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

“Be alone.”

Vacation has begun.

Salt ocean air and the cries of gulls recede as Father guides the camper through Port Angeles. You wish you could stay, walk through the postcard-pretty gingerbread-housed streets with Jaime, shop for expensive knick-knacks you don’t need, daydream of a life you’ll never have. Father drives on. Office buildings and shopping districts give slow way to industrial parks and oversized construction sheds surrounded by rusting bulldozers and dump trucks. None of it looks permanent, not even the highway. 101 lengthens like overworked taffy into a worn, three-lane patchwork of blacktop and tar. Campers and flat-beds, station wagons and Airstreams all whoosh across its surface, with you and against you. Port into town, town into suburbs, suburbs into the beyond. The sun has returned in vengeance, and all the grey clouds have whipped away over the waters, following the ferry you were never meant to take.

“Once we’re off the highway, we can follow the logging roads,” Father shouts over the roaring wind as he steers the camper down the Olympic Highway. He sounds excited, almost giddy. “They’ll take us deep into the Park, past the usual campgrounds and tourist spots, past the Ranger Stations, right into the heart of the forest. And then, once the logging roads have ended — well, look at the map. Just see how far we can go.”

You stare at the silhouette of his head, dark against the dirty brilliance of the window shield. One calloused hand rests on the steering wheel, one hand on your mother’s shoulder. His fingers play with the gold hoop at her ear, visible under the short pixie cut of grey-brown hair. She turns to him, her cheek rising as she smiles. They remind you of how you and Jamie must look together: siblings, alike and in love, always together. Father and you used to look like that. Now you and he look different. You clench your jaw, look away, look down.

“It’s not even noon, we should be able to make it to Lake Mills by this afternoon—”

Your mother interrupts him. “That far? We’ll never make it to Windy Arm by then, it’s too far.” So that’s your destination. You’ve been there before, you know how much she loves the lake, the floating, abandoned logs, the placid humming of birds.

“Not this time, remember? We’re taking Hot Springs Road over to the logging roads. Tomorrow we’ll start out early, and we should be there by sundown.”

“But there’s nothing — wait, isn’t Hot Springs closed? Or parts of it? I thought we going down Hurricane Ridge.” Your mother looks confused. Evidently, they didn’t make all the vacation plans together. Interesting.

“It’s still drivable, and there won’t be any traffic — that’s the point. To get away from everyone. Don’t worry.”

“Aren’t we going back home?” Jaime asks. “Where are we going?”

“We’re not going all the way to the end of Hot Springs, anyway,” Father continues over Jamie. “I told you we’re taking the logging roads, they go deeper into the mountains. We already mapped this all out, last week.”

“We didn’t discuss this.” Your mother has put on her “we need to speak in private” voice.

“Take a look at the map. June has it,” Father says.

“I don’t need to look at the map, I know where we planned on going. I mean, this is ridiculous — where in heaven’s name do you think you’re taking us to?”

“I said we’re going all the way.” His hand slides away from her shoulder, back to the wheel.

“All the way to where?”

“All the way to the end.”

The map Father gave you to hold is an ordinary one, a rectangular sheaf of thick paper that unfolds into a table-sized version of your state. Jamie scoots closer to you as you struggle with the folds, his free hand resting light on your bare thigh, just below your shorts. His hands are large and gentle, like the paws of a young German Shepherd. You move your forehead close, until your bangs mingle with his, and together you stare down at the state you were born in, and all its familiar nooks and crevices. In the upper corner is your small city — you trace your route across the water and up the right hand side of the peninsula to Port Angeles, then down. The park and mountains are a blank green mass, and there are no roads to be seen.

You lift the edge of the map that rests on your legs, and dark markings well up from the other side. “Turn it over to the other side,” you say.

“Just a minute.” He holds his side tight, so you lift your edge up as you lower your head, peering. The other side of the paper is the enlarged, fang-shaped expanse of the Olympic Mountain Range. Small lines, yellow and pink and dotted and straight, fan around and around an ocean devoid of the symbols of cartography, where even the logging roads have not thrust themselves into. You can see where your father has circled small points throughout various squares, connecting each circle with steady blue dashes that form a line. Underneath his lines, you see the lavender ink of your mother’s hand, a curving line that follows Whiskey Road to its end just before Windy Arm. Over all those lines, though, over all those imagined journeys, someone has drawn another road, another way to the interior of the park. It criss-crosses back and forth, overlapping the forests like a net until it ends at the edges of a perfect circle — several perfect circles, in fact, one inside another inside another, like a three-lane road. Like a cage. The circles encloses nothing — nothing you can see on the map, anyway, because nothing is in the center except mountains and snow, nothing the mapmakers thought worth drawing, nothing they could see. The circles enclose only a single word:

Xάος

Someone has printed it in the naked center of the brown-inked circles, across the mountains you’ve only ever seen as if in a dream, as smoky grey ridges floating far above the neat rooftops of your little neighborhood, hundreds of miles away. Letters of brown, dark brown like dried-up scratches of blood — not Father’s handwriting, and not your mother’s.

“Do you see that?” you ask Jamie. “Did you write that?”

“Write what?” He’s still on the other side of the state. He doesn’t see anything. He doesn’t care.

You brush a fingertip onto the word. It feels warm, and a bit ridged. “Help me,” you whisper to it, even though you’re not sure to who or what you’re speaking, or why. The words come out of your mouth without thought. They are the same words you whisper at night, when Father presses against you, whispering his own indecipherable litany into your ears. Your finger presses down harder against the paper, until it feels you’ll punch a hole all the way through the mountains. “Save me. Take me away. Take it all away.”

The word squirms.

Goosebumps cascade across your skin, a brushfire of premonition. As you lower your edge of the map, Jamie’s fingers clench down onto your thigh. Perhaps he mistakes the prickling heat of your skin for something else. You don’t dissuade him. Under the thick protection of the paper, hidden from your parents’ eyes, your fingers weave through his, soaking up his heat and sweat; and your legs press together, sticking in the roaring heat of engine and sun-soaked wind. Your hand travels onto his thigh, resting at the edge of his shorts where the whorls of your fingertips glide across golden strands of hair, until you feel the start, the beginning of him, silky soft, and begin to rub back and forth, gently. His cock twitches, stiffens, and his breath warms your shoulder in deep bursts, quickening. You know what he loves.

“Do you see where we’re headed to?” Father asks.