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

Evening came on differently out here than it did at home, seeming to rise up from the ground and spill from the woods and overflow the ditches that ran alongside the road. I’d forgotten this. Forgotten, too, how night seemed to spread outward from the chicken coop, and creep from behind the barn, and pool in the hog wallow and gather inside the low, tin-roofed shack that had sheltered the pigs and, miraculously, was still standing after years of disuse. Night was always present here, it seemed. It just hid for a while and then slipped its leash again.

I never remembered a time when it hadn’t felt better being next to somebody when night came on. We watched it from the porch, plates in our laps as we ate a supper thrown together from garden pickings and surviving leftovers from the fridge.

When she got to it, finally, Gina started in gently. “What Mrs. Tepovich said… about having anything else planned this weekend… meaning Shae, she couldn’t have been talking about anything else… she wasn’t onto something there, was she? That’s not on your mind, is it, Dylan?”

“I can’t come up here and not have it on my mind,” I said. “But doing something, no. What’s there to do that wouldn’t be one kind of mistake or another?”

Not that it wasn’t tempting, in concept. Find some reprobate and put the squeeze on, and if he didn’t know anything, which he almost certainly wouldn’t, then have him point to someone who might.

“Good,” she said, then sat with it long enough to get angry. We’d never lost the anger, because it had never had a definite target. “But… if you did … you could handle yourself all right. It’s what you do every day, isn’t it.”

“Yeah, but strength in numbers. And snipers in the towers when the cons are out in the yard.”

She looked across at me and smiled, this tight, sad smile, childhood dimples replaced by curved lines. Her hair was as light as it used to get during summers, but helped by a bottle now, I suspected, and her face narrower, her cheeks thinner. When they were plump, Gina was the first girl I ever kissed, in that fumbling way of cousins ignorant of what comes next.

There was no innocence in her look now, though, like she wished it were a more lawless world, just this once, so I could put together a private army and come back up here and we’d sweep through from one side of the county to the other until we finally got to the bottom of it.

Shae was one of the ones you see headlines about, if something about their disappearance catches the news editors’ eyes: MISSING GIRL LAST SEEN MONDAY NIGHT. FAMILY OF MISSING COLLEGE STUDENT MAKE TEARFUL APPEAL. Like that, until a search team gets lucky or some jogger’s dog stands in a patch of weeds and won’t stop barking.

Except we’d never had even that much resolution. Shae was one of the ones who never turned up. The sweetest girl you could ever hope to meet, at nineteen still visiting her grandmother, like a Red Riding Hood who trusted that all the wolves were gone, and this was all that was found: a single, bloodied scrap of a blouse hanging from the brambles about half a mile from where our mother had grown up. The rest of her, I’d always feared, was at the bottom of a mineshaft or sunk weighted into the muck of a pond or in a grave so deep in the woods there was no chance of finding her now.

I’d had three tours of duty to erode my confidence about any innate sense of decency in the human race, and if that weren’t enough, signing on with the Department of Corrections had finished off the rest. For Shae, I’d always feared the worst, in too much detail, because I knew too well what people were capable of, even the good guys, even myself.

We made little progress that first evening, getting lost on a detour into some photo albums, then after an animated phone conversation with her pair of gradeschoolers, Gina went to bed early. But I stayed up with the night, listening to it awhile from Grandma Evvie’s chair, until listening wasn’t enough, and I had to go outside to join it.

There was no cable TV out this far, and Grandma hadn’t cared enough about it for a satellite dish, so she’d made do with an ancient antenna grafted to one side of the house. The rotor had always groaned in the wind, like a weathervane denied its true purpose, the sound carrying down into the house, a ghostly grinding while you tried to fall asleep on breezy nights. Now I used it as a ladder, scaling it onto the roof and climbing the shingles to straddle the peak.

Now and again I’d see a light in the distance — the September wind parting the trees long enough to see the porch bulb of a distant neighbor, a streak of headlights on one of the farther roads — but the blackest nights I’d ever known were out here, alone with the moon and the scattershot field of stars.

So I listened, and I opened.

The memory had never left, among the clearest from those days of long summer visits — two weeks, three weeks, a month. We would sleep four and five to a room, when my cousins and sister and I were all here at once, and Grandma would settle us in and tell us bedtime stories, sometimes about animals, sometimes about Indians, sometimes about boys and girls like ourselves.

I don’t remember any of them.

But there was one she returned to every now and then, and that one stuck with me. The rest were just stories, made up on the spot or reworked versions of tales she already knew, and there was nothing lingering about them. I knew that animals didn’t talk; the good Indians were too foreign to me to really identify with, and I wasn’t afraid the bad ones would come to get us; and as for the normal boys and girls, well, what of them when we had real adventures of our own, every day.

The stories about the Woodwalker, though… those were different.

That’s just my name for it. My own grandmother’s name for it, she admitted to us. It’s so big and old it’s got no name. Like rain. The rain doesn’t know it’s rain. It just falls.

It was always on the move, she told us, from one side of the county to the other. It never slept, but sometimes it settled down in the woods or the fields to rest. It could be vast, she told us, tall enough that clouds sometimes got tangled in its hair — when you saw clouds skimming along so quickly you could track their progress, that’s when you knew — but it could be small, too, small enough to curl inside an acorn if the acorn needed reminding on how to grow.

You wouldn’t see it even if you looked for it every day for a thousand years, she promised us, but there were times you could see evidence of its passing by. Like during a dry spell when the dust rose up from the fields — that was the Woodwalker breathing it in, seeing if it was dry enough yet to send for some rain — and in the woods, too, its true home, when the trees seemed to be swaying opposite the direction the wind was blowing.

You couldn’t see it, no, but you could feel it, down deep, brushing the edges of your soul. Hardly ever during the day, not because it wasn’t there, but because if you were the right sort of person, you were too busy while the sun was up. Too busy working, or learning, or visiting, or too busy playing and wilding and having fun. But at night, though, that was different. Nights were when a body slowed down. Nights were for noticing the rest.

What’s the Woodwalker do? we’d ask. What’s it for?

It loves most of what grows and hates waste and I guess you could say it pays us back, she’d tell us. And makes sure we don’t get forgetful and too full of ourselves.