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

Behind the mountains, the clouds and skies deepen into vivid pinks and purples, rich and wonderful. A wind barrels down, sharp and stiff: the herd raise their heads from the grass in a single movement, then shoot off down the slope. You smell the change in the air, see the shimmering dark gather around the high peaks as the first thread of lightning splits down and away. Shivering, you sit down in the grass, balancing the bone at the crest of your mounded stomach, and carefully, firmly, run your wrists across the sharpened edges. And the sunset begins its slow dissolve, while lightning dances around the mountaintops, as all light fades from the world, and you start to cry. It’s not a mirage, you see it: a separate, circular mass of black flowing up from the heart of the mountains, up and over the peaks like a tidal wave. Clouds and lighting curve toward the darkness, sliding into the mouth of the maelstrom and away. Near the edges of the whorl, uprooted trees begin to swarm into the air like locusts, disappearing with the earth itself. The ground beneath you shifts, and the entire hill jerks forward: the camper topples over and rolls out of sight. This is it. This is it. Raising your arms high, you inhale as much as your cracked ribs allow, and shout as hard as you can.

Take me. Save me.

It’s not very loud, or hard, and your broken voice can barely be heard. But it doesn’t matter. It’s widening, consuming everything, and it doesn’t even care or know that you exist because this is chaos, this is nothing and not nothing, and this is where you want to go more than anyplace else at all, because inside that, there is no sorrow, there is no pain. Only everything you ever were, waiting to be reborn.

And while you can still feel, you feel joy.

Within your belly, movement — a deep watery ping of a push, like someone beating down against a drum, over and over. You cover the mound of flesh with your weeping arms, and crouch before the rising winds. Everything’s going, this time. Nothing will return. Cherry red ribbons cover the blue stains and black scars, erase the circles, the roads. No new map this time. Only a river rushing into itself, only a girl striking out on her own, with no directions left behind that anyone can follow.

Which is as it should be. Where a girl goes, the world is not meant to know.

The bus turns left off Langworthy Road and onto the approach to the A6. Just before it goes under the overpass, past the old Jewish cemetery at the top of Brindleheath Road and on past Pendleton Church, it stops and Dermot gets on.

He gets a few funny looks, does Dermot, as he climbs aboard, but then he always does. It’s hard for people to put their fingers on it. Maybe it’s the way his bald head looks a bit too big. Or the fishy largeness of his eyes behind the jar-thick spectacles. The nervous quiver of his pale lips, perhaps.

Or perhaps it’s just how pale he is. How smooth. His skin — his face, his hands — are baby smooth and baby soft. Like they’ve never known work, and hardly ever known light.

All that and he’s in a suit, too. Quite an old suit, and it’s not a perfect fit — maybe a size too large — but it’s neat and clean and well maintained. Pressed. Smooth.

And of course, there’s the briefcase.

It’s old fashioned, like something out of the seventies, made out of plain brown leather. He doesn’t carry it by the handle. He hugs it close against his chest. Like a child.

Dermot finds his way to a seat and parks himself there. His hands glide and slide smoothly over one another, as if perpetually washing themselves. His lips are slightly parted and behind the thick glasses his pale, almost colourless eyes are fixed on some far distant vanishing point beyond the bus’ ceiling.

After a moment, the man next to him grunts and gets up. Dermot blinks, snapped rudely out of his reverie, then gets up to let the man past. He thinks the man’s going to ding the bell to get off but he doesn’t, just goes and finds another seat. Another, Dermot-less seat.

Dermot doesn’t care.

He sidles up closer to the window and watches Salford glide past him in the thickening dusk, street lamps glinting dully in the gathering grey of impending night.

But he gazes beyond what is there to be seen.

And licks his lips as the bus rides on.

“Special Needs…” slurs Shires, outside the door. “Special Needs …”

Abbie stops tapping her pencil on the desktop and looks up at Carnegie.

They’re alone in the little office, the little dusty old office that never has a proper clean and has phones and a fax machine and a desktop computer that were last updated in 1991. Well, maybe a little more recently in the computer’s case, but only that.

They’re the dirty little secret. They’re the office in the police station that nobody wants to admit is there, nobody wants to acknowledge exists.

That nobody wants to admit there is a need for.

“Special Needs … Special fucking Needs …”

Shires is pressing himself up against the door’s big frosted glass pane with its reinforcing wire mesh. Seen through it, he’s blurred but she can make out enough. His arms are up, bent at the elbows and bent sharply in at the wrists, fingers splayed, a parody of some kid with cerebral palsy. He’s making that stupid, that fucking annoying voice, by sticking his tongue down between his bottom lip and his teeth and gums. It’s supposed to make him sound like a spastic.

They have to call their little office something, have to give it some kind of a name, and so they call it Special Projects. Shires and the other lads and lasses in the station who know about it call it Special Needs.

It passes for humour around here.

But it’s fear, nothing more. It’s not the drab little out-of-date office, caught perpetually in its early nineties time warp, that they’re scared of. It’s what it represents.

It’s what they have to fight.

And how they have to fight it.

That’s the theory, anyway. Abbie knows all about the theory. She knows all about what goes on in here, in theory. She’s read all the reports, the rule books, the case files. She knows the score. In theory.

But this is the first time she’s done it for real.

Carnegie, though, he’s different. He’s a big guy, solid looking. In his forties, she thinks. Late thirties, maybe, and feeling the strain. Dirty blond hair, washed out watery looking blue eyes and features that all look too closely gathered together in the middle of his face. Black jacket, long black coat, black trousers and shoes. White shirt. No tie. The washed out watery looking blue eyes are rolled up towards the ceiling and each new breath is blown out through his lips. Hard. A little harder each time, it seems, Shires lets out his stupid call.

“Special fucking Neeeeeeeeds …”

Shires slaps and bats a splayed bent hand weakly against the frosted, wire-meshed glass, pressing his face up close against it.

Carnegie grabs the door handle, twists and slams his shoulder back into it. The door opens outwards and the impact knocks Shires flying back into the corridor, arms flailing. There’s a heavy crash as he lands.

Carnegie pulls the door shut again. He turns to face Abbie and shrugs.

“Argh! Carnegie you fucking cunt!” Shires’ voice is muffled.

Abbie is biting her lips hard so as not to laugh. She has to stop herself doing that because if she starts she doesn’t know if she’ll stop.

Moaning, groaning and mumbling indistinct threats of revenge, Shires stumbles away down the corridor and out of earshot.