Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

I stayed put and studied them for several minutes, before Eddie beckoned me over. My very guts seemed to have shrivelled and my breathing was shallow and raspy. Absurd thing to describe, I dare say, but I was acutely alert and conscious of a vague but persistent danger of some indefinable type. I can’t remember what Eddie said to them, the tone of his conversation, or its subject matter. I’d never come across women like them before and I quickly concluded that they were part of a cult. They had that same quiet and thoughtful look that religious women sometimes have. Most of the women I knew laughed too loudly and talked for too long about nothing of interest and in squeaky voices. They had fussy hairstyles and fidgety hands, and were always far too eager to agree with what I thought. These women had a curious melancholic air about them that wasn’t exactly a state of sadness, more as if they—and this is crazy—carried within them a sense of all the isolated places on the earth.

I would describe them as beautiful, the smaller one in particular, the one Eddie could not keep his eyes off, but I can say for certain that I didn’t like those faces. Several times I squeezed his elbow to try to get him to come away. He glanced at me once and frowned. His eyes were literally shining, and I shivered.

“We were just talking , Ross. You were standing right there!” Eddie said on our way home. “How could you not hear us?”

“I wasn’t paying attention to their words, but their hair…”

“Fantastic wasn’t it?”

“Freakish,” I replied. “Freakish.”

Eddie laughed. “Not your kind of women, eh?”

I moved my sack of wood onto my other shoulder and quickened my pace. We’d wasted a good part of the day and I was irritated and feeling shuddery. “Did you see their clothes?”

“A bit Amish, I agree, Ross. But so what?”

“Not the kind of women who’re asking to be touched,” I replied, “and you’re a bit keen on that, aren’t you?”

“Does that mean you’re not coming?”

“Huh?”

“They invited us to that old house tomorrow afternoon.”

Our argument when on into the night. I couldn’t persuade him not to go. He suggested we both take a day off as we’d been working on the house for a couple of weeks with no breaks, and were beginning to get fatigued. In the end, I decided I was going to walk around town and see if I could find anyone I knew from when we were young, and he could do the hell what he liked. I watched him go. I watched him walking fast down the wooded lane, and when he disappeared into the first of the trees, I picked up my coat and headed for town.

I spent the rest of the day arguing with myself. I sat in the park for a while and then followed our old route through the back streets. I didn’t meet anybody we used to know, although the place itself hadn’t greatly changed. It was only when I became aware that I was walking aimlessly and with very little interest in anything other than what was in my mind that I returned home.

A great jumble of contradictory thoughts battered my head. The most part of me was seized with horror made more terrifying because I had no idea how such a powerful reaction had come about. I could almost feel the reasoning voice I’d conjured up as Eddie walked away that morning fading into silence: so, my brother had met a couple of deadly strange women and found them to be charming, while I thought they were grotesque. Was it not just evidence of how differently we saw the world? Maybe… but what had they done to him in those moments that we stood with them that he should be so eager to return? I tried repeatedly to bring their faces to mind so I could search for expressions on them that would explain something… explain anything. All I remembered was a curious blandness of expression, while Eddie’s face was alight with interest and pleasure. The bloody fool.

I left the kitchen and went to stand on the veranda, dusk was falling and the local frogs were beginning to get noisy. Eddie had not returned. God damn it! I wasn’t going after him. What was the point? Soon it would be pitch black. Just as I was thinking that, I saw him.

He was wandering towards the house, taking his time—and he was whistling.

“For Christ’s sake, where the hell have you been?” I shouted at him, and I realised by the expression on his face, that I’d badly over-reacted.

“I told you. You know. You were invited too. What’s the matter with you?” he asked, almost whispering at me and with such as dismissive expression on his face, that I felt curiously ashamed of myself.

“Sorry,” I said, following him into the kitchen.

“I’ve eaten already. Have you?”

“No. I’m not hungry.”

“I ate with them.”

“What?”

“I said I ate with them.”

“Those women?”

“Don’t call them those women.”

“What did you eat?” I asked, moving around the table to get a better look at him.

He seemed startled all of a sudden, and he frowned. “Hey, guess what? I haven’t a clue, Ross; isn’t that strange? They are so… engaging, I don’t think I noticed the food.”

“You must be joking!”

He seemed tired, and before I could get anything much out of him, he edged towards the door. “I’m whacked, Ross. See you tomorrow,” he said, and closed the door extra quietly, and was gone.

I remember shaking my head in frustration about him for some few minutes after he’d left; he’d seemed so calm, almost luminous, as if he’d risen slightly above the normal dirtiness of human life. I made the decision not to talk to him about it the following day. We’d just get on, each with our separate work, and stop for short coffee breaks when the time seemed right. But I didn’t sleep that night, only roamed about in my thinking, ricocheting from one awful thought to another.

We were working on the living room the following morning and I had a lot of shabby-looking window frames to deal with in there. Eddie was priming the opposite wall. We hadn’t spoken at breakfast, but every time I glanced at his face, he seemed perfectly normal, as if somehow he’d come down to earth during the night. I well knew that if I brought up the subject of the women directly he’d take pleasure in thwarting me. Back in Holesville Nine he had a girlfriend. She was as different from the women in the wood as could be. Her clothes were ill-fitting and badly chosen and often garish, she walked with little tittering steps as if about to topple, in shoes that looked as though they’d been deliberately designed to harm the wearer. Yet, her face was childish and kind of sweet and I know she adored Eddie.

“Cherie doing okay?” I asked after some time.

“She’s good. She’s doing good. Yeah. Thanks.”

“She’ll be glad to see you back,” I suggested. “I was wondering if we should forget the upstairs. Sometimes people are keen to get hold of places they can do up themselves.”

“Not what you said when we first talked about it.”

“Yeah, but how long have we been here now, three weeks isn’t it?”

“Ross, I think we should do what we planned to do. What’ve you got to get back to in Holesville Nine?”

“Nothing in particular,” I agreed. I turned my head to look at him and was surprised to find that he was no longer priming the wall, but standing facing me with his arms folded and his face pale in the poor light. “Nothing,” I said again. “Hey! How about asking Cherie to come and visit us? She could cook for us; I’m tired of scrabbling about trying to make our meals.” Eddie stared at me with an expression so hostile, that for the first time in my life I felt afraid of my little brother. “It was just an idea , Eddie. I mean, she used to help out in Cygnet’s Café, didn’t she?”