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

Room six had been converted into a warm and stuffy sickroom. Jane Hooker leaned over the bed, obscuring her patient from the knees on up, and Georgie Fiddler tinkered with the steam radiator, coaxing out a whining, clanking heat. The warm air made Cora sneeze, and two heads turned sharp around the double bed. She waggled the canvas bag and groped with her free hand for a tissue.

Her fingers were still stiff when she unscrewed the thermos caps and set them on the nightstand. Jane shifted over to make room, and she finally got a look at the driver.

He had soft, sweaty, messy hair. It fell dark across a white man’s flattened cheekbones and was tamped down in a line where his cap would sit. The cap was on the dresser: white and faded red, damp from the roadside snow. The brim was bent almost double, into a fist.

Jane had the man’s jackets off — one for winter and a checked old lumber jacket — and her broad hand felt the shape of his ribs. “Good enough,” she said to Georgie with a nod, and he let out a little sigh; probably happy he didn’t have to call to Hay River for the doctor.

Cora poured them half-chilled chicken soup and passed the mugs into reddened hands. “From Johnny,” she said. Jane took hers with a nod, distracted; Georgie caught his up and resumed his regular pacing. She cupped her hands around a third mug, stealing what heat it had left, and leaned back against the wall to watch.

“Enough left for our boy here?” Jane asked, and Cora nodded. She’d ladled Johnny’s soup pot dry. “Good,” Jane replied, and stood with a long, loose breath. The lines around her eyes were windburned and deep. “I get the feeling he’ll wake up hungry. Got a pretty good crack on the head.”

“Lucky he didn’t break those ribs too,” Georgie said.

“Speaking of.” Jane paused. “You find his seatbelt on?”

“He was clear across the cab.” Georgie looked up at her, at Jane, and his brow creased into three fine canyons over his greying eyebrows. “I’ll look over the truck tomorrow.”

Jane nodded. “You’re a good man, George Fiddler.”

She didn’t need to say it. But Georgie pinkened anyways over the rim of his mug, and those terrible fissures came out of his face.

“Hey,” he said sudden, and both Jane and Cora looked up. “I think he’s waking up.”

Cora leaned in soon enough to see his eyes flicker. They were folded, turned a touch at the corners. Métis then, not white, but whatever blood he had, it wasn’t Dene or Inuit. The nose was too narrow, the face too thin. Too thin for his own cheekbones, she realized. The man looked gaunt. Hungry.

“Hello?” she asked softly, then: “Wotziye?”

The creased eyelids opened.

The eyes behind them were bright and black, bone-sharp. They darted right and left like a trapped hunting bird’s, taking in ceiling, walls, triple-paned window with the air of something captive. Cora jerked back and they tracked her movement. The gaze stung like wind-whipped ice on the edge of her cheek.

Cora had once, before she moved to Sunrise, seen a polar bear hunt. It crouched by a seal’s breathing hole silent, waiting, waiting for a seal to draw breath, and then reached in and crushed its skull.

Those black winter eyes rested upon her, and she didn’t breathe.

“Hey there,” Jane said beside her, terribly far away. “How you feeling?”

That terrible watching, January-cold and fine like sand, moved .

Nothing happened. Jane Hooker, solid and dependable, didn’t lean back or recoil. “Thought we’d lost you there,” she said, all good cheer and good sense.

Cora exhaled, and for a brief second, her breath steamed in the air.

She felt a hand on her elbow and jumped; Georgie Fiddler, standing an arm’s-length back. “You all right there?”

No. “Yeah,” she said. Her jaw was numb, and it ached. Those wicked eyes looked at Jane Hooker and they were just brown: too-bright and confused, flicking back and forth between faces and the pitted white ceiling. The pupils were overlarge, crowding the skin-brown iris, dark and deep but normal.

It wasn’t the pupil, Cora thought distinctly, and rubbed her palm against her cheek. The man’s mouth shaped a question, and it was not at all the same.

Georgie quirked an eyebrow. “Go on, Cor. Johnny probably needs you back.”

“Thanks,” she said. There was gooseflesh on her hands. She stuffed them in her coat pockets and went.

She was ten steps into the crunching, wailing snow, her second scarf only half-wrapped around her ears, when she heard the bird cry.

There was a raven perched on the Treeline Motel’s roof, still as an animal killed five miles from home and frozen rictus. The storm beat against it, passed around it, let it through. It cocked its head — a beak-shadow, a change in the darkness — and laughed at her once more, biting.

Oh hell, she thought.

And then it blurred against the snowfall, its wings black against white against bottomless black, and she ran.

“I saw a raven on the Treeline’s roof last night,” Cora said, no preamble, when she came into the diner the next morning.

Johnny Red was in the kitchen, fumbling for something that clattered and bumped and made him swear. “It’s minus thirty,” he said when he surfaced.

“Yeah,” Cora said.

She felt his eyes on her as she hung up her coat and tied on her soft, worn-down apron. It was just the two of them here this time of day, but he still kept his voice low. “Think it’s something?”

She pulled the knot tight, tugged at each of the loops to make sure they wouldn’t give. The sun was brilliant outside, halfway through the sky and already falling: subarctic noontime. It turned the snow to pure light and slanted anti-shadow across the pale blue tabletops. “I don’t know medicine, Johnny.”

“Sometimes you don’t have to,” he replied, ducking back onto his haunches behind the counter and clattering some more. She had all the table settings in place and he’d started the soup before she said, “Yeah. I think it’s something.”

His mouth pulled down, grimmer. He didn’t reply.

Georgie Fiddler came in right at the lunchtime open, pink with cold and puffy-eyed. He nodded to Cora and bellied up to the old-fashioned lunch counter. “Thanks for the soup last night,” he said, and set the bag of empty thermoses on the counter.

Johnny waved it off, ladle in hand. “How’s damages?”

“Bent front axle,” he said, and tugged off his gloves. “Be a day or two before I can run up to Hay River for the new axle brackets. They haven’t cleared the highways yet.”

Cora looked out the restaurant’s triple-paned windows at the glittering snow: knee-high if it was an inch. Terrible driving weather. “How’s our trucker?”

“Awake,” he said; the glance he cast her was only a little concerned. “Jane said he’s just staring.” He didn’t need to say more; there was only one kind of stare in a town like this. Cora’d first seen it young, in an uncle home after a turn in Grande Cache who’d stayed only a week before drifting off one night to freeze. After that it showed up on mothers, friends, the boys who sniffed gasoline in tool sheds on long winter nights; it blurred.

“You reach his people yet?” Johnny Red asked.

“Jane don’t think he’s got any people. The only number in his wallet was the trucking company.”

“That’s a shame,” Johnny Red said evenly, in a way someone else might have thought idle.

Cora lifted an eyebrow. He put his long chef’s knife against the curve of a withered onion and said nothing.

Georgie Fiddler did. “Everything all right there, John?”