Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

“My wife’s family cottage,” he answered. “It’s somewhere around Calcutta.”

“Where?”

“I’m not sure,” Lyle admitted. “I thought I might recognize something once I drove out here.”

“Don’t worry, sweetie. I’ll get you there. What happened to your ear?”

He glanced over at her. Now that her hair was smoothed back from her face, he saw that she was a good deal younger than he’d assumed, her skin clear and pale in the savage dying light.

“It’s a long story.”

“We got time,” she said.

And so he told it, told it all as they drove into the setting sun. He didn’t particularly want to, but he didn’t particularly not want to, either. The words flowed the way water pours out of a jug. She made conciliatory noises as he spoke, but also occasional suggestions—right, left, turn here, watch this curve coming up—and they wended their way further from the highway, deeper into the darkness that separated Calcutta and whatever came after Calcutta. Every time she made a navigational suggestion, she reached over and brushed the back of his hand with her fingertips. And each time, Lyle noticed something new: the softness of her fingers, the smoothness of her skin, her delicate manicure. When they’d been in the bright field together, wrestling with the ligature around her neck, her hands had felt hard, ground with dirt, the nails chewed to the quick. Now they reminded him of the slender satin gloves you saw in old movies. The image gave him an electric, erotic thrill, embarrassing and enthralling.

When he finished his story, Leighanne said, “So we’re going to visit your wife and the Good Cop?”

“Yeah.” Lyle sighed. He didn’t know why he was so certain the two were still together, let alone in the cabin near Calcutta—nor how Leighanne might know this—but it was clearly true.

“Why?”

Lyle didn’t know. But as he’d told the story, the pain in his face and ear had steadily subsided. He’d begun to feel lighter, almost giddy.

“To kill them?” the girl asked. Had she sounded this young before? He wondered. This fresh? He glanced over, and she was much younger than he’d thought. Not teenager young, but close. Thrillingly so.

“No,” he said, surprised it was true, and somehow disappointed.

“You know—Oh, slow down, left up here.” Lyle obeyed. “There you go. You know, lots of times folks think of killing as a form of taking away. And they don’t like to think of themselves as thieves. Thieves are low things. But maybe we’ve got something to share with your wife and the Good Cop. Maybe there’s some things about the world we can show them, together. Killing them right off would be a waste.”

Yes , Lyle thought. He suddenly had a lot to share. What had been sludgy and cool and dim in him for so long was now kindling bright and liquid and joyous.

“Later on, killing them might prove a mercy. Which maybe they’ll deserve.” She paused, smiling in the dark. “Or maybe not.”

Lyle’d never had an affair, but he’d worked in the public defender’s office long enough. He understood an essentially dark human tendency, not for pleasure so much as for intensity: grappling and pulling hair, a kiss that scrapes teeth, a hard pinch, a scratch, a twisted nipple, a bitten earlobe.

And then there was real intensity: a scream in a locked trunk, a wire coat hanger looped around an elbow or ankle—or somewhere more private—and twisted tighter and tighter with a pair of pliers.

Lyle smiled. He felt Leighanne next to him, a hot summer musk wafting off of her as she leaned close, setting one smooth hand on his hand, and the other on his thin slacks.

“Almost there,” she said.

He thought of blood swelling beneath the skin as wire wound tight, the ecstasy of release when that skin is finally pricked with a blade. The long scream, screaming the throat raw, then screaming some more, until the voice cracks and disintegrates like a car window in a collision.

Lyle sighed. “I know what you’re doing,” he said, “but you can’t get in my head, because I don’t have what Earl said, not even a glimmer. I really, truly, and honestly do not want to hurt my wife, or even that Good Cop.”

Leighanne looked at Lyle prettily, and did not respond.

Lyle sighed again, then added, “But I sure as hell want to want to hurt them.”

Now she smiled. “That, my buddy boy, we can work with.”

And then, just for a moment, her glamor slipped.

Lyle gasped in shock, and the breath he drew in was choked with her mildewed stink. Leighanne was not a withered crone, nor something young and petite. She was lean and tall and mottled and pale. She hunched to fit in the small car. She was naked, bristle-haired like a boar, her breasts numerous and pendulous as a dog’s that’s whelped countless pups. Her noseless face was many-eyed as a spider, lipless and tooth-full as something from the bottom of the sea.

But grinning.

The witch was awful —in that she filled him with awe—and wonderful —in that she was full of terrible wonders, an ambulatory torture chamber, a lightless and all-swallowing heat.

Lyle threw his arm wildly, reflexively recoiling from Leighanne’s touch. He needed to be much farther from her than the cramped confines of the Prius allowed. He jerked the wheel toward the edge of the road.

This time the soft shoulder got the best of him. The Prius dug in, slewing out to the left. The wheels skidded, screaming against the crumbling blacktop. One side bit in, the other began to lift. The car rose, then came down with a tumbling crunch.

Darkness.

For a long time. Or a little.

When Lyle finally awoke to himself, he was walking toward a small house standing alone in the dark fields. His back was to the road. There was a high metallic tang to the air. Lyle wondered if the car’s big hybrid battery had cracked. He tried to remember what the warning sticker inside the doorframe said. Something about a fire hazard, he thought, but he couldn’t be sure.

Then he smelled burning plastic and rubber, and supposed it didn’t really matter one way or another.

The gas tank burst with a phooooom!

A gout of hot, noxious air washed across his back. Leighanne laughed. Not a crone’s cackle, but a teen’s burst of champagne glee. She walked beside him, and his heart was light. She was everything—the pretty young thing, the old crone, the stooped awful wonder. He felt good and purposeful walking next to her, alive and joyful.

“Here.” She handed him something, a complex arrangement of leather straps and buckles, a brass bar. It was whatever had been lashing her hands to her waist as she hanged, back in the field. He’d never held a bridle before, but had seen them in cowboy movies and museum displays.

“Put it on,” she said.

He did so willingly, placing the brass bit between his teeth. It dug into the corners of his mouth, pulling back his cheeks, splitting his lip where the bullet had grazed him. He tightened the buckles, then tossed the reins over his shoulder. Leighanne grabbed hold of these, planted one foot on his hip, and swung up onto his shoulders. He wasn’t a large man and had never been strong. He should have buckled under her weight. But the weight felt good and solid. He felt good and solid, strong, his muscles flexing and releasing under his skin, beautiful in their smooth inexorability.

He thought about the kitschy poem hanging next to the mirror in his guest bathroom. The last verse hung in his mind:

My precious child, I would never leave you;