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

He rounds a bend and quickly turns, and is in my arms, banging my chest with his bound purple hands. “You will not! You will not!” I turn him around, and move him on with all my body and legs. The torrent shows between the trees — that’s what set him off, the water fighting white among the boulders.

Now he resists me with all that he has. His boots slip on the stones and he throws himself about. But there is simply not enough of him, and I am patient and determined; I pull him out of the brush again and again, and press him on. If he won’t walk, I’m happy for him to crawl. If he won’t crawl I’m prepared to push him along with my boot.

The path comes to a high lip over the water before cutting along and down to the flatter place where you can fill your pots, or splash your face. I bring him to the lip and push him straight off, glad to be rid of his flailing, embarrassed by his trying to fight me.

He disappears in the white. He comes up streaming, caught already by the flow, shouting at the cold. It tosses him about, gaping and kicking, for a few rocks, and then he turns to limp cloth, to rubbish, a dab of bright wet silk draggling across his chest. He slides up over a rock and drops the other side. He moves along, is carried away and down, over the little falls there, and across the pool, on his face and with blood running from his head, over again and on down.

I climb back up through the woods. It is very peaceful and straightforward to walk without him, out of the water-noise into the birdsong. The clearing when I reach it is quiet without him, pleased to be rid of his fussing and displeasure and only to stand about, head among the leaves while the two fires send up their smoke-tendrils and John Barn sleeps on.

I bend down and touch his shoulder. “Come, John,” I say, “Time to make for home. Do I need to bind you?”

He wakes. “You?” His eyes reflect my head, surrounded by branches on the sky.

“George. George Treadlaw, remember?”

He looks about as I untie his feet. “That man is gone,” he says. “Good. I don’t like that man.”

I reach across him to loosen his far hand. “Oh, George,” he says “You smell bad this morning. Perhaps you’d better bind me, and walk at a little distance. That’s a fearsome smell. It makes me want to run from you.”

I sniff at a pinch of my shirt. “I’m no worse than I was last night.”

“Yes, last night it started,” he says. “But I was tied down then and no trouble to you.”

I tether him to a tree-root and cook myself some pan-flaps.

“They smell nice,” he says, and eats another mulberry leaf, watching the pan.

“You must eat nothing but leaves today, John,” I tell him. “Anything foreign, you will die of it, for I can’t go into you like Phillips and fetch it out again.”

“You will have to watch me,” he says. “Everything is very pretty, and smells so adventurous.”

We set off home straight after. All day I lead him on a length of rope, letting him take his time. I am not impatient to get back. No one will be happy with me, that I lost Phillips. Oh, they will be angry, however much I say it was an accident, a slip of the man’s boot as he squatted by the torrent washing himself. No one will want to take the spindles down to the town, and find whoever he traded them to, and buy the goods he bought. I will have to do all that, because it was I who lost the man, and I will, though the idea scares me as much as it will scare them. No one will want to hunt again, in years to come as the mulberries die off and no new ones are made; no one will want to gather roots and berries, and make nut flour, just to keep us fed, for people are all spoilt with town goods, the ease of them and the strong tastes and their softness to the tooth. But what can they do, after all, but complain? Go down to the town yourselves, I’ll tell them. Take a mulberry with you and some spindles; tell what was done to us. Do you think they will start it again? No, they will come up here and examine everything and talk to us as fools; they might take away all our mulberries; they might take all of us away, and make us live down the town. And they will think we did worse than lose Phillips in the torrent; they will take me off to gaol, maybe. I don’t know what will happen. I don’t know.

“It is a fine day, George of the Treadlaws,” John Barn says behind me. “I like to breathe, out here. I like to see the trees, and the sun, and the birds.”

He is following behind obedient, pale and careful, the stitches black in his paunch, the brace hanging off the silk-end. Step, step, step, he goes with his unaccustomed feet, on root and stone and ledge of earth, and he looks about when he can, at everything.

“You’re right, John.” I move on again so that he won’t catch up and be upset by the smell of me. “It’s a fine day for walking in the forest.”

The way in was almost nothing like we remembered, miles off the main road, and Gina and me with one half-decent sense of direction between us. Do you need us to draw you a map, our parents had asked, hers and mine both, once at the funeral home and again over the continental breakfast at the motel. No, no, no, we’d told them. Of course we remember how to get to Grandma’s. Indignant, the way adults get when their parents treat them like nine-year-olds.

Three wrong turns and fifteen extra minutes of meandering later, we were in the driveway, old gravel over ancestral dirt. Gina and I looked at each other, a resurgence of some old telepathy between cousins.

“Right,” I said. “We never speak of this again.”

She’d insisted on driving my car, proving… something… and yanked the keys from the ignition. “I don’t even want to speak about it now.”

If everything had still been just the way it used to be, maybe we would’ve been guided by landmarks we hadn’t even realized we’d internalized. But it wasn’t the same, and I don’t think I was just recalling some idealized version of this upstate county that had never actually existed.

I remembered the drive as a thing of excruciating boredom, an interminable landscape of fields and farmhouses, and the thing I’d dreaded most as a boy was finding ourselves behind a tractor rumbling down a road too narrow for us to pass. But once we were here, it got better, because my grandfather had never been without a couple of hunting dogs, and there were more copses of trees and tracts of deep woodland than the most determined pack of kids could explore in an entire summer.

Now, though…

“The way here,” I said. “It wasn’t always this dismal, was it?”

Gina shook her head. “Definitely not.”

I was thinking of the trailers we’d passed, and the forests of junk that had grown up around them, and it seemed like there’d been a time when, if someone had a vehicle that obviously didn’t run, they kept it out of sight inside a barn until it did. They didn’t set it out like a trophy. I was thinking, too, of riding in my grandfather’s car, meeting another going the opposite direction, his and the other driver’s hands going up at the same moment in a friendly wave. Ask him who it was, and as often as not he wouldn’t know. They all waved just the same. Bygone days, apparently. About all the greeting we’d gotten were sullen stares.

We stood outside the car as if we needed to reassure ourselves that we were really here. Like that maple tree next to the driveway, whose scarlet-leafed shade we parked in, like our grandfather always had — it had to have grown, but then so had I, so it no longer seemed like the beanstalk into the clouds it once was. Yet it had to be the same tree, because hanging from the lowest limbs were a couple of old dried gourds, each hollowed out, with a hole the size of a silver dollar bored into the side. There would be a bunch more hanging around behind the house. Although they couldn’t have been the same gourds. It pleased me to think of Grandma Evvie doing this right up until the end. Her life measured by the generations of gourds she’d turned into birdhouses, one of many scales of time.