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

All the lights went out, leaving only sounds. Pip’s screaming and struggling. Greg shouting for her. The metallic crunch as a camera hit the ground. One of the bulbs shattered overhead, showering them in glass. Tiny fragments lodged in Martha’s face. A dozen tiny stings.

“Leave her alone.” Martha tried to help, calling over muffled cries. “Please stop. Don’t hurt her.”

He did stop. Eventually. Then the movement sensors were set off one by one, marking Thomas’ progress around the room. Martha found the wall and groped along it in the direction of the stairs. Greg shouted out, a single cry of pain.

The lights came on and the carnage was revealed. Greg was within Martha’s reach, lying on the floor. She crouched beside him, dabbing at his wound. A neat line joined his ear to the corner of his mouth, blood oozing from the deep wedge of red flesh revealed.

“Where’s Pip?” Greg, dizzy and disorientated, struggled to lift his head.

They followed the soft sobbing to the corner. This was not Pippa’s TV histrionics but the heartbreak of the truly wounded. Thomas stood back, well satisfied with his work.

Pip was revealed in the dim circle of the lamp. She was curled against the wall, bare torso revealed. Thomas had remade her. When the blood crusted and the scabs fell off, she would be a work of art. That a single, common blade could carve such detail was remarkable. She was etched with arcane calligraphy. Profane flourishes. No plastic surgeon could eradicate his dirty graffiti. But that would be for later. For now she was slick and slippery with snot and tears and blood. Martha slipped her coat off to cover her. Greg moved to enclose her in his arms. Nothing could diminish her distress until the paramedics arrived and she slipped into the dreams of deep sedation.

The traffic was streaks of light. Neon discoloured the night. The police kept the crowds at bay. Greg went to where Martha stood alone. Her hair, soaked with perspiration, stuck to her head in unflattering curls.

“You did this, didn’t you? When I find out how, I’ll kill you.”

A policeman came over, casting them a warning look.

“Miss Palmer. We’re taking everyone in for questioning. It’s time for you to come along with me.”

“Greg, he says you got it wrong.” Her last words to him. “It’s Thomas the Knife. Not Thomas the Blade.”

Martha settled into the slippery car seat. Her new travelling companion by her side. They stared at one another, neither speaking. Iris’ lessons came to mind.

A medium must take care. The opening of consciousness is a special time in a girl’s life. When a spirit guide is acquired. Don’t be scared. I’ll be here to keep you safe.

Suki had smirked when it was her time. The advent of Martha’s menstruation seemed paltry by comparison.

You’ll never want for company.

You’ll never be alone.

For all those years, I believed all the things you said, Martha thought. You’re not the gifted one. You’re not gifted. It was always you and Suki, talking to voices I couldn’t hear.

Talking to Dad.

If only you could see me now, Iris. If only you could see me now.

So night comes on. I make my own fire, because why would I want to sit at Phillips’s, next to that pinned-down mulberry?

Pan-flaps, can you make pan-flaps? Phillips plopped down a bag of fine town flour and gave me a look that said, Bet you can’t. And I’m certainly too important to make them. So pan-flaps I make in his little pan, and some of them I put hot meat-slice on, and some cheese, and some jam, and that will fill us, for a bit. There’s been no time to hunt today, just as Ma said, while she packed and packed all sorts of these treats into a sack for me — to impress Phillips, perhaps, more than to show me favour, although that too. She doesn’t mind me being chosen to track and hunt with the fellow, now that I’m past the age where he can choose me for the other thing.

We are stuck out here the night, us and our catch. If I were alone I would go back; I can feel and smell my way, if no stars and moon will show me. But once we spread this mulberry wide on the ground and fixed him, and Phillips lit his fire and started his fiddling and feeding him leaves, I knew we were to camp. I did not ask; I dislike his sneering manner of replying to me. I only waited and saw.

He’s boiled the water I brought up from the torrent, and filled it with clanking, shining things — little tools, it looks like, as far as I can see out of the corner of my eye. I would not gratify him with looking directly. I stare into my own fire, the forest blank black beyond it and only fire-lit smoke above, no sky though the clouds were clearing last I looked. I get out my flask and have a pull of fire-bug, to settle my discontentments. It’s been a long day and a weird, and I wish I was home, instead of out here with a half-man, and the boss of us all watching my every step.

“Here, boy,” he says. He calls me boy the way you call a dog. He doesn’t even look up at me to say it.

I cross from my fire to his. I don’t like to look at those creatures, mulberries, so I fix instead on Phillips, his shining hair-waves and his sharp nose, the floret of silk in his pocket that I know is a green-blue bright as a stout-pigeon’s throat, but now is just a different orange in the fire’s glow. His white, weak hands, long-fingered, big-knuckled — oh, they give me a shudder, just as bad as a mulberry would.

“Do you know what a loblolly boy is?”

He knows I don’t. I hate him and his words. “Some kind of insulting thing, no doubt,” I say.

“No, no!” He looks up surprised from examining the brace, which is pulled tight to the mulberry’s puffed-up belly, just below the navel, when it should dangle on an end of silk. “It’s a perfectly legitimate thing. Boy on a ship, usually. Works for the surgeon.”

And what is a surgeon? I am not going to ask him. I stare down at him, wanting another pull from my flask.

“Never mind,” he says crossly. “Sit.” And he waves where; right by the mulberry, opposite himself.

Must I? I have already chased the creature five ways wild today; I’ve already treed him and climbed that tree and lowered him on a rope. I’m sick of the sight of him, his round stary face, his froggy body, his feeble conversation, trying to be friendly.

But I sit. I wonder sometimes if I’m weak-minded, that even one person makes such a difference to me, what I see, what I do. When I come to the forest alone, I can see the forest clear, and feel it, and everything in it. If I bring Tray or Connar, it becomes the ongoing game of us as big men in this world — with the real men left behind in the village, so they don’t show us up. When I come with Frida Birch it is all about the inside of her mysterious mind, what she can be thinking, what has she noticed that I haven’t about some person, some question she has that would never occur to me. It’s as if I cannot hold to my own self, to my own forest, if another person is with me.

“Feed him some more,” says Phillips, and points to the sack beside me. “As many as he can take. We might avoid a breakage yet if we can stuff enough into him.”

I untie the sack, and put aside the first layer, dark leaves that have been keeping the lower, paler ones moist. I roll a leaf-pill — the neater I make it, the less I risk being bitten, or having to touch lip or tongue. I wave it under his nose, touch it to his lips, and he opens and takes it in, good mulberry.