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

But nothing happens, and your arms become stiff and cold. Soft hooting punctuates the silence, followed by another passage of the wind through the ferns and trees. Resisting the temptation to sigh, you curl your arms back into the camper, and fumble for the zipper. As you close the mesh screen, the wind picks up, and small cracks sound throughout the clearing. It’s a familiar sound, but you can’t place it. Something flaps against the screen then whooshes away: startled, you shiver and slide back from the netting, images of insects and bats filling your mind. Jamie stirs, turns away. Another object hits the mesh and slides away — this time you recognize the sound for what it is. Stretching one hand out, you press against the mesh as hard as possible, fingers outstretched, wiggling as if coaxing. When the page hits the flat of your hand, you grab and reel it back in. The wind dies down, and the flapping of loose paper fades. What’s left of the book is gone for good, scattered into the sky. You take the page and insert it into the folds of the map. You fall into restless sleep, paper clutched against your chest like a rag doll. In the early morning before everyone else awakens, when the sky is the color of ash, you’ll wake up and study the pen and ink drawing of an ancient maelstrom, its nebulous center leading somewhere you cannot see.

The road Father drives down while you fall asleep is smooth as silk compared to the road you wake up to. It had been beautiful before — unbroken lanes of blacktop, with perfect rows of evergreens lining each side, wildflowers of crimson red and white crowding at their roots. The magazine slipping from your hands, you’d grabbed a pillow from the storage area behind the bench and snuggled against the window, bare feet resting flat against Jamie’s legs. You slept hard, so hard you didn’t feel the vibration in your bones as the road shifted to gravel and dirt, pitted with potholes and large rocks. You didn’t see the forest fall away, dissolve into ragged sweeps of ravaged land, green only in the brush and grasses sprouting around stumps of long-felled trees. You didn’t see the land itself fall away, until all that remained of the road was a miserly ledge, barely wide enough for any car, clinging to the steep sides of barren hills. You only woke up when you heard your mother screaming.

“Don’t ask,” Jamie says, before you can. He’s sitting on the porta-potty, ashen-faced and shoulders hunched over, methodically placing one green grape after another in his mouth. You rub your eyes, trying to make sense of the ugly, unexpected landscape. To your right, the hill rises in a steep incline, tree stumps clinging for their lives to the dirt like severed hands. To your left: nothing. There is more desolation in the distance, but right beside the camper, there is nothing but jagged space.

The camper lurches down and shoots up, sending books and backpacks sliding across the floor. Your mother screams again. “Turn around, goddammit!” Tears stain her face in shining streaks.

“I can’t turn around,” Father shouts. “There’s nowhere to turn!”

“Where are we?”

Jamie shrugs. “A logging road, somewhere. It’s not on the map. Dad says it is, but—” he shrugs again, and shoves several more grapes in his mouth, barely chewing before they’re gone. He always eats mindlessly when he’s stressed out.

“When did we leave the real road?”

“I don’t know — an hour ago? It didn’t get really bad until about twenty minutes ago. I can’t believe you slept through all that. I thought you were dead.” The camper lurches again, swaying wildly. Jamie stares out the window, a grape at his lip. “Yeah, I don’t want to talk anymore. I just want to be quiet for a while, ok? I need to not — I need to be quiet.”

“Yeah. Sure.” Reaching for the grapes, you start to rise, and Jamie shoots out his hand to block you. “Stop, ok? Just — don’t. Fucking. Move. Sit down.” The camper lurches again, and for a wild second, you get the impression that there is nothing under the wheels, that you’re all about to topple over and fall. The shriek is out of your mouth before you can stop it.

“Goddammit.” Father, at the wheel. “Sit down, June, both of you sit down and shut up!” Your mother covers her face with her hands. You’ve never seen her cry. You’ve never seen her lose control of her emotions, or of Father. They’ve always done things as one. Now she’s sobbing like a child. Father turns back to you, motioning.

“Come up here.”

“I—” You’re paralyzed.

“Look at the road—” your mother shrieks. Father’s hand lashes out like a snake. You can’t hear the slap of his hand over the roar of gravel and rock under spinning wheels.

“June, get up here now . Jamie, get off the goddamn toilet and help your mother to the back. Everybody, now!”

Jamie stands up, legs shaking, and grabs your mother’s hand as she sidles out of the passenger seat. Mascara coats her face in wet streaks, except for where Father slapped it away, and her lipstick has bled around the edges, making her mouth voracious and wide. Jamie helps her across the porta-potty, while you stand to the side, fingernails biting into your palms. There’ll be raw red crescents in the skin when you finally unclench your hands.

“Come on,” Father snaps, and you crawl across the toilet, hitting your head against the edge of the refrigerator as the camper slams over a log. Father curses under his breath, but doesn’t slow down. Sweat the color of dust dribbles down his face, collects at the throat of his t-shirt and under his arms. If his jaw was clenched any tighter, his teeth would break. “Sit down. Open up the map.”

Up here, in your mother’s seat, you see now how bad it is. The road before you is barely there, crumbling on the right side back into the mountain, gouged with giant potholes — more like depressions where the road simply dropped away. No guard rails or tree line, just a straight drop hundreds of yards down, the kind of fall the camper would never survive. And the road curves, so steep and sharp that you can’t see more than ten or twenty yards ahead, assuming there’s even a road ten or twenty yards beyond that. No wonder your mother was hysterical. Father’s going to kill you all.

“June, the map.”

“You threw it away in the woods, I don’t have it—”

“Never mind the fucking seatbelt. Take out the fucking map!”

Reaching into your blouse, you pull out the warm square of paper.

“Open it up.”

You do as he says, refolding it so that only the folds showing the Olympic Peninsula show. It fits perfectly in your lap, the land and the void.

“Tell me where we are.”

“Ok, I—” Your finger traces over the hand-drawn roads, so many of the brown-red roads that start and end with each other as abrupt as squares of netting. Below them, somewhere, is Father’s dotted blue ink line, along with your mother’s wishful scrawl of lavender road. Frantic, you move your fingernail along Father’s road, following, following — You lost it. No: it’s simply gone.

“Where are we, June-Bug?” Father manages a tight smile. “How much further do we have to go? I’m counting on you to help us.”

“I’m looking — it’s hard to see, it’s like a furnace up here.” Panic sharpens your voice. Again, you find the start of Father’s road, and you follow, follow — it disappears. And it’s not like it simply stops, and you can see the end. The road is there and then it’s not, and your gaze is somewhere else on the map, on another map altogether, on the one that was meant for you.

“I’m sorry.” The words barely leave your dry mouth. “I just can’t find it. It’s not on here. I’m looking and I see all these lines but there aren’t any logging roads, and I can’t find the road you drew—”