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

We argued over what was true. We argued over what couldn’t possibly be real. We weren’t arguing with each other so much as with ourselves, and with what fate had shoved into our faces.

Mostly, though, we argued over how far is too far, when it’s for family.

Living with this has been no easy task. What happened to Shae was not a just thing. Folks here once knew that whatever we called it, there really is something alive in the woods and fields, as old as time and only halfway to civilized, even if few were ever lucky or cursed enough to see it. We always trusted that if we did right by it, it would do right by us. But poor Shae paid for other folks’ wrongs.

She meant well, I know. It’s no secret there’s a plague here and it’s run through one side of this county to the other. So when Shae found a trailer in the woods where they cook up that poison, nothing would do but that she draw a map and report it.

Till the day I die I won’t ever forget the one summer when all the grandchildren were here and the night little Shae spoke up to say she’d seen the Woodwalker. I don’t know why she was allowed at that age to see what most folks never do in a lifetime, but not once did I think she was making it up. I believed her.

The only thing I can fathom is this: Once she decided to report that trailer and what was going on there, the Woodwalker knew her heart, and resolved to put a stop to her intentions.

I spent half of Sunday out by myself, trying to find what Shae had found, but all I had to go by was the map she’d drawn. There was no knowing how accurate it was when it was new, and like the living things they are, woods never stop changing over time. Trees grow and fall, streams divert, brambles close off paths that were once as clear as sidewalks.

And whoever had put the trailer there had had eight years to move it. What it sounded like they’d never had, though, was a reason.

I had the map, and a bundle of sticks across my back, and like any hunter I had a shotgun — not my granddad’s, since that one had yet to turn up, and it’s just as well I went for the one in my trunk, carried out of habit for the job — but sometimes hunters come home empty-handed.

At least I came back with a good idea of what else I needed before going out to try again.

I don’t want to say what I saw, but it was enough to know that it was no man using all those vines to drag her off toward the hog wallow, faster than I could chase after them. By the time I caught up, it had choked the life from her.

It didn’t do this because it wanted to protect those men for their own sakes. I think it’s because it wants the plague to continue until it finishes clearing away everybody who’s got it, and there’s nobody left in this county but folks who will treat the place right again.

These days you’ll hear how the men who’ve brought this plague think they’re beyond the reach of the law, because their hideaways can’t be found. Well, I say it’s only because the Woodwalker has a harsher plan than any lawman, and blinds the eyes of those who come from outside to look.

But Shae always did see those woods with different eyes.

“Remember what Grandma used to call her?” Gina asked. I was ashamed to admit I didn’t. “‘Our little wood-elf,’” she said, then, maybe to make me feel better, “That’s not something a boy would’ve remembered. That’s one for the girls.”

“Maybe so,” I said, and peeled the blanket open one more time to check my sister’s face. I’d spent the last hours terrified that there had been some magic about our grandmother’s attic, and that once she was carried back to the outside world again, the eight years of decay Shae had eluded would find her at last.

One more time, I wouldn’t have known she wasn’t just dreaming.

Instead, the magic had come with her. Or maybe the Woodwalker, spying us with the burden we’d shared through miles of woodland, knew our hearts now, too, and opened the veil for our eyes to see. Either way, I’d again followed where the old map led, and this time Shae had proven to be the key.

“Do you think it goes the other way?” Gina asked.

“What do you mean?”

“If we stood up and whoever’s in there looked out, would they see us now? Or would they look straight at us and just see more trees?”

“I really don’t want to put that to the test.”

The trailer was small enough to hitch behind a truck, large enough for two or three people to spend a day inside without tripping over each other too badly. It sat nestled into the scooped-out hollow of a rise, painted with a fading camouflage pattern of green and brown. At one time its keepers had strung nets of nylon mesh over and around it, to weave with branches and vines, but it looked like it had been a long time since they’d bothered, and they were sagging here, collapsed there. It had a generator for electricity, propane for gas. From the trailer’s roof jutted a couple of pipes that had, ever since we’d come upon it, been venting steam that had long since discouraged anything from growing too close to it.

Eventually the steam stopped, and a few minutes later came the sound of locks from the other side of the trailer door. It swung open and out stepped two men. They took a few steps away before they stripped off the gas masks they’d been wearing and let them dangle as they seemed glad to breathe the cool autumn air.

I whispered for Gina to stay put, stay low, then stepped out from our hiding place and went striding toward the clearing in-between, and maybe it did take the pair of them longer to notice than it should’ve. They each wore a pistol at the hip but seemed to lack the instinct to go for them.

And the trees shuddered high overhead, even though I couldn’t feel or hear a breeze.

“Hi, Ray,” I called, leveling the shotgun at them from the waist.

“Dylan,” he said, with a tone of weary disgust. “And here I believed you when you said you weren’t no narc.”

For a while I’d been wondering if he’d simply dropped by while visiting his great-aunt, and Shae had suspected him for what he was and followed him here, righteous and foolhardy thing that she could be.

I glanced at the gangly, buzz-cut fellow at his side. “Who’s that you’re with?”

“Him? Andy Ellerby.”

“Any more still inside?”

Ray’s fearsome beard seemed to flare. “You probably know as well as I do, cooking is a two-man job at most.” He scuffed at the ground. “Come on, Dylan, your roots are here. You don’t do this. What say we see what we can work out, huh?”

I looked at his partner. Like Ray, the edges of his face and the top of his forehead were red-rimmed where the gas mask had pressed tight, and he gave me a sullen glare. “Andy Ellerby, did I know you when we were kids?”

He turned his head to spit. “What’s it matter if you did or didn’t, if you can’t remember my name.”

“Good,” I said. “That makes this much a little easier.”

I snapped the riot gun to my shoulder and found that, when something mattered this much, I could again aim at something alive and pull the trigger. The range was enough for the twelve-gauge load to spread out into a pattern as wide as a pie tin. Andy took it in the chest and it flung him back against the trailer so hard he left a dent.