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

There are two more heads rising from the water when I look back at the full basin, the first already sprouting an odd number of limbs attached to a decayed body. The thing staggers towards us, the only two living souls for miles around, though how it can see us with its head cocked so far back is a mystery. I can smell it from where we sit. It smells like tomorrow. More of the dead emerge from the water, refugees from the dark ocean, each one a promise of what’s to come. They’re us, I think. The rich, the poor, the strong, the weak. They are our heroes and our villains. They are our loved ones and hated enemies. They are me, they are Marie, they are the skinny lifeguard in his idiotic hat. They are our destiny, and they have come to us from the future, from beyond the passage with a message. It’s one no one but us will ever hear. It is why Marie and I are there, though each for a different reason — her to finally help her understand the death of her mother, me so I can finally put to rest the haunting terrors of my childhood. Neither of us speak about why, but we both know the truth. The dead walk to tell us what’s to come, their broken mouths moving without sound. The only noise they make is the rap of bone on gravel. It only intensifies as they get closer.

For the first time, I see a thin line of fear crack Marie’s reverie. There are nearly fifty corpses shambling toward us, swaying as they try to keep rotted limbs moving. If they lose momentum, I wonder if they’ll fall over. If they do, I doubt they’d ever right themselves. Between where we sit and the increasing mass is the metal gate the young lifeguard chained shut. More and more of the waterlogged dead are crowding it, pushing themselves against it. I can hear the metal screaming from the stress, but its holding for now. Fingerless arms reach through the bars, their soundless hungry screams echoing through my psyche. Marie is no longer sitting. She’s standing. Pacing. Looking at me, waiting for me to speak. Purposely, I say nothing. I’ll let her say what I know she’s been thinking.

There’s something wrong, she says. This isn’t—

It isn’t what?

This isn’t what I thought. This, these people. They aren’t right …

I snigger. How is it possible to be so naive?

They are exactly who they are supposed to be, I tell her with enough sternness I hope it’s the last she has to say on the subject. I don’t know why I continue to make the same mistakes. By now, I’d have thought I would have started listening. But that’s the trouble with talking to your past self. Nothing, no matter how hard you try, can be stopped. Especially not the inevitable.

Dead flesh is packed so tight against the iron gates that it’s only a matter of time. It’s clear from the way the metal buckles, the hinges scream. Those of the dead that first emerged are the first punished, as their putrefying corpses are pressed by the thong of emerging dead against the fence that pens them in. I can see upturned faces buckling against the metal bars, hear softened bones pop out of place as their lifeless bodies are pushed through the narrow gaps. Marie turns and buries her face in my chest while gripping my shirt tight in her hands. I can’t help but watch, mesmerised.

Hands grab the gate and start shaking, back and forth, harder and harder. So many hands, pulling and pushing. The accelerating sound ringing like a church bell across the lonely Hopewell grounds. I can’t take it anymore, Marie pleads, her face slick with so many tears. It was a mistake. I didn’t know. I never wanted to know. She’s heaving as she begs me, but I pull myself free from her terrified grip and stand up. It doesn’t matter, I tell her. It’s too late.

I start walking toward the locked fence.

I can’t hear Marie’s sobs any longer, not over the ruckus the dead are making. I wonder if she’s left, taken the keys and driven off into the night, leaving me without any means of transportation. Then I wonder if instead she’s watching me, waiting to see what I’ll do without her there. I worry about both these things long enough to realize I don’t really care. Let her watch. Let her watch as I lift the latches of the fence the dead are unable to work on their own. Let me unleash the waves that come from that dark Atlantic ocean onto the tourist attraction of the Hopewell Rocks. Let man’s future roll in to greet him, let man’s future become his present. Make him his own past. Who we will be will soon replace who we are, and who we might once have been.

The dead, they don’t look at me as they stumble into the unchained night. And I smile. In six hours and thirteen minutes, the water will recede as quickly as it came, back out to the dark dead ocean. It will leave nothing behind but wet and desolate rocks the colour of sun-bleached bone.

Samuel Wilson’s life wasn’t a search for love at every turn. There’d been girls he’d liked, with whom he’d managed fragile love affairs, but something was always lacking no matter how hard he tried. Something that failed to ignite.

Sam knew what it was. He knew that love and objectification weren’t the same but he had a passion for hands. His arousal in every organ, the mind, the skin, the parts he’d once been told were made for sin, depended on the wrists, the palms, the fingertips.

Why don’t we ask Sam to the party? I’ve invited Judith. We should introduce them .

Women were keen to intervene on his behalf.

Your Mother wants you to bring your friend Sam to Sunday lunch. She says he looks like he needs feeding up. Yes, your sister’s also coming .

Colleagues, friends, friends’ girlfriends, wives, and mothers were all eager to help him along on a romantic quest.

What’s Sam like? No, I don’t fancy him. I only have eyes for you. I’m just curious. He’s such a nice, unassuming guy. I don’t get why he’s single .

They were taken with his unconscious charm. He was a millpond of a man. They wanted to see what sort of woman would make him ripple. None guessed the secret so incongruous with the rest of him. The thing he’d denied himself.

Sam couldn’t tell them for fear they’d make a tawdry fetish of the fundamentals of his happiness.

He couldn’t tell them about the hands.

Sam, aged nineteen, had seen a fortune teller. There was a painted caravan on the outskirts of a funfair. He was close enough to childhood to find the fair childish, not old enough to enjoy its novelty with a pang of nostalgia. He wasn’t having fun. His friends were raucous. Boorish. The whirling neon and cheap hotdogs made him feel sick. The quiet caravan seemed like a retreat. He was at the age and stage where he had queries about his life. Later the classmates he’d arrived with questioned his disappearance but he deflected them with vagaries and shrugs.

It was a formulative experience. The palm reader, twenty years his senior, took him in with a glance that measured his vitality. His every possibility. His diffidence hid his differences from his peers. The ardour and sensitivity overlooked by girls his own age.

Imogen (the palmist’s real name) didn’t go in for hoop earrings or headscarves. Her uniform was black and flattering, fit for funerals and seductions. Although her youth was behind her, Imogen was still young enough to want to feel it.

They sat on opposite sides of the table. Imogen was fleshy where expected of an older woman but with slender limbs. She used her hands and wrists to express everything.

Sam felt an unexpected thrill, the exact location of which was uncertain, when she leant across the table and seized his waiting hands in hers. He liked how she took charge despite her diminutive size. The way she examined him for clues. She dropped his left hand, having exhausted its information. It lay between them on the table, aching to be held again. Sam watched her pink tongue dart out between plum painted lips to wet the tip for her forefinger. She traced a damp circle around his palm, her face close so that she could peer into his future. Close enough to feel her breath on his skin. Close enough to see a single silver strand in the darkness of her parting.