Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

“A bunch of weird women with very long hair who lived in an old house in the wood, Cherie. That’s all I know.”

“Hippy types?”

“Well, I had the idea they were part of a cult at first.”

“Are you saying Eddie got involved with them or something? You can tell me, I don’t mind; I’m used to him. What you don’t realise about your brother is that he knows he’s got a soul, so he’s always interested in anything that he thinks shows him the meaning of life.”

Which of the sisters was sitting astride my brother’s chest was difficult to see at first, but after some long minutes standing there at the edge of the clearing, I saw that it was Carboh. She was sitting astride his body with her head close to his face, and her hair, all the long length of it was wound, cocoon-tight around his neck and upper chest. I could see my brother’s face, pale and slack. Below Carboh, and also sitting on his body, facing in the opposite direction, was Domescia, and she had her hair wound tightly around his middle section. I could see the top of his bare thighs. Domescia kept yanking her head up in little jerking motions, although there were no sounds. Sissiol was attached to one of his legs, her hair wound down the whole length of it, and she was lying face up with her head near his bare feet. Likewise, one of the others was attached to his left leg, and at his two arms, women had wound their hair round and round him. The seventh of the sisters was rocking backwards and forwards a few feet away in the arms of the hideous mother. Beyond my terror and revulsion, I registered that this seventh was not yet ready to feast.

Eddie looked like a gigantic brown cocoon, and I knew he was dead by the striking whiteness of his feet and face. “Let’s just stick on this path and find the ash,” he’d said on the first day we ventured into the wood proper, and I’d said, “No, come on, let’s just take a quick look down there. Where’s the harm?”

It was late in the day when Lyle Morimoto saw the hanged woman and almost crashed his Prius.

He was somewhere between Calcutta, Ohio, and whatever the hell came after Calcutta. For hours he’d been sipping warm Gatorade and cruising the crumbling two-lane blacktop that sliced up the scrubby farmland separating Calcutta, Cairo, Congo, Lebanon, East Liverpool, East Palestine—in southern Ohio, apparently, you could circle the globe without ever crossing the state line.

He understood that he was not thinking clearly, but that seemed okay, since it also meant not thinking about his ear, or his wife, or Detective Jason Good, or the gun in the pocket of his suit jacket.

Lyle’s day had begun in court. He’d had every reason to assume it would end there, as would the next day, and possibly the day after that. But midway through jury selection, his client had pled guilty to the charge of fifth-degree arson, despite the fact that she’d demonstrably not set the fire. Before being led away, she had leaned in close to Lyle’s ear and whispered that she hadn’t torched that trash can, but had murdered two girls that no one knew about, so she figured this “evened things up.” She’d looked enormously relieved, almost radiant.

As the court officer led the defendant back to holding, Lyle had struggled to feel something about this—frustration at the System, disgust with humanity, pleasure at escaping the dingy hearing room, hope that an unexpectedly free morning might allow him to make a dent in the mountain of paperwork surrounding his desk, even just relief that he wouldn’t have to eat lunch out of the vending machines again.

At the very least, he should say something—if not to the judge or court officer, at least to his client, who would spend no more than a single year in prison, then walk out having absolved herself of double murder.

But Lyle felt nothing in particular, and so did nothing in particular.

Lyle had only been planning to stop at his house long enough to change into chinos and microwave some noodles. But when he opened his bedroom door he froze, wondering if they’d been robbed. He and Olivia had left the room pin neat that morning: tidy bed buried under a small mountain of varicolored throw pillows, curtains drawn back to let in the morning sun, closet and bathroom doors closed, not a dust mote in the bright air. The room he saw before him was a mess: dim, curtains drawn, bathroom door ajar, mountain of pillows littering the floor, bed in disarray.

But what half-witted burglar left a $3,000 flat-screen TV in the living room in favor of trashing the bedroom?

Then the sheets burst with sudden movement. Olivia scrabbled to cover herself, cowering against the bedside table and lamp. The man with her leapt in the opposite direction, coming to rest as far as he could from the bed, arms extended, palms out.

Lyle riffled through the range of emotions he thought he should feel—rage, wrath, indignation, embarrassment, sorrow—but none of them were there. He didn’t even feel particularly surprised. Not that he’d suspected—he’d suspected nothing—but just that this sort of monumental, senseless slap in the face seemed, in its randomness, entirely predictable. If working in the justice system had convinced him of anything, it was that while there was indeed a System, there was no Justice.

The naked guy who’d just leapt out of Lyle’s bed was remarkably good-looking. Pale, yes, but well-muscled through the arms and legs, with Men’s Health abs and pecs, and that little muscular pelvic V-thing all the guys had in that Magic Mike movie Olivia loved. But he had a kind of weird dick. Nothing earth-shattering, just more emphatically curved than Lyle would have thought comfortable. It reminded him of the big Koegel’s hot-dog billboard he passed every day heading into the city, which showed an enormous, bun-less, upthrusting wiener proudly surmounted by the words SERVE THE CURVE .

Out in the kitchen the microwave beeped; his noodles were ready.

“Hey there,” the naked man panted, and Lyle realized he knew him: this was a detective with the local PD, Jason something.

“Jason Good?” Lyle asked, recalling that, the one time they’d met, he’d made some crack about being glad to finally meet that “Good Cop” he was always hearing about. The detective had laughed genuinely at the joke. He’d seemed like a legitimately good guy.

“Yeah,” the Good Cop said, open hands still outthrust. “We met one time, at a fundraising thing. Listen, I know this looks—”

Then the world exploded, a sound so loud that it was more light and heat than noise.

Then darkness.

Lyle’s hearing cleared quickly but his head continued to ring like a struck bell. He found himself on the floor, his face numb, as though he’d gotten a dose of Novocain. He felt no urge to move or speak or continue living.

“—SHOT HIM IN THE HEAD, Olivia!” Jason Good cried. “Whyd’ya do that, Olivia?”

“I don’t know!” Lyle’s wife shrieked back.

Bleeding to death in an awkward jumble of decorative pillows, Lyle thought of a number: 4.5 . He’d read it on a poster in his doctor’s waiting room: You’re 4.5 times more likely to be shot if you keep a gun in the home. He had scoffed at that number once. Shame on him.

The gun had been in the bedside table. He’d put it there himself. The district attorney had advised getting something for “home protection” immediately after Lyle joined the public defenders’ office. “You’ll be in court,” she snuffled, sounding like a cartoon bulldog. “People end up behind bars—despite your best efforts. People are unhappy. People have family. Doesn’t matter that you were technically on their side. If these people were good at thinking things through, you never would have met them to begin with.”