Каарон Уоррен - The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2018 Edition

One that was making it slobber all the way down to the ground.

It had gone to that dug-up hole first, I think. For the new smells. Maybe that was part of the route it took into the pasture every day, when it jumped the fence, went on patrol, or hunting, or whatever it did.

But now here was me. I didn’t even make sense. At first.

When I did, the dog’s haunches bunched and dirt shot up behind it and its mouth opened to tell me what all it was going to do to me.

I squeaked a sound of pure fear, twisted around, and kicked through the skirt, into the darkness under the house, and only just managed to guide the tetherball pole out at the last instant, so the flap could shut the dog out.

It clawed at the base of the skirt and barked and snarled enough that the rest of the dogs finally came over the fence for whatever this was.

It was me.

I was crying and snuffling and hugging myself, having to keep my head low so it wouldn’t collect all the webs spun under the floor of the living room—which, if this was the underside of the living room, then what did that make it, right?

I wouldn’t say it out loud, even in my head.

I’d seen coyotes go after a rabbit, when they didn’t have anything better to kill. They don’t just dig a bit and give up, they excavate until they find a beating heart.

I was that rabbit, now.

The neighbor dogs, they’d been waiting for this ever since we moved in. The only thing that was saving me was that dogs only know to push, not to pull, and the one flap of the skirt that was loose, it overlapped a solid flap, so it would only push in for a car bumper someday.

Not that the dogs weren’t trying.

That just scraped my nerves raw, though, which isn’t permanent damage. What would be more permanent was when the other three caught onto what the yellowy-white one was already doing: reaching down with one big paddle of a paw, to dig under.

As big as these dogs were, and as sharp as the bottom of the skirt would be, they were going to have to really tunnel. But I trusted that they hated me enough to do just that. The prize would be worth the work.

I swallowed and the sound was loud in my ears.

My eyes had adjusted some now. Enough that the sunlight edging in through the cracks and seams in the skirt showed shapes, anyway.

I’d imagined it would smell like an animal den in here, that it would be moist and sticky.

It was just dry and dead.

I beat the side of my fist on the bottom of the living room, even though I’d seen my mom leave already. Moms are capable of a lot, I knew. I didn’t put it past her to hear me needing help somehow and shrike across the thirteen miles from her work, tear into this pack with her bare hands.

What I got back, instead of an answering knock or a footstep, was a faceful of fine dust I was too slow to close my eyes against.

And then something was on my hand, something with feet. I panicked back into a strut or a pipe, shaking my whole arm like it was on fire, and a moth batted into my face. I registered what it was right away but still flinched back all the same, into that same strut or pipe or whatever, nearly knocking myself senseless.

This reinvigorated the dogs.

I didn’t have to act like a hurt rabbit for them anymore. It wasn’t an act anymore, I mean.

Now each time the yellowy-white paw stabbed down under the skirt for more dirt, it was like it was reaching down out of the sun.

Every few scoops, the paw would be replaced by a nose, breathing my fear in.

I pushed as far away as possible. I wasn’t exactly thinking rationally. All I knew, I guess, it’s that the more distance between me and them, the longer it might take them to find me.

If you can delay pain, you delay it, don’t you? Even when it’s inevitable. Especially when there’s teeth involved.

The farthest I could get was right under Mom’s bedroom.

The whole way there, it was just dirt and the old dead weeds and grass that must have been live weeds and grass when this house got delivered here. They’d turned into mummies of themselves, mummies that crumbled into less than dust when I touched them. Twice I hit my head on something sharp under the house, and when I started ducking, then I hit my shoulder and back on it three more times, something up there tearing my shirt and cutting me, it felt like.

I beat on the floor again, just to say I had, I guess, that I’d tried everything I could, and I pushed back into the farthest corner of the skirt. My idea was that I could push my way out—from this side, the overlap would help me—make some kind of suicidal dash for the pump house roof, which I would magically fly up onto. Fear would give me wings, I don’t know.

I didn’t get all the way to the crack of light in the skirt, though.

Instead, I planted my hand into… a nest?

It was tacky and scratchy both at once, like whatever was living there had pulled all the broken things under the trailer under it, and then slobbered all over them until the trash went soft, could get shaped.

Only—not a nest, no. I looked with hands, traced out the contours.

A nest is open at the top.

This was more like a burst-open chrysalis.

One with a pocket deep down big enough for three of me.

My first thought was bobcats, since that was supposedly why the neighbor had all these dogs—bobcats had used to steal his grandfather’s chickens, so now it was a forever war—except this didn’t smell remotely feline. It didn’t smell like anything, really. And animals always have a scent, don’t they? Even the hunter animals, the reason they face into the wind, it’s that they don’t want their scent to get ahead of them, give them away.

Not this hunter.

It could come from any direction.

“Even the front door,” I heard myself say.

Dad?

I didn’t say it this time, didn’t know if I wanted it to be real, didn’t know if what started there could gestate or incubate or pupate into the kind of silhouette I’d felt crossing behind me in the living room. That I’d seen crossing the kitchen.

But you have to come from something, don’t you?

I told myself yes, you had to.

Because—because a ghost, it’s basically useless, it’s just a vision, a phantasm. It doesn’t even make sense that it could interact with light, much less a floor or a person or clothes. Meaning it had to have some kind of organic beginning, right?

I was still nodding, figuring this out.

When you come back from the dead, you’re a spirit, you’re nothing, just some leftover intention, some unassociated memory. But then, then what if a cat’s sneaked into a dark space like this, right? What if that cat comes here to die, because it got slapped out on the road or hit by an owl or something, so it lays back in the corner to pant it out alone. Except, in that state, when it’s hurt like that, when this cat isn’t watching the way it usually does, something else can creep in. Something dead.

It’s the injury that opens the door, I knew. The corruption.

But a cat isn’t a person.

Now that cat that’s not dying, is just panting, it has to wait for something else to crawl in, and then something else, and a third and fourth and finally some fiftieth thing. Just one worm at a time. You can build a self like that, if you compact it all together. If you remember how you used to be.

And if someone up in the living part of the house, if they remembered you too.

Dad was back because he loved us, yes. But it was also because I believed in him.

“ Dad! ” I said then, beating again on the floor of the house with the flat of my hands.

My face was muddy, I know, from the dust sifting down onto my tears and snot.

There was more daylight where the dogs were digging now. Almost enough daylight.