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

Aidan No-Last-Name picked at his food; the violent green vegetable soup Johnny Red had fixed for starter was barely below the rim when she came back to refill the coffee. His spoon leaned unused on his napkin. “He your boyfriend?” Aidan asked through a fall of brown hair.

“No,” Cora said, though Johnny Red had managed to kiss her in the storeroom once or twice, and she’d not turned away. “He just likes having people to boss around. Everything all right here?”

His hands stilled. He looked up at her. Opened his mouth and shut it again. He knows , she realized, sharply. Everything was not at all right.

He’s scared.

“Something I can do?” she asked carefully.

His hands were still on the table. He was staring, and she realized, not at her; past her, out the big windows of the Sunrise Restaurant, into the snow. She turned, and on the featureless white there was a splotch of black; low to the ground, ruffled, feathered.

The raven hopped one step, two, in the soft-packed January snow. It twisted its head near backwards, like birds do, and cawed a wicked laugh at the both of them.

Something dropped from its sharp little beak and landed in the snow: long, and thin, and red.

Aidan scrambled up against the back of the booth and howled, all the voice of wolves and snuffling bears and winter, eyes big and black and wide, and the cold spiralled out of him. The cold rushed in.

The raven fluttered into the night laughing, its wings snapping like falling trees. The coffeepot slid out of Cora’s hand and rang on the black and white tile. Coffee splashed her trousers, her shoes. She flinched back from the window, the raven, the boiling hot liquid on the floor. The fiddle had stopped, and the drum. Every head in Sunrise turned to stare out into the dark.

He took one step towards her. Two.

And ran.

Aidan jostled past her, between tables and chairs, out the oak front doors. “Hey!” she called, slipping in coffee, limping after him. The cold air hit like a knife to the throat. “Wait!” she managed, before she doubled over coughing.

He didn’t wait. Coatless, hatless, Aidan ran across the path and to the highway, head down and legs working like all the wickedness in the world was right behind him. His breath misted, a little plume to follow, and then her hip tightened sharp and he was disappearing, farther away. Going, smaller and smaller. Gone.

“Shit!” she said, and the footsteps behind her caught up: Johnny Red and Georgie Fiddler, one after the other, Johnny still with his fat blue oven mitts on.

“Cora,” he said, and threw an arm full around her to keep her from falling, or maybe just running any further. “What the hell?”

“He got away. The raven,” she said, and burst out again coughing. “It was out here. It dropped something—”

“I felt it,” he said. Felt, not saw.

“He’s scared,” she said. “It scared him.”

“We need coats,” Georgie called, and they picked their way back over the broken snow. Their feet had churned up the bird-tracks.

“It wasn’t too far.” Her teeth were chattering. She curled out of Johnny’s bracing arm and picked her way back to the parking lot: back under the edges of the sodium lights. Nothing. Nothing—

And then the wind rose and ruffled the snow, stirred it up and out and away, and Cora looked down at the smooth brown finger, slowly turning blue in the January snow.

The search party came back cold and empty-handed, and Johnny Red had nothing left over for soup.

“We found Gertie,” Jane Hooker said, staring at the specials board and the remains of Tropical Party Night. Her right mitten dangled from a string on her coat sleeve. “She’s…”

Mike Blondin swallowed. “We’re gonna need to call her nephew.”

Bile nudged into Cora’s throat. She forced it back. “Oh,” Daisy said, and it sounded like all the air had left her lungs forever. Johnny held his coffee filter between thumb and finger for one long moment, turned it around, and crumpled it in his fist.

“I went by Jane’s. We got an APB ’bout an hour ago,” Georgie Fiddler said, his face sallow and sick. Smudged fax paper fluttered from his left hand, limp as a dead child. “From the Mounties over in High Level.”

Cora took the paper. She read it briefly, like a dry goods manifest or a power bill. “Suspicion of murder and—” her voice failed. Johnny Red took the page from her. “Desecration of a corpse?” he finished, both eyebrows up high.

Jane’s cheeks were red: bright and hot and burning. The tears in her eyes were probably scalding. “Her fingers were missing,” she said, out from somewhere far away. “And her stomach—”

“Hey,” Georgie said, and held up one hand. Big Mike Blondin looked like he planned to be sick.

“Wendigo,” Johnny Red said quiet, and it cut every voice in the restaurant dead.

Cora felt for her pack, dipped into it with chilly fingers: empty. “Bum a smoke?” she asked Mike Blondin quietly, and he didn’t even try to make her give him a smile for it. She rolled it between her fingers like a raven’s trophy, held onto it like there was nothing else to hold.

“What do you mean?” Georgie Fiddler said. He was sweating. “Wendigo’s a monster. They’re made up.”

She shook her head. She couldn’t explain wendigo to Georgie Fiddler, not now. Jane stepped in smoothly, taking his arm. “Wendigo aren’t made up,” she said softly. “My grandpa knew one.”

“What happened?” Georgie asked.

Jane hesitated. “They found him at the river and shot him down.”

“We can’t — that’s murder. He’s a person.”

“Not anymore,” Fred Tutcho said softly.

Poor Georgie Fiddler looked around the circle for backup; found none. “Maybe he won’t come back,” he said weakly.

Johnny Red shook his head. “He’ll come back.” There was no food or shelter for two hundred miles in any direction, and he had no jacket, and he was unarmed. Cora didn’t know a whole lot about wendigo, but there were ways in which they were just like people: they wanted above everything to live through the night.

“So what do we do?” Georgie asked.

“We get the shotguns,” Jane said, and shoved the restaurant door open, letting in the night.

“He’s still a person,” Georgie muttered, and the cigarette between Cora’s fingers bent and tore.

There were seven shotguns in the town of Sunrise. Six of them worked. The six shotguns and their owners gathered close in the Sunrise Restaurant with the other eighty-three townsfolk crammed in around them. They locked the doors and turned the outside lights on full. Whatever came, if it threw a shadow, they’d see it coming.

Jane and Georgie and Nate and Daisy and Fred Tutcho and Johnny Red stood behind the counter, lining up ammunition. It was most of it deershot: there weren’t no licences to carry for much else in this small a town. “They’re hard to kill,” Johnny Red said softly; loud enough for Cora to hear where she was pouring hot cocoa into salvaged and washed-up mugs. “You got to shoot and shoot again. Don’t stop, even if he’s got his hands up. Don’t stop ’til he stops moving.”

Cora popped one more marshmallow into the cocoa mug and drifted back to the counter, to the always-filling coffeepot. “Have a minute, Johnny?”

He looked down at her with a frown she hadn’t seen before; tense, old. Tired. “What’s up?”

She glanced around at her people, her family: the Okpiks and Tutchos and Blondins and Hookers and Fiddlers and Johnny Red Antoine from down south in the plains. “Georgie’s right,” she said. “He’s still a person.”