Ellen Datlow - The Best Horror of the Year – Volume One

Uncorking the rye, I take a swig, then replace the bottle and slide the razor case under my robe into my pajama shirt pocket. I turn toward the door, pull the robe as closed as it will go against the constant chill, and as an afterthought decide to take the rye along. In eight steps, I've crossed my lake-rot, one-room efficiency to the front door so I can peer through the fish-eye.

"Knock knock," I say.

The guy out there is big, maybe six-five, in a black coat that looks warmer than all the clothes I own combined, plus black gloves and a black Derby, even. Not a cop. Also not Sarah, unless she's grown a foot and a half and cut off all her hair. Sarah and Ezzie and their dark waterfalls of black curls…

"What?" the guy asks.

"Knock knock."

He stares at the door, and the Lake Superior wind whips up and blows snow on him. It's kind of great, really. A strapping young Oedipus befuddled by the Sphynx. Me. Finally, he takes the plunge.

"Who's there?"

"Exactly," I say.

Pause. Befuddlement.

"Exactly who?"

"Exactly my question."

Poor Oedipus. Big wind. I gulp rye from the bottle I have every intention of sharing with my caller, providing he convinces me to let him in.

"Please," he says, and he sounds nothing like a cop or a vengeful relative or anyone else I know anymore. I open the door. He hurries past me and stands shivering in the center of my all but empty room. Then he starts to unbutton his coat.

"I wouldn't suggest it," I tell him. "It's not much better in here."

Experimentally, he loosens another button. His head almost brushes the bulbous, bug-filled light-fixture that provides the efficiency's only illumination when I bother to switch it on, which isn't often. He removes his hat, and I can't help but smile at the hair, which is black and flat as road tar, with little flattened spikes jagging down his forehead. Little-kid-after-sledding hair.

He takes in my cot, the nightstand, the remaining 365 or so square feet of empty space.

"No… no books," he says, and I understand, abruptly. I consider showing him my iRead, which is the only thing I use now, just to see his face. There's nothing quite like confronting a Crawler with an iRead.

Except I can't quite bring myself to do it. Every time my heart beats, it bangs against the razor case in my pocket. Cold and plastic and empty of Ezzie.

"How'd you find me?" I ask.

"Will," he says. "I'm Will."

"That's nice."

"Can I sit?"

The question cracks me up. I gesture around the couchless, chairless, rugless, room. "Pick a wall."

Instead, he sits where he is, folding his long legs under him and his arms across his chest. Then he looks expectantly at me with wide, shiny eyes. I hold out the rye bottle.

"You're going to need it," I say.

"Not as much as you do," says Will, without guile.

I laugh again, glancing down at myself. Feather-robe with the feathers molting. Slippers with the toes poking through. I can't see my hair, of course, but I can feel it trying to flap off my head in a thousand different directions every time the draft pours through the windows.

I take a gulp, extend the bottle again, and he says, "Look. I'm sorry. I don't mean to intrude. I just… I have to know what you saw."

The laughter evaporates in my throat, and the rye on my tongue.

"Please. I have to know."

"I'm not sure I know what you mean," I lie. My hands start to shake, and I slip the one not holding the bottle into my pocket.

But he's all too eager to explain. "Oh. I see. You probably… I mean, since you don't… since I'm guessing you don't go to the depots anymore, you probably aren't keeping up with what's happening."

"Probably not." Ezzie's lens case beats, and I sit down opposite my guest.

"I just need to ask you one thing, okay? Then I'll leave you alone. At the moment your wife-"

"She wasn't my wife."

"Sorry. Lover-"

I start to squelch that, too, but how to explain? The simple truth was that we'd almost never been physical with each other, and even if we'd wanted to be, the overgrown bramble-hedge of scabs and scarring up both of Ezzie's thighs would have been a serious turn-off for me. I hate pain. The funny thing about Ezzie-it took years of our friendship for me to learn this-was that she did, too.

My visitor hesitates a moment longer. Then he tries again. "At the moment she… vanished… "

Again, he waits for me to chime in. I can't, and don't.

"I just need to know," says Will. "Did you see anyone?"

Careful, now. Careful. How is this supposed to work? How does the story they all tell themselves go? "How do you mean?" I say eventually. "Are you asking were there others with us in the Depository that night? There were." That was true enough, although they'd all been on the ground floor. None of them had even heard Ezzie scream.

My visitor stares at me, and I realize I've played too dumb. And this is no journalist, no private investigator. He's a fellow Crawler. Maybe even fellow ex-Crawler. And he's paid for the privilege, same as me.

Or, not quite the same.

"Sorry," I say. "Habit."

"So," says Will. "Did you?"

I blow out a long breath. My heart bangs, and my skin prickles in the cold. Ghost-touch of Ezzie's hair across my forearms. "The thing is, I don't really know when it happened. I mean, not the exact moment. Do you?"

Abruptly, Will begins to weep. He wipes the tears away once with the heel of one huge hand, but otherwise he remains motionless. His voice comes out hoarse, as though ice has lodged in it. "Now I do."

In spite of myself-in spite of everything-I lean forward, clutching the rye bottle. "How?"

He tells me.

"It was going to be our last one, at least for a long time. The St. Paul. Have you heard about that one? It's massive. It's in six abandoned warehouses right on the Mississippi. It stinks. Some local told us the river itself catches fire a couple times a year near there. And there aren't any windows, so the wind blows all the filth from the barges and all the snow and ice in the winter right into the depot. So the books are in awful shape, even by depot standards.

"But God, there are so many. So, so many.

"And they're not even textbooks, mostly. Not shit stuff. This one started just like Dallas. The last used shop owners in the Twin Cities all closed on the same date, in the middle of a snowstorm in the middle of January in the middle of the night. They brought everything they had left to the warehouses. I've heard Crawlers say that for that first year or so, there were even sections.

Local History. True Crime. Classics.

"Sections. Can you imagine?

"Anyway. This was our honeymoon. It was Bri's idea, even though I'm the Crawler. I don't even think she'd been to a depot before she met me. But she loved the adventure. Dressing up in black, going to those neighborhoods, getting dirty. Hiking between twenty-foot mounds of books with our flashlight beams on each other's faces and all that moldy paper whispering all over the place. Bri used to say it was like sneaking into an old-age home and finding all the residents sitting up in their beds gossiping all night.

"You know how it is, I guess. I don't know why I'm telling you.

"This was summer before last. Our St. Paul night. It was so humid. The river wasn't on fire, but it smelled oily. There's a park on the Minneapolis side where I guess people with no sense of smell can picnic and watch barges, but on the St. Paul side, there's just warehouses and landfills and five hundred million mosquitoes. That whining never leaves your ears. I swear, it's like the world has sprung a leak, and everything is just spilling out of it somewhere.

"For our honeymoon, we'd hit five depots in four cities in four days. St. Louis, Topeka, Lincoln, Wall. You been to Wall? South Dakota? It's right on the prairie, maybe a hundred yards from that famous drug store. It's just a big barn. There's almost nothing in it but maps and dried-out pens and thousands of copies of some old biology textbook about evolution. But we saw a buffalo. It strolled right past the doors while we were inside. One buffalo. Bri loved it."