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

What happens then, if you do? Somebody always wanted to know that.

Awful things, she’d say. Awful, awful things. Which wasn’t enough, because we’d beg to know more, but she’d say we were too young to hear about them, and promise to tell us when we were older, but she never did.

You’re just talking about God, right? one of my cousins said once. Aren’t you?

But Grandma never answered that either, at least not in any way we would’ve understood at the time. I still remember the look, though… not quite a no, definitely not a yes, and the wisdom to know that we’d either understand on our own someday, or never have to.

I saw the Woodwalker once, Shae piped up, quiet and awestruck. One weekend last fall. He was looking at two dead deer. None of us believed her, because we believed in hunters a lot more than we believed in anything called the Woodwalker. But, little as she was, Shae wouldn’t back down. Hunters, she argued, didn’t stand deer on their feet again and send them on their way.

I’d never forgotten that.

And so, as the night blustered on the wings of bats and barn owls, I listened and watched and took another tiny step toward believing.

“Any time,” I whispered to whatever might speak up or show itself. “Any time.”

The milk had gone bad and the bacon with it, and we needed a few other things to get us through the weekend, so that next morning I volunteered to make the run back to the store near the turnoff on the main road. I decided to take the long way, setting off in the opposite direction, because it had been years and I wanted to see more of the county, and even if I made more wrong turns than right, there were worse things than getting lost on a September Saturday morning.

Mile after mile, I drove past many worse things.

You can’t remember such a place from before it got this way, can’t remember the people who’d proudly called it home, without wondering what they would think of it now. Would they have let their homes fall to ruin with such helpless apathy? Would they have sat back and watched the fields fill with weeds? Would they have ridden two wheels, three wheels, four, until they’d ripped the low hills full of gouges and scars? Not the people I remembered.

It made me feel old, not in the body but in the heart, old in a way you always say you never want to be. It was the kind of old that in a city yells at kids to get off the lawn, but here it went past annoyance and plunged into disdain. Here, they’d done real harm. They’d trampled on memories and tradition, souring so much of what I’d decided had been good about the place, and one of them, I could never forget, had snatched my sister from the face of the Earth.

Who were the people who lived here now, I wondered. They couldn’t all have come from somewhere else. Most, I imagined, had been raised here and never left, which made their neglect even more egregious.

But the worst of it was in the west of the county, where the coal once was. The underground mines had been tapped out when we were children, and while that’s when I’d first heard the term strip-mining, I hadn’t known what it meant, either as a process or its consequences.

It was plain enough now, though, all the near-surface coal gone too, and silent wastelands left in its wake, horizon-wide lacerations of barren land pocked with mounds of topsoil, the ground still so acidic that nothing wanted to grow there.

No matter how urgently the Woodwalker might remind the seeds what to do.

It was the wrong frame of mind to have gotten in before circling back to the store. I left my sunglasses on inside, the same way I’d wear them on cloudy days while watching the inmates in the yard, and for the same reasons, too: as armor, something to protect us both, because there was no good to come from locking eyes, from letting some people see what you think of their choices and what they’d thrown away.

The place was crowded with Saturday morning shoppers, and there was no missing the sickness here. Those meth people that’ve made such a dump of the place, I hear they don’t mess around, Mrs. Tepovich had said, and for that matter, neither did the meth. I knew the look — some of the inmates still had it when they transferred from local lockups to hard time — and while it wasn’t on every face in the market, it was on more than enough to make me fear it was only going to get worse here. A body half-covered with leprosy doesn’t have a lot of hope for the rest of it.

The worst of them had been using for years, obviously, their faces scabbed and their bones filed sharp. With teeth like crumbling gravel, they looked like they’d been sipping tonics of sulfuric acid, and it was eating through from the inside. The rest of them, as jumpy and watchful as rats, would get there. All they needed to know about tomorrow was written in the skins of their neighbors.

It had an unexpected leveling effect.

From what I remembered of when we visited as children, the men nearly always died first here, often by a wide margin. They might go along fine for decades, as tough as buzzards in a desert, but then something caught up with them and they fell hard. They’d gone into the mines and come out with black spots on their lungs, or they’d broken their backs slowly, one sunrise-to-sunset day at a time, or had stubbornly ignored some small symptom for ten years too many. The women, though, cured like leather and carried on without them. It was something you could count on.

No longer.

The race to the grave looked like anybody’s to win.

When I got back to the house, I discovered we had a visitor, a surprise since there was no car in the drive. As I came in through the kitchen, Gina, over his shoulder, gave me a where-were-you-all-this-time look that she could’ve stolen from my ex. They were sitting at the kitchen table with empty coffee mugs, and Gina looked like the statute of limitations on her patience had expired twenty minutes earlier.

I couldn’t place him, but whoever he was, he probably hadn’t had the same fierce black beard, lantern jaw, and giant belly when we were kids.

“You remember Ray Sinclair,” she said, then jabbed her finger at the door, and it came back in a rush: Mrs. Tepovich’s great-nephew. He used to come over and play with us on those rare days that weren’t already taken up with chores, and he’d been a good guide through the woods — knew where to find all the wild berries, at their peak of ripeness, and the best secluded swimming holes where the creeks widened. We shook hands, and it was like trying to grip a baseball glove.

“I was dropping some venison off at Aunt Pol’s. She told me you two were over here,” he said. “My condolences on Evvie. Aunt Pol thought the world of her.”

I put away the milk and bacon and the rest, while Gina excused herself and slipped past, keeping an overdue appointment with some room or closet as Ray and I cleared the obligatory small talk.

“What have you got your eye on?” he asked then. “For a keepsake, I mean.”

“I don’t know yet,” I said. “Maybe my granddad’s shotgun, if it turns up.”

“You do much hunting?”

“Not since he used to take me out. And after I got back from the army … let’s just say I wasn’t any too eager to aim at something alive and pull a trigger again.” I’d done fine with my qualifications for the job, although that was just targets, nothing that screamed and bled and tried to belly-crawl away. “But I’m thinking if I had an old gun that I had some history with, maybe…” I shrugged. “I guess I could’ve asked for it after Granddad died, but it wouldn’t have seemed right. Not that Grandma went hunting, but left alone out here, she needed it more than I did.”