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

I’d loaded it with three more of the same, but didn’t need them, so I racked the slide to eject the spent shell, then the next three. Ray looked confused as the unfired shells hit the forest floor, and his hand got twitchy as he remembered the holster on his belt, but by then I was at the fifth load and put it just beneath his breastbone, where his belly started to slope.

He looked up at me from the ground, trying to breathe with a reedy wheeze, groping where I’d shot him and not comprehending his clean, unbloodied hands.

“A beanbag round,” I told him. “We use them for riot control. You can’t just massacre a bunch of guys with homemade knives even if they are a pack of savages.”

I knelt beside him and plucked the pistol from his belt before he remembered it, tossed it aside. Behind me, Gina had crept out of hiding with her arms wrapped around herself, peering at us with the most awful combination of hope and dread I’d ever seen.

“I know you didn’t mean to, and I know you don’t even know you did it, but you’re still the reason my little sister never got to turn twenty.” I sighed, and tipped my head a moment to look at the dimming sky, and listened to the sound of every living thing, seen and unseen. “Well… maybe next year.”

I drew the hunting knife from my belt while he gasped; called for Gina to bring me the bundle of hickory sticks that my grandmother must have sharpened years ago, and the mallet with a cast-iron head, taken down from the barn wall. It would’ve been easier with Granddad’s chainsaw, but some things shouldn’t come easy, and there are times the old ways are still the best.

I patted Ray’s shoulder and remembered the stocky boy who’d taken us to the fattest tadpoles we’d ever seen, the juiciest berries we’d ever tasted. “For what it’s worth, I really was hoping it wouldn’t be you coming out that door.”

If the family is to have Shae back again, there’s some things that need doing, and I warn you, they’re ugly business.

Dylan, if you’re reading this, know that it was only you that I ever believed had the kind of love and fortitude in you to take care of it and not flinch from it. Whether you still had the faith in what your summers here put inside you was another matter. I figured that was a bridge we’d cross when it was time.

But then you came back from war, and whatever you’d seen and done there, you weren’t right, and I knew it wasn’t the time to ask. Somehow the time never did seem right. So if I was to tell you that I got used to having Shae around, even as she was, maybe you can understand that, and I hope forgive me for it.

It never seemed like all of her was gone.

The Woodwalker could’ve done much worse to her body, and I think it’s held on to her soul. What I believe is that it didn’t end her life for good, but took it to hold onto awhile.

Why else would the Woodwalker have bothered to bring her back to the house?

My sister saw the Woodwalker once, so she’d claimed, looking at two dead deer, and the reason she’d known it was no hunter was because hunters don’t help dead deer back to their feet and send them on their way.

There’s give and there’s take. There’s balance in everything. It was the one law none of us could hide from. Even life for life sometimes, but if Shae really did see what she thought she had, I wondered what she hadn’t seen — what life the Woodwalker had deemed forfeit for the deer’s.

As I went about the ugliest business of my life, I thought of the moonshiners from the tale Mrs. Tepovich had told Ray as a boy — how they’d burned out a stretch of woodland and fields, and the grotesque fate they’d all met. But Grandma Evvie, as it turned out, had a different take on what had happened, and why the woods and crops rebounded so quickly after the fire.

“That story about Old Hickory Bones your Aunt Pol told you?” This was the last thing I said to Ray. “It’s basically true, except she was wrong about one thing. Or maybe she wanted to give you the lesson but spare you the worst. But the part about replacing the bones with hickory sticks? That’s not something the Woodwalker does… that’s the gift it expects us to give it.”

Whatever else was true and wasn’t, I knew this much: Grandma Evvie would never have lied about my grandfather taking part in such a grim judgment when he was a very young man, able to swing a cast-iron mallet with ease.

Just as he must’ve done, I cut and sliced, pounded and pushed, hurrying to get it finished before the last of the golden autumn light left the sky, until what I’d made looked something like a crucified scarecrow. It glistened and dripped, and for as terrible a sight as it was, I’d still seen worse in war. When I stood back to take it in, wrapped in the enormous roar of woodland silence, I realized that my grandmother’s faith in me to do such a thing wasn’t entirely a compliment.

Gina hadn’t watched, hadn’t even been able to listen, so she’d spent the time singing to Shae, any song she could think of, as she prepared my sister’s body. She curled her among the roots of a great oak, resting on a bed of leaves and draped with a blanket of creepers and vines. How much was instruction and how much was instinct grew blurred, but it seemed right. She shivered beneath Shae’s real blanket after she was done, and after I’d cleaned myself up inside the trailer, I held her awhile as she cried for any of a hundred good reasons. Then I built a fire and we waited.

You let yourself hope but explain things away. No telling why that pile of leaves rustled, why that vine seemed to twitch. Anything could’ve done it. Flames flickered and shadows danced, while something watched us in the night — something tall enough to tangle clouds in its hair, small enough to hide in an acorn — and the forest ebbed and flowed with the magnitude of its slow, contemplative breath.

A hand first, or maybe it was a foot… something moved, too deliberate, too human, to explain away as anything else. Eight years since I’d heard her voice, but I recognized it instantly in the cough that came from beneath the shadows and vines. Gina and I dug, and we pulled, and scraped away leaves, and in the tangled heart of it all there was life, and now only one reason to cry. Shae coughed a long time, scrambling in a panic across the forest floor, her limbs too weak to stand, her voice too weak to scream, and I wondered if she was back at that moment eight years gone, reliving what it was like to die.

We held her until, I hoped, she thought it was just another dream.

I cupped her face, her cheeks still cold, but the fire gave them a flush of life. “Do you know me?”

Her voice was a dry rasp. “You look like my brother… only older.”

She had so painfully much to learn. I wondered if the kindest thing wouldn’t be to keep her at the house until we’d taught each other everything about where we’d been the last eight years, and the one thing I hadn’t considered until now was what if she wasn’t right, in ways we could never fix, in ways beyond wrong, and it seemed like the best thing for everybody would be to send her back again.

For now, though, I had too much to learn myself.

“Take her back to the house,” I told Gina. “I’ll catch up when I can.”

They both looked at me like I was sending them out among the wolves. But somebody, somewhere, was expecting what had just been cooked up in the trailer.

“And tell them not to put the place up for sale. I’ll need it myself.”