Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

Eddie was on the veranda reading the local paper when I arrived home. The air had darkened and the first bull frogs were beginning their rasping croaks. I felt utterly forlorn and deeply troubled; it was as if I was watching my brother teetering on the edge of a cliff. I’d considered contacting Cherie myself and asking her over to spend some time with us, but she’d have wanted to talk to Eddie, and I could see only confusion and anger as a consequence.

Eddie patted the seat beside him and I went to sit with him gladly and in the hope he’d changed his mind about Carboh. “Anything in the papers?” I asked.

“No. There never is. I was just whiling away some time, waiting for you to come back. Wondering where you’d gone, actually. This business with the house isn’t really working out too well is it? We’ve got three rooms finished, that’s all, and those windows in Mum and Dad’s room will take a fair bit of work, won’t they?”

“Let’s pack up and leave, Eddie. We can hire some painters to do the work for us, it’d be worth the money and we’ve got to pay the woodworm people anyway. I say let’s skedaddle and get back home.”

“So where did you go, Ross?”

“To Mr. Ratchetson’s.” I paused, but saw immediately how I could use the moment. “He told me about the time Mum cut her hair off.”

“Oh, wow! I never thought of asking him that.”

“Yes, well it’s a pretty terrible story and you should know that it directly involves the women that you’re intending to hang out with.”

Eddie shook his head. “That was, what? Thirty odd years ago, so you’re talking rubbish, Ross.”

For a moment, I was floored. “Well it was the same family, at any rate,” I said.

“Carboh and the others can’t be responsible for things that went on in the past. You’re being illogical and really mean to them.”

“Mean,” I repeated. “Look, I’m worried about you, Eddie. You’re behaving as if nothing you’ve ever known before matters now.”

“You’ve got it in one. That’s exactly how I do feel.”

“So when’s the wedding?”

Eddie laughed and slapped his hand down hard on my knee. “You won’t let up on that one will you?” he asked.

“The winding, then?”

“Windings happen at dawn, and I don’t think Mother has decided the day yet. Carboh will let me know.”

“Will there be a party afterwards?”

“The winding itself is the big celebration, they tell me. But I’ve already said, Ross, it’s a private affair, and you’re not invited.”

“So, supposing I get in some drinks and a bit of food, sandwiches or something, pizza slices, and you both come back here afterwards?”

“Yeah. Maybe. But where goes one, goes all.”

“Huh?”

“The sisters and Mother, you should invite them.”

I could not bear to turn my face and look at him, so I stood up and turned to go inside. “Of course,” I answered over my shoulder, “of course.”

I believe that it was only by chance that I awoke as the sun came up on the morning of my brother’s winding. He was using Mum and Dad’s old room while he prepared to paint his own, and the squeak of that door had never been dealt with. I think I heard it in my sleep and woke up on the instant. I heard the soft click of the front door and went to the window. Sure enough, Eddie was out there heading towards the wood. I knew I could easily lose him if I didn’t move swiftly and by the time I was also on the path, he’d just disappeared into the first line of trees. I sprinted. My shoelace was untied and whipping itself around my bare ankle.

Once I was in the wood proper, I stood for a moment to catch my breath and listen out for sounds. There was nothing but the whispering of wind through leaf. I stuck to the main path for a good while, hurrying, then slowing down, then hurrying again. My heart felt wretched and I knew I was badly frightened, yet just as it was when we first encountered Domescia and Carboh, I couldn’t describe the nature my terror or explain the reason for it.

I made my way towards the plaited path, supposing that I might be able to locate them in the surrounding area, as surely, if they were having a version of a wedding no matter how peculiar, there’d be noise, and particularly if the activity was as foul as the old man had said. I stopped and started many times, wanting so badly to call out to my brother, but not daring to. I could hear nothing, no birds even, and it was only the sight of some broken stems that sent me off down a meandering track to the left of the main pathway. I blundered along it, suddenly convinced it was the right way, and sure enough, I came to a wide circular opening in the forest with few trees, and there they all were. When I try to tell Cherie this… when I try to describe it to her, she starts her uncontrollable sobbing, and yet, she is so fierce to know about it that she never gives up making me describe it. She often says, “you say Eddie had no clothes on, Ross. Are you sure?”

“I could see his legs sticking out under that mess.”

Fact is, after I’d both seen and understood it, I retreated to Mum and Dad’s house and holed up there for many days, and it was only when Cherie arrived noisily by car, that I tried to connect again with the outside world. I came out to the veranda to meet her.

“Hey, Ross! How’s it going?” she asked. She had on those shoes poised on a mountain of cork that some women are drawn too, and she was trying to see where best to put her feet as she made her way towards me. “I got this idea you might like someone to cook for you while you’re doing up the house, I mean where’s the harm? So I came over,” she said, just as she read something on my face that alarmed her.

“Where is he?” she asked.

I shook my head. “You know Eddie. He’s gone off, Cherie. He suddenly took it into his head he wanted to go travelling. He’s gone.”

“You’re kidding me,” she said. “The fucker.”

“Yes. In any case, I’m not sticking around either.”

“Why do you look like that, Ross?”

“Like what?”

“Like the whole world’s gone to shit.”

“Do I?”

“I think you know you do. Something’s happened, and if you try and bullshit me and say it hasn’t, I’m going to shoot you, right there on that veranda.”

However wrong it was of me to involve someone as child-like and innocent as Cherie, I couldn’t help myself; I didn’t want to carry what I’d seen around with me by myself any longer, and so I think I was brutal in the way I handled her.

I told her as much as I knew before saying anything important, before describing what I actually saw. I thought I could limber up to it, if in the end I had to tell her, and it would be easier that way… and I cannot say at what point I did begin explaining what happened to my brother in that clearing—at least what I could see of it.

“He’d been really restless and snappy before he left Holesville Nine,” Cherie declared. “He was worried about working with you because he reckons you always look down on him.”

I shrugged. “You know yourself what he’s like, you’re forever bailing him out of one situation or another.”

“Yes, but I love him, so it’s my job.”

“Don’t you ever worry about yourself, Cherie, instead of about my brother?”

“You think I’m such a small person that I don’t have enough of what it takes to worry about the both of us?”

“No. Of course not; I didn’t mean that at all. I’m talking about the futility of it.”

“That’s just mean of you, Ross. Who exactly were the women you say you saw anyway?”