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

Father puts his foot on the brake, and the camper grinds to a hard halt. When he cuts the engine, the silence almost makes you groan with pleasure. Only the ticking of the engine now, and the whisper of wind and rolling gravel outside. Father places a hand on your shoulder. It sits there like some cancerous growth, hot and heavy, pressing down until the bones grind together. “You can do better than that,” he says. “You know what map I’m talking about.” He leans toward you, his eyes still on the ever-thinning road ahead. “Look at your map, June-Bug. I want you to tell me where we are on your map, not mine. Because, every very time I try to read it, I can’t quite make out the roads. You know what I mean. Read your map, and tell me where we are. How far we are from the center.”

You look back at your mother. She holds Jamie in her arms. His face rests at her throat, lips on her skin, pressing gently, whispering words you cannot hear because they aren’t meant for you. Those beautiful large hands, around her waist and thighs. He didn’t love you most, after all.

“June-Bug.” Father stares at you, and you return his glance. There can’t be any lying now. He already knows, and, you’re so tired. You just want this all to be done.

“It’s not my map. I didn’t draw it, you know. I don’t know how it got there.”

“I know. We didn’t draw those other maps, either, your mother and me.”

“What?” You lean back in the seat, astonished and angry as you stare at the limp paper. You wanted divine intervention for yourself, not for him, because you were the one who needed it, not him. Did the void betray you? “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Do you know how it got there?”

“I don’t know. I got it at a gas station, I didn’t open it till I got home, and there it was.” He stares at the dusty windshield, beads of sweat matting his brown-grey hair. “I think — I think they appeared because that’s where we wanted to go more than anywhere else in the world; and I think something in the world heard us and showed us the way. To a place where we can be ourselves without anyone else’s eyes on us, to where we can be free to do and act as we please.”

As animals, you think. As monsters. But you remember Jamie in the same breath, curving over you in the quiet corners of the school. Like father, like daughter. Animal, monster, too.

“Why can you see my map? Why can’t we both see yours?”

“Because your map, that’s where we both most want to go now. Because I love you, and I want to be with you. We need to go there together.”

“All of us, together?”

Father’s hand moves from your shoulder, gliding over your breast as he lowers it onto your thigh, the fingers rubbing hard against your sore crotch. “Us, together. Just the two of us. That’s how it’s supposed to be.”

The sun boils the fabric of the seat, searing your skin. You stare out your window at all the desolation, feeling his hand, working, working. You barely see a thing in the glare, but you don’t need to. You don’t need to see anything at all. The cool, black edges of the void nip at the edges of your conscious, small nudges that leave smears of black in your vision, as though ink is trickling into your tears.

“I know the way to the center,” you say.

“Good girl.” Father leans in, kissing you on the cheek, almost chaste in his touch. “Good girl.”

The engines roar, and the wheels whine as Father shifts into first, sending the camper rattling back up the small ledge. It’s not that much further, you tell him, just a few more corners to round, and we’ll be at the top, and the road will even out. You stare at the map as you speak, fingers moving back and forth as they trace the roads to the nothingness in the middle. Another corner comes and goes, and another, and you can see the anger in his face start to rise again, anger and impatience because he thinks no he knows that you lie, and you move your hand to his shoulder and squeeze it, then place it on his thigh. He smiles, takes your wrist and moves it in and down, wrenching the small bones in his haste. Repulsion fills your throat as you slide your hand past the folds of fabric, but you grab tight, grab as you slide to the edge of your seat, place your other hand on the wheel and your foot on the gas, down hard. And the road becomes a blur, the cliff is a blur and the screams and Father’s fist against your face are mere blurs, and only the momentary silence under the wheels before the sharp weightless flip of the entire world strikes you as having any substance or weight, just the right weight and terror to send you into the flat black void, into the nothingness of the center, as you whisper to Father and Jamie and your mother and to anything else that can hear:

Can you see everything now?

You open your eyes.

You stand in an open field on a hill. Beyond this hill, more hills — small mountains bristling with dark green trees. Beyond those, the Olympics rise up from one end of the horizon to the other — endless, imperious, cold and white, their jagged peaks tearing through passing clouds like tissue. Until now, you never thought they were quite real. You never knew anything so colossal, so beautiful, could actually exist. Behind them, the sun is lowering, and long shadows are creeping toward you and the hill. The light is wrong: thin and pale. The air is cool, almost cold. It doesn’t feel like summer anymore. It doesn’t feel like June.

Both your hands are covered in clotted scars and blood — your right hand clutches a long, pitted bone. Many of your nails are gone, the rest have grown out hideous and sharp. It takes a moment to recognize the filthy strips hanging from your body as the remains of your pajamas. Your skin is deep blue: hands, arms, torso, legs, feet. Dye from the small septic tank in the porta-potty. You smell like shit and death.

An animal-like grunt sounds out. Startled, you turn. To your right, a small herd of elk graze on the short grass. They are large and thick-furred, the males with antlers high as tree branches. They pay no attention to you. To your left sits the camper, monstrously dented and mangled, windows shattered, sliding side door long gone. Inside, it’s dark. There’s no movement in or around it, save for several birds perched on the pop-top. Scattered all around you are bits of clothes, empty cans and boxes, plastic bags, with a larger pile by the front tire of the camper, like a large nest. The hill. The road. The fall. The camper should not be here. You should not be here, alive. This is not the remains of the logging road. This is the interior. This is the center. But of what, you do not know.

Turning to the camper again, you wait.

You wait for Jamie. You wait for anyone. You wait until the sun begins to lower behind the range. Waves of nausea roll through you, sending drool and bile spilling out from between your lips, and your muscles spasm and twitch. But you are not ill, and you are not hungry, and you hold a long clean bone in your hand. You raise the bone to your face. It’s been scratched and scoured clean.

You know they will not appear. You know where they’ve gone.

As you lower your hand, you notice how rounded your belly is, like a little pillow, and how your naval sticks out like a round fat tongue. You’re thin but not starved. Bending over slightly, you study your inner thighs: they, of all places on you that should be caked with blood, are clean. “Oh.” It’s the only word you can form. You know what this means, and you now know you’ve been on this mountainside longer than just three months. The tight, blue skin of your stomach is dotted with a lattice-work of markings as intricate as lace. You touch the blood, a roadmap of brown ink — it’s the map, you realize, it’s your map made flesh. You run your finger in a spiral around to your naval, circled three times in dried blood. Press at the soft nub of flesh, the place that still connects you to your mother’s womb, and to all the women before her, to the beginning of time, the first woman, the first womb. It was always going to be like this. It has to end like this. It cannot begin again.