Ellen Datlow - The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

Vasquez tried to speak. “What… is he?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Plowman said. “He’s old — I mean, if I told you how old he is, you’d think….” He looked to his left, to the giant sucking the gore from its fingers. “Well, maybe not. He’s been around for a long time, and he knows a lot of things. We — what we were doing at Bagram, the interrogations, they woke him. I guess that’s the best way to put it; although you could say they called him forth. It took me a while to figure out everything, even after he revealed himself to me. But there’s nothing like prison to give you time for reflection. And research.

“That research says the best way to bind someone like Mr. White is — actually, it’s pretty complicated.” Plowman waved his pistol at the symbols shining around them. “The part that will be of most immediate interest to you is the sacrifice of a man and woman who are in my command. I apologize. I intended to put the two of you down before you knew what was happening; I mean, there’s no need to be cruel about this. With you, however, I’m afraid my aim was off. Don’t worry. I’ll finish what I started before I turn you over to Mr. White.”

Vasquez tilted her right hand up and squeezed the trigger of her gun. Four pops rushed one after the other, blowing open her pocket. Plowman leapt back, stumbled against the opposite wall. Blood bloomed across the inner thigh of his trousers, the belly of his shirt. Wiped clean by surprise, his face was blank. He swung his gun towards Vazquez, who angled her right hand down and squeezed the trigger again. The top of Plowman’s shirt puffed out; his right eye burst. His arm relaxed, his pistol thumped on the floor, and, a second later, he joined it.

The burn of suddenly hot metal through her pocket sent Vasquez scrambling up the wall behind her before the pain lodged in her back could catch her. In the process, she yanked out the Walther and pointed it at the door to the Junior Suite—

— in front of which, Mr. White was standing, hands in his jacket pockets. A dark smear in front of him was all that was left of Buchanan. Jesus God… The air reeked of black powder and copper. Across from her, Plowman stared at nothing through his remaining eye. Mr. White regarded her with something like interest. If he moves, I’ll shoot , Vasquez thought, but Mr. White did not move, not the length of time it took her to back out of the corridor and retreat to the elevator, the muzzle of the pistol centered on Mr. White, then on where Mr. White would be if he rounded the corner. Her back was a knot of fire. When she reached the elevator, she slapped the call button with her left hand while maintaining her aim with her right. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Buchanan’s gift for his son, all two hundred and sixty euros worth, wedged under its chair. She left it where it was. A faint glow shone from the near end of the corridor: Plowman’s black-lighted symbols. Was the glow changing, obscured by an enormous form crawling towards her? When the elevator dinged behind her, she stepped into it, the gun up in front of her until the doors had closed and the elevator had commenced its descent.

The back of her blouse was stuck to her skin; a trickle of blood tickled the small of her back. The interior of the elevator dimmed to the point of disappearing entirely. The Walther weighed a thousand pounds. Her legs wobbled madly. Vasquez lowered the gun, reached her left hand out to steady herself. When it touched, not metal, but cool stone, she was not as surprised as she should have been. As her vision returned, she saw that she was in a wide, circular area, the roof flat, low, the walls no more than shadowy suggestions. The space was lit by a symbol incised on the rock at her feet: a rough circle, the diameter of a manhole cover, broken at about eight o’clock, whose perimeter was shining with cold light. Behind and to her left, the scrape of bare flesh dragging over stone turned her around. This section of the curving wall opened in a black arch like the top of an enormous throat. Deep in the darkness, she could detect movement, but was not yet able to distinguish it.

As she raised the pistol one more time, Vasquez was not amazed to find herself here, under the ground with things whose idiot hunger eclipsed the span of the oldest human civilizations, things she had helped summon. She was astounded to have thought she’d ever left.

For Fiona.

Piotr waited nervously in the International Arrivals hall of Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 1. Born and bred in London, Piotr had never thought of himself as the type of guy who would import a wife from Poland. His parents had made sure that he’d learnt Polish from an early age; while his English friends had played football or watched Swap Shop on Saturday mornings, Piotr had been dragged kicking and screaming to Polish classes in Ealing. But it had all paid off in the end when he went to Poland one summer and met Krystyna. Since that time, Krystyna had moved to London and moved in with Piotr. They were engaged to be married, and it seemed to Piotr that all the members of Krystyna’s family had already visited London and stayed with them — all, that is, except Krystyna’s grandmother, and that was who Piotr was now waiting for. Krystyna had not been able to get the day off work, and Piotr was now anxiously eyeing every elderly woman who came through the arrival gate, in the hope that one of them would match the tattered photograph that Krystyna had given him.

Eventually a little old lady came out alone. Piotr recognised her immediately and started to walk towards her, stopping abruptly as he saw the woman slip, drop her glasses and, in a desperate effort to right herself, step on them, crushing them completely. Upset for the woman, Piotr began to rush forward, only to halt as she started to laugh hysterically. She muttered something under her breath and, had he not known any better, Piotr could have sworn that what she said was “little pig!”

The sleigh sped through the dark forest, the scant moonlight reflected by the snow lighting up the whites of the horse’s eyes as it galloped along the narrow path, nostrils flaring and velvet mouth spitting foam and blood into the night. The woman cried out as the reins cut into her hands, and screamed to her children to hang on.

The three little girls clung to each other and to the sides of the sleigh, their tears freezing onto their faces as soon as they formed. The corner of the large blanket in which their mother had wrapped them for the perilous journey to their grandparents’ house had come loose and was flapping violently in the icy air.

“Hold on to Vitek!” the woman screamed over her shoulder at her eldest child, her voice barely audible over the howling wind. But the girl did not need to be told; only two days away from her seventh birthday, she clung onto her baby brother, fear for her tiny sibling stronger than her own terror. The other two girls, aged two and four, huddled together, lost in an incomprehensible world of snow and fear and darkness.

The woman whipped the reins against the horse’s heaving flanks, but the animal was already running on a primal fear stronger than pain. The excited yelps audible over the snowstorm left little doubt in the woman’s mind: the pack was gaining on the sleigh — the hungry wolves were getting closer.

That winter had been particularly hard on the wolf pack. The invading Russian army had taken the peasants’ livestock and, with no farm animals to snatch, the wolves had been limited to seeking out those rabbits and wild fowl that the desperate peasants and fleeing refugees had not killed and eaten. Driven half-mad with starvation, the wolves had already invested an irrevocable amount of energy in chasing the horse, and instinct informed them that it was too late to give up now — they had to feed or had to die.