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

"Did you hear me and your mother talking the other morning?"

"No sir."

His eyes smiled but his lips did not. "Well, if you had been listening, you'd have heard me telling her that I don't know what did that to Maggie. Could be a wolf or some kind of nasty cat but whatever it was, it's dangerous. I can't find any tracks or any other sign, so who knows where the dog found that trouble. Some other fathers and I are going to look around again tomorrow, but I'm telling you Jacob, you stay close to home, you understand?"

"Yes sir," I said.

The humor in his eyes had completely disappeared.

Oswego was never a big town, not even in its heyday when the lumber industry was booming. The population had been halved after the First World War and dropped by another half during the Depression. Oswego wasn't unique. The same thing was happening all over the country, but us kids didn't know we were poor and the adults never talked about times being hard. It's amazing what you don't think about until you're older.

Telling a nine-year-old boy to stay close to home in a small town defines impossibility. To this day, I can't honestly say whether Whitey and I deliberately went looking for trouble or whether it somehow found us. We went for our usual Friday after school ramble with Maggie, and we roamed a little further than usual-both of us noticing that we'd wandered more than we should have, both of us understanding that we ought to turn back, but neither of us saying a word. Nine-year-old boys can communicate in such ways.

We were on the winding path near the woods when Maggie stopped and raised her nose.

"What is it, girl?" Whitey said as she growled at the air. She stared across a grass field that separated us from Pochman's Pond. Maggie barked once, then again, then whimpered and looked at Whitey with frightened eyes.

"What do you think it is?" I asked.

In my mind, I can still see Whitey's profile against the steel-gray sky as he stared across the field. The trees on the horizon had lost their leaves and looked like black, spiny fingers reaching for the sky. Whitey's face was set in a frown, his forehead wrinkled beneath his crew cut. His right eye was bruised and his cheek below it shiny, his lip slightly split at the corner. Whitey had told me he'd been hit by a baseball playing catch with his dad and I believed him, or told myself I did. We never talked about Whitey's dad.

Whitey took a step into the long grass. Maggie barked and ran a few yards in the opposite direction. She barked again and then took off towards home.

"Come on," Whitey said, taking a step forward. "She knows the way back."

I swallowed and followed him. The yellow grass rolled like waves in wind. We didn't have to go very far, only a few dozen yards of high stepping through the tall grass before we found it.

It was a dead deer, but unlike any carcass we'd ever seen. Hunting season hadn't opened yet but it wasn't uncommon to find deer parts in a field. Still, we knew no hunter was responsible for what we saw.

The deer had been ripped from the throat down and its insides had been strung out in a wide, rusty red circle around the body. Its skin had puncture wounds as though it had been jabbed with a serrated knife. Three of its legs had been broken, the bones jutting from the flesh like pieces of splintered wood, and the fourth leg had been ripped off completely. Strings of intestine were draped from its antlers, hanging across its face as it stared into the sky with black, vacant eyes. Both the carcass and the circle of matted grass were smeared with greasy, charcoal-black streaks.

We stood gaping at the mutilated carcass as our eyes flitted from detail to gruesome detail. Then the wind dropped and that familiar rotting smell overwhelmed us. I nearly threw up right there but I made it back to the path before I puked up my lunch. I heard Whitey retching next to me.

We ran all the way back to town.

When we reached the McFarlands' tumbledown shack, Whitey's dad was waiting for us, swaying in the yard. "Where the hell you been? Your goddamn dog been wanderin' all over the place," he slurred.

"Dad," Whitey said and tried to catch his breath. "We saw something. Out in the field. A dead deer."

"Get home," he said to me without sparing a look. He grabbed Whitey's jacket collar with one hand and tugged off his belt with the other. "The dog's been howlin', gettin' on people's property. Makes me look bad."

Whitey looked at me with the same terrified expression Maggie had when she caught a whiff of the deer. I looked back, helpless.

Whitey's dad jerked his son towards the house. He fixed a hard, glassy gaze on me and said a single word: "Get." It was every inch a threat as a command.

I sprinted home, my lungs burning from swallowing the chill air and choking on my tears.

My dad's mouth drew into that thin, straight line when I told him what happened. I didn't know what bothered him more, the dead deer or Mr. McFarland. He knew Whitey's dad from when they both worked at the mill. Once I asked my dad what was wrong with Mr. McFarland, and he told me that Whitey's mother had run off with some traveling snake oil salesman and his father had been living in a bottle ever since. The mill was always looking for excuses to trim payroll and it wasn't long before they gave Mr. McFarland his walking papers. Then things got worse.

That's no excuse and I still hate him for how he treated Whitey, but that doesn't make what happened next any easier to talk about.

That next morning, my dad formed a posse armed with rifles, hatchets, hoes and they headed out towards the woods. They trudged back at dusk, weapons slung over their shoulders, heads bowed. I remember my mother waiting on the porch working her hands and my dad giving her a slow, apologetic shake of the head when he got home.

Weeks passed, and the temperature plummeted, too cold to even snow. Eventually, the fervor died down and parents slowly loosed the reins on their children. The escorts to and from the schoolhouse ended, but not before my parents sat me down at the kitchen table and told me, in no uncertain terms, that I was to stay within earshot of home at all times. Under no circumstances was I to wander outside of town. Not in the woods, not down by the stream, and nowhere near the pond. My dad shook one calloused palm and said he'd give me the hiding of my life if I disobeyed and, even though he'd never as much as spanked me, I believed him. I'd wager the same conversation transpired in every kitchen in Oswego.

Yet sometimes trouble comes out of nothing. We weren't doing anything wrong, just playing baseball with Ira, Benny, and Whitey in his yard like always. We had a diamond worn into the grass and Whitey's dad didn't care if we tore up the yard sliding into the bases. He was never around anyway to yell if the ball hit the house and we could be as loud as we liked, so we played there most often.

Ira Schmidt was two years older than Whitey and me and could really knock the cover off the ball. He used to say he could hit it even further in the cold air. At his turn at bat, he cracked the ball into the weeds behind Whitey's house where they grew thick and deep before tapering off at the edge of the forest. We spread out looking for it but it was Whitey who made the big find, and I don't mean the baseball. I wish to God it had been me or one of the other boys, but it was Whitey.

I was parting handfuls of frozen grass when I heard Whitey say in a flat voice, "A boot." He lifted a brown workman's boot from the grass. I glanced over and went back to searching when I heard his strangled gasp. I looked up and saw that the boot still had a foot in it; it terminated at the ankle in a maroon stump with a circle of white bone, sheared cleanly like one of the fancy steaks in the butcher's shop.