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

The backdrop is a carnival, but it’s also a graveyard, or maybe an empty field backed with distant trees. A woman studded with fragments of glass lies spread-eagle on a great wheel. Between her legs, Carrie lies on an altar, covered in writhing snakes. Behind Carrie, Elizabeth’s blood-sheeted face hangs like a crimson moon. From the black of her wide open eyes, shadowy figures seep out and stain the other images. They hide behind and inside everything, doubling and ghosting and blurring. The card isn’t one thing, it’s everything.

“I’m sorry.” Jackson finally manages the words aloud.

Slowly, Carrie reaches for a pen lying atop of a half-finished crossword puzzle. Her hand moves, more like a spasm than anything voluntary. The nib scratches across the card’s back, slicing skin and bone and soul. She lets the card fall onto the table between them, infinitely kind and infinitely cruel. Jackson thinks the tears welling in his eyes are the only things that save him.

“It’s okay,” she says. Her voice is not quite forgiving. For a moment, Jackson has the mad notion she might fold him in her bony arms and soothe him like a child, as though he’s the one that needs, or deserves, comforting.

Instead, Carrie leans forward and opens a drawer in the coffee table, fishing out a pack of cigarettes. Something rattles and slithers against the wood as the drawer slides closed. Jackson catches a glimpse, and catches his breath. Even after forty years he imagines the beads still sticky and warm, still slicked with Elizabeth’s blood.

Carrie lights her cigarette, and watches the patterns the smoke makes in the air, in shadows on the wall. They don’t quite match.

“I’m the final girl,” she says. The softness of her voice makes Jackson jump. He doesn’t think she’s even speaking to him anymore. She might as well be alone. (She’s always been alone.)

“What?” Jackson says, even though he knows exactly what she’s talking about. His voice quavers.

“It’s fucking bullshit, you know that?” Her voice is just as soft as before if the words are harsher. “I wasn’t a helpless fantasy at the beginning; I wasn’t an empowered hero at the end. I was just me the whole time. I was just human.”

She stands, crushing her cigarette against the cupped palm of her hand without flinching. “You can stay if you want. Or you can go. I don’t really care.”

And just like that she’s gone. Jackson is alone with Carrie Linden’s blood-red walls and her battered couch, with her beads hidden in the coffee table drawer, and her autograph on a worn-soft postcard. When she walked onto the screen, Carrie Linden stopped Jackson’s heart; walking out of the room, she stops it again.

He sees Carrie Linden doubled, trebled — bony-thin hips hidden beneath a bulky sweater; the curve of her naked ass, teased by long blonde hair as she saunters across the screen; a hunted, haunted woman, glancing behind her as she darts into the drug store.

Jackson has sunk so low, he can’t go any lower. (At least that’s what he tells himself as he leaves to make it okay.)

At home, Jackson hides the postcard and Carrie Linden’s beads at the bottom of his drawer. He covers them with socks and underwear, wadded t-shirts smelling of his sweat and late night popcorn, ripe with fear and desire.

It doesn’t matter how rare the postcard is, never mind that it’s signed by Carrie Linden; he’ll never show it to anyone, or even take it out of the drawer. The beads are another matter.

Everyone knows the opening sequence of Kaleidoscope , but it’s the closing sequence plays in most people’s minds, projected against the ivory curve of their dreaming skulls, etched onto the thinness of their eyelids. It bathes the late-night stupors of lone losers curled on their couches with the blankets pulled up to their chins against the flickering dark. It haunts midnight movie screens in rooms smelling of sticky-sweet spills and stale salt. It looms large on sheets stretched between goal posts, while orgies wind down on the battered turf below.

It is the third most famous scene in cinema history. (Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.)

Carrie is running. Everybody else is dead — Lance and Lucy, Elizabeth and Josh and Mary, and all the other brief phantoms who never even had names. She is covered in blood. Some of it is hers. She is naked.

Ahead of her is a screen of trees. More than once, Carrie stumbles and falls. When she does, the camera shows the soles of her feet, slick and red. But she keeps getting back up, again and again. The camera judders as it follows her. It draws close, but never quite catches up.

Carrie glances back over her shoulder, eyes staring wide at something the camera never turns to let the viewer see. (Imagination isn’t always the worst thing.) Carrie’s expression (hunted and haunted) says it all.

There is no soundtrack, no psychedelic colors. The only sound is Carrie’s feet slapping over sharp stones and broken bottles and her breath hitching in her throat. She’s running for the grass and the impossibly distant trees.

The credits roll.

The screen goes dark.

But Carrie is still there, between the frames, bleeding off the edges, flickering in the shadows. She’ll always be right there, forever, running.

Vacation doesn’t begin when Father pulls the Volkswagen camper out of the driveway, and speeds through the sleepy Tacoma streets toward Narrows Bridge. It doesn’t begin on the long stretches of Route 16 through Gig Harbor, Port Orchard, and Bremerton, your twin brother Jaime fast asleep beside you on the warm back seat, his dark blond hair falling over his eyes. It doesn’t begin with the hasty lunch at the small restaurant outside Poulsbo, where your father converses with the worn folds of the triple-A map as your mother slips the receipt into a carefully labeled, accordioned envelope. 16 whittles down to 3, blossoms into 104 as the camper crosses Hood Canal onto the Olympic Peninsula, and still your vacation does not begin. Discovery Bay, Sequim, Dungeness: all the feral playgrounds of vacations and summers past: no. It is in Port Angeles, under a storm-whipped sky, against the backdrop of Canada-bound ferries gorging their wide, toothless mouths on rivers of slow-moving cars, when Father turns away from your mother, thin-lipped and tearful from the forced confession that another envelope holding four passports sits on the quiet kitchen counter back in Tacoma. You roll your eyes. Why do they go to such trouble of pretense? Oh, yes: for the neighbors. For the pastor, for colleagues and relatives, for all the strangers and passers-by who wouldn’t understand, who want to hear only the normal. Father sees the look on your face, and takes you aside as his large flat thumb rubs against your cotton-clad arm in that old familiar way, that way you’ve known all of your fifteen long and lonely years, the way that always sends your mind into the flat black void. Old Spice tickles your nose, and you rub the itch away as Jaime scowls, the color fading from his perfect face like the sun.

“Don’t worry, June-Bug. I know a place. Better than Victoria. No distractions, no tourists. Where there’s nothing at all. You know the place. You’ve been there, before. It’s where you always go.” He places his calloused finger at the center of your forehead, and you almost piss yourself in fear: does he know?

“Where we can — you know.”

Your mother takes Jamie aside, her fingers sliding around his slender waist as she spins her own version of the same tale. Father winks and parts his lips, coffee and cigarette breath drifting across your face as he whispers in your ear.