Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

“Is this yours?” She showed him the tooth.

“No, miss.” He skinned his lips back. His loose tooth hung from his gum by a thread.

“Where did it come from, then?”

He blinked up at her, eyes clear and innocent. “Bitte , miss, I don’t know.”

Tall as he was, in that moment he seemed little more than an infant. His voice was quite lovely. The effect of a slight childish slur on those German vowels was adorable.

“Do you know where the key to the crypt is?”

“No, miss.”

“Have you been inside the crypt?”

“No, miss.”

He was just a child; children had no sense of time. Did he even know the difference between a month and a year? She’d gotten herself worked up over nothing. The steward and cook had taken a dislike to her, but it was her own fault. She should have taken care to make friends with them. But no matter. Bärchen would be back in a few days, and the summer would continue as planned.

Helen brought Mimi and Peter their dinner, barricaded them in the nursery, then helped herself to a bottle of claret from the steward’s pantry. She set it on the dining room table beside her dinner plate. No corkscrew, and she hadn’t found one while searching through the house for keys. The steward must have had hidden them. She hadn’t seen any cigarettes, either. She’d have to ration the ones in her cigarette case until Bärchen came home.

She called for the steward. When he didn’t come, she fetched the silver letter opener from the library and used it to pry the cork from the bottle. She lifted the bottle to her mouth like a drunk in a Montparnasse alleyway. The wine burned as it slipped down her parched throat.

Helen put the letter opener in her pocket and took her plate and the wine bottle out to the terrace. The air was fresh with pine. The first evening stars winked overhead between clouds stained with dusk. A hundred feet off the terrace, the floating log bobbed. Slow ripples licked the terrace steps.

She had almost drained the wine bottle when the log was joined by another. The breeze carried a whiff of salt. The two logs seemed to be moving toward her, eel-sinuous. Starlight glistened off their backs as they slipped through the water, dipping under and then breaking the surface in unison like a pair of long porpoises.

The bottle slipped from her hand and smashed on the terrace. Shards of glass flew into the lake.

The logs turned to look at her.

Helen scrambled into the house and slammed the door. She ran to the parlor and began dragging an oak chest across the floor, rucking up the rug and peeling curls of varnish from the floor. She pulled it across the foyer, scraping deep scars across dark wood. By the time she’d barricaded the front door, she was dripping with sweat. Her wounded leg throbbed with every shuddering heartbeat.

She crept to the parlor window and peeked between the drapes. Only one creature was visible, floating just beyond the edge of the terrace. It looked like a log again, but she knew better. She’d seen them. Two long, inky serpents raising their heads from the water, their maggot-pale eyes hollow and staring.

Just a log, that’s all .

The log flipped. Water poured across its back. Its mouth split open. Starlight revealed hundreds of teeth, wire-thin and hooked.

Just a log, that’s all .

Bärchen was a liar.

The cook and steward sat at the kitchen table, heads down over their dinner, one candle burning between them.

“I suppose you’ll tell me there are no serpents in the lake. Herr Lambrecht says they’re logs, and it’s not your place to contradict him.” She threw her arms wide. “If one of those monsters bit off your leg and Herr Lambrecht said it hadn’t, you’d agree with him.”

“Would you like another bottle of wine, Fräulein?” the steward asked.

“Always.” She pounded her fist on the table, rattling their dinner plates. “But I’d rather know how badly Herr Lambrecht lied to me, and why.”

The steward shrugged and turned back to his meal.

Helen ransacked the kitchen drawers and piled instruments on the table—knives, forks, even a slender iron spit—everything she could find that was long and slender and strong. She wrapped them in a rag, grabbed the candlestick from the table, and lugged everything downstairs.

Delicious, salty air roiled out from under the door, stronger than before. Helen’s stomach growled. She lit a cigarette and rolled up her sleeves.

The white coating on the walls and door wasn’t frost; it was salt. She scraped the crust off the eye of one of the griffins. It wadded up under her fingernail, dense and gritty.

Helen licked the salt off her finger and slipped a filleting knife into the keyhole. She could feel the latch inside, and bumps that must be a series of tumblers. They clicked as she guided the knife tip back and forth. The blade sawed at the corners of the keyhole, carving away fine curls of brass. But the knife was too wide, too clumsy.

She tried the iron spit next. It left a patina of sticky grease on her palms. She attacked the lock with each instrument in turn, whining with frustration. She knocked her forehead on the door, gently, once, twice.

A chill played over her bare skin. Gooseflesh prickled her arms. Sour spit flooded her mouth.

Finally, she drew the letter opener out of her pocket and fed its tip through the lock, leaning into the door as if she could embrace its whole width. She peeked into the keyhole, hand by her cheek like an archer with a drawn bow.

She licked salt from her lips. The lock clicked. The door opened an inch, hinges squeaking.

A little wet bone bounced across the floor and hit her foot. She turned.

Peter was right behind her.

Candlelight flickered over his round cheeks and dimpled chin, the neatly combed wings of pale hair framing his face. He was just a child. Orphaned. Friendless. She’d already given him her sympathy. Didn’t he deserve her care?

“Hello.” She kept her voice gentle. “How did you get out of the nursery?”

“Bitte , Miss York. The door opened.”

The chair must have fallen. She hadn’t wedged it hard enough.

Peter stared at the crypt door. She should take him back upstairs, tell Mimi to put him to bed, but he would just come down here again. And wasn’t this his own home?

“Do you know what’s behind this door, Peter?”

“Mama,” he said.

“Yes, that’s what your uncle told me. Not just her, but your whole family—all of your ancestors, in their tombs. Do you know what a tomb is?” He shook his head. “A big box made of stone, usually. Or an alcove in a stone wall, sometimes. Usually family crypts are in cemeteries or churches. But your family—”

She hesitated. Your family is strange , she thought. She needed to find out exactly how strange.

“Are you sure you want to see your mother’s tomb?”

Peter nodded.

The air that rushed out as she opened the door had a meaty, metallic tang. Her stomach roiled with hunger; her vision swam. She shielded the candle flame with her body. Peter took her hand and led her into the crypt.

Helen had seen crypts before. They didn’t frighten her. At age five she’d seen her mother shut away in a Highgate Cemetery tomb. She’d kissed her first girl in the crypt at St Bride’s, after stealing the key from the deacon. And she’d attended parties in the Paris catacombs, drank champagne watched by thousands of gaping skulls.

But this was no crypt.

The passage opened into a wide cavern, its walls caked with salt crystals and honeycombed with human-sized alcoves, rough indentations hacked out of the rock with some primitive tool. Some were deep, as if they might be passages, some gaped shallow and empty, and others were scabbed over with a crusted mess the color of dried blood, leaking filth down the crystalline walls. One of these was just over her left shoulder. Tiny bones were embedded in the bloody grime. It smelled like fresh meat.