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

Then Davy moved and she saw it was only a cloak, her cloak, the one she had made for him. He threw it to the floor and brushed himself down, his arms shaped as they should be, moving as they should move. And he looked at her. “I’m back,” he said, and that was all she remembered before she fell.

At first, when Mia tried to tell her mother how Davey had been hurt, she listened to her and stroked her head and soothed her. Later she began to tut and brush Mia’s words away; later, she became angry. He’s fine, she said. Your brother’s fine.

Mia knew that Little Davey wasn’t fine. He wasn’t even the same. He was like Davey and yet not like him. He was too pale, his eyes too bright. He didn’t smile.

The others didn’t like to play with him anymore. Mia didn’t really know why because they didn’t tell her, and Mia knew that was because they had always been Davey’s friends and not her own. They had liked his smiles and his bravado, and they were things she didn’t have. Now they were things Davey didn’t have either. He sat around the house, scowling at the television or staring into space. He stared at her, too, if she tried to talk to him, to ask him about the woods or the ravens. He stared at her as if he didn’t really know what words meant.

One day her mother was trying to clean up around them, and she kept darting little looks towards her son. Sharp, hard little looks. At last she stopped and turned on him. “Why don’t you go out?” she said.

Davey stopped staring into space and stared at her instead.

Their mother straightened. She licked her lips. When she spoke again her tone was different: sweeter. “Why don’t you take your sister for a walk?” she asked.

Mia heard this, and thought: I’m the eldest. But she didn’t say anything.

Her mother said, “Why don’t you take her to the woods?” and Mia knew then how much their mother wanted them to go because she never told them to go to the woods, it was somewhere they weren’t supposed to be.

Her brother turned his head and looked at her. “Do you want to come to the woods, Miranda?” he said.

She looked at him and saw that he hadn’t said that to be funny or mean. He hadn’t meant it in any way at all, he’d just said it, and they were only words, things that didn’t seem to mean anything to him.

Mia , she mouthed. She was Mia. Even Little Davey had always called her Mia. But she didn’t say it out loud.

He got up and put on his coat and so did she. When he went out of the front door she followed him. She didn’t try to talk; knew it would be easier that way. Instead she walked at his heels until they reached the woods. The raven wasn’t there but Davey stopped and stared for a moment, at something only he could see.

“What is it?” asked Mia, and he just started walking again and so did she.

They went into the woods and Mia wasn’t afraid, not really. She had learned there were other things to be afraid of; things that came into your home and slept in the room next to yours; things you weren’t really sure were the people you had known or the ones you had loved, in spite of yourself, all the time you were wishing they were something else.

She followed Davey until they reached the swing. He walked over to it, leaned out until he grasped the rope with his fingers. He didn’t jump for it, though, or do anything else. He just stood there with it clasped in his hand, looking down into the drop.

“You died,” said Mia.

When he turned, she wasn’t sure that he had heard. She saw his eyes, though, and they were dark, and small, and bright. She couldn’t look away from them. Then Davey smiled, and although it was something Mia had wished for, she suddenly knew it wasn’t a thing she wanted to see. It wasn’t Davey’s smile. It wasn’t a good smile.

Davey opened his mouth and he spoke to her in the voice she’d known was inside him. His voice was the sound a raven made and she knew then that the birds hadn’t been good, after all; that they hadn’t meant well. They had taken her brother just as she had dreamed, and it was the birds which brought him back: except, when they did, they left a part of him behind them, in whatever dark place they had been.

Mia shuddered. She felt stinging at her eyes. She closed them and felt the tears come, no use now. So many times she had wished, and she wished again now, but she knew it wasn’t any use. The magic had gone. It had gone with Davey, and he had known that. He had looked at her and called her by her name.

So many times she had wanted her brother to be something else, some strange and magical thing. Now she clenched her fists, still feeling Davey’s stare, and wished harder than anything to have her brother back. To have Little Davey come home, just the same as he had always been.

Okay, this on? Yep, red light, guess I’m good to go. I carry this thing around in case I get any song ideas, never used more than the first few minutes of a tape, so this’ll be a first. What I’m gonna do now is tell how I came to get the last verse of “Mother Come Quickly,” and also what really became of Pete Waitkus. Then I’m gonna tuck this away in my safe-deposit box, and maybe someday everybody’ll know the real story. So here goes.

Now you oughta know this anyway, but “Mother Come Quickly” is one of the best-known songs in popular music, a sure-fire classic. It’s traditional, and because of that everybody and his brother’s recorded it. It was around as a folk song for a good many years before it was really a hit, which was when Peter, Paul, and Mary put it on their first album. It was that year’s “Tom Dooley.” Joan Baez did it on one of her first records, Bob Dylan used just the tune and put his own lyrics to it. There’s even been rock versions of it. Kurt Cobain did it on that “Unplugged” show, lotsa others. And country and bluegrass, hell yes. Doesn’t matter it’s really a woman’s song, a lot of guys sung it — Johnny Cash, George Jones, even ole Hank did it live, but he never recorded it. Became a bluegrass standard after Bill Monroe brought it out on Decca in the fifties. The Stanleys, Jim and Jesse, hell, even I did it back when I was doing straight country.

Course, I’m bluegrass now — then and now, since I started out as one of Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Boys, playing rhythm guitar and singing lead for two months way back in the early seventies till Bill realized that good as my singing was I wasn’t never gonna get that Lester Flatt lick, that bum-bumma-dooba-dooba-do that had become such a part of his sound. I could play it medium tempo, but real fast I hit it maybe two times out of five, and the other three it sounded like chickens dancing on the frets. He let me go, but not before one of them Nashville smoothies seen me and thought I had the voice and looks to make the big time.

He was right. In a few years I was just holding the damn guitar, letting the backup pickers play the tricky licks. Yeah, I had a shitload of songs on the charts back then — and I did “Mother Come Quickly” on my album, Billy Lincoln Sings Songs from the Home Place . That was around 1983, when I was starting to slip. Record sales were down, they weren’t asking me on the Grand Ole Opry anymore, concerts weren’t selling, and Columbia dropped me.

So I went back to bluegrass. Any port in a storm, and things had gotten pretty damn stormy by then. I’d spent a lot more than I’d saved, and what I had saved I’d put into dumbass investments. I played guitar with Doyle Lawson for a time, doing the festival and church circuit, and finally started my own group, Billy Lincoln and the Blue Mountaineers. We did okay, got a contract with Rounder, where a lot of the best bluegrass acts were, and sold enough CDs to hang on.