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

The seeds crunched between his teeth like bones, like something living. He choked.

She twitched out from under him, wheezing; she couldn’t roll anymore, couldn’t move right. Her leg was a dead weight, and her head wouldn’t lift. There was winter in her lungs, and she couldn’t cough it out.

“Once upon a time when the world was young,” she forced out, rattle-quick and low, because white-people medicine needed invocations, needed words, “a white girl ate six pomegranate seeds and was trapped down six months in Hell.”

His eyes went big. He knew this story, knew it to the bone. He spat, reflexive, and she let slip a grin through the tears. Too late.

“Now you’re bound to us,” she said. Her vision was blurring. She couldn’t see half of him, couldn’t see the dark that was from the dark that wasn’t. “See all those seeds? Each one’s a month. That’s how long you’re bound to me and this town.”

His mouth was stained red. Some of it was thin and some thick, drying. Some of it was hers: her hand stung, burned on three flat points on the ridge of each long finger. It’d all stain.

“Stay with me,” she said, and cradled her bleeding hand; tried to say it like Grandma Okpik, like medicine, like somebody who loved you. “Stay people.”

He opened his mouth, and the moan that came out was terrible, terrible, but not animal. Only the sound of a human being, pushed horrible miles too far.

“Good boy,” she whispered, and leaned back against the hard, freezing floor. There were footsteps somewhere outside, footsteps in the hallway she could hear now that the sound of trees falling, wood breaking, living things dying was gone. The raven’s eyes regarded her, black on black on black, and then one blink to the next, they were gone.

They broke down the door.

Shadows flicked across her vision: friends and neighbours, friends with guns. “Down!” Jane Hooker was shouting. “Stay down! ”

“I’m done now,” Aidan sobbed, rocking, hands clasped over his ears, mouth torn and bleeding fruit and flesh and saliva. “I’m all done. I want to go home —”

“Don’t shoot,” Cora whispered.

And then Johnny was beside her, gathering her up and calling for Jane, for Georgie, for the doctor from Hay River. She blinked slow and long and his face was above hers, lined with stark terror. “He won’t be no trouble,” she managed, and Johnny Red looked like he was about to be sick.

“ That was your plan?” he said.

“He needs a bowl of soup,” she told him, cradled lopsided in his arms, and the world went black as wings departing.

She came to in room five of the Treeline Motel, the last set of buildings standing before the end of roots and leaves and life and hope. Sunlight speckled across the ceiling, ice-light, winter-light, and the trees outside swayed quiet, and she was still alive.

She let out a sigh, long and shuddering.

Johnny Red was at her bedside in an instant. “You okay?” he said. His voice was snow-brush soft. He looked like he hadn’t slept for at least a day or three.

She licked her lips. Dry. “Who’s got the restaurant?” she croaked, and he went for a glass of water. He wet her lips, her bruised throat.

“Nobody,” he said, and there was a rawness in it now. “Talk to me.”

She stretched, cautiously; nothing broken. Jane Hooker’s careful hands would have made sure of it. Her eyes wouldn’t quite focus, but that was all right. There were three tidy, thick bandages wrapped about the fingers of her right hand. “I’ve had worse,” she said.

Johnny Red flinched. “Don’t tell me that.”

His hand slipped down to her good one. Held on. She didn’t shake it off.

“He’s outside.” Johnny’s mouth twisted with something: fear, anger, distaste. The edges of a terrible hatred. “Has been all day, and all yesterday too. Crying like a dog.”

“How much does he remember?” she asked after a second.

Johnny Red opened his mouth, shut it with a snap. “All of it.”

“Did Jane call the Mounties?”

Johnny’s expression went even flatter. “Not yet.”

Cora leaned back against the soft pillows; heard a half-wendigo voice sobbing, burning, asking Why did you say that to me? Why’d you say you’d take care—

“It’s gone now,” she said. Then hesitated, turned her head to him half an inch. “It is, right?”

Johnny Red’s lips pressed together. “Hard to tell. This could just be—” he paused with distaste “—a stronger claim. How long do we have?”

There were a lot of seeds in that pomegranate, nestled together like lovers, like houses perched on the edge of the highway to Hay River. It was past too late to find out how many he’d spit, how many he’d swallowed down. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess we’ll find out.”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t answer for long enough that she turned her head another agonizing space, and saw him sitting in a chair beside her, elbows on his knees, head buried in his hands.

“The raven left,” he said muffled. “Maybe that means something.”

It means, she thought, we’re on our own now.

“How much medicine d’you have?” she asked.

He looked up. There were tears in his eyes: sheer frustration, pain. Relief. “Not enough,” he said. “Not half enough to make this safe.”

“We’ll be fine,” she said, faintly.

Johnny Red stood up, all six feet of him, and leaned over her slowly, bracing himself with a hand on the yielding mattress. The kiss he left on her mouth wasn’t hard — she was bandaged up too much for hard right now — but it didn’t brook no questions.

“You,” he said, “are bound to me three months, and next time you talk to me about the plan.”

She didn’t talk back to that.

Johnny Red went to the door, swung the hinges wide. She felt the cold air blow in, cold but not terrible bitter, and heard voices exchanged low, terse, cautious. One set of footsteps faded, and another stepped inside. Shut the door. Moved, soft and tremulous, along the faded carpet runner to the bedside.

The light was so much better now. It had to be past three. Spring coming, eventually.

“Hey,” Aidan said, standing two feet away, hands clasped in front of him like they were the only thing in the world to hold; eyes big and brown and human and terrified and whole.

“Hey,” she said. “You stayed.”

The mist hit us suddenly. One moment we had the peak in sight; the next, the white had swallowed up the crags and was rolling down towards us.

“Shit,” I said. “Head back down.”

For once, Diane didn’t argue.

Trouble was, it was a very steep climb. Maybe that was why we’d read nothing about this mountain in the guidebooks. Some locals in the hotel bar the night before had told us about it. They’d warned us about the steepness, but Diane liked the idea of a challenge. All well and good, but now it meant we had to descend very slowly; one slip and you’d go down the mountainside, arse over apex.

That was when I saw the faint desire-line that led off, almost at right angles to the main path, running sideways and gently downwards.

“There, look,” I said, pointing. “What do you reckon?”

Diane hesitated, glancing down the main path then up at the fast-falling mist. “Let’s try it.”

So we did.

“Look out,” I said. Diane was lagging a good four or five yards behind me. “Faster.”