Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

A few—just a few here and there—were furred over with cobwebs the same bloodless pale pink as Peter’s skin.

At the bottom of the cavern, a wide pool of oily water quivered and sloshed.

“Mama,” Peter said. “Papa.”

“I don’t think they’re here, Peter,” she whispered, pulling him back toward the door.

His hand slipped from her grasp. He ran to a cobwebbed alcove and plunged his hand deep inside. She grabbed his jacket and pulled him away. The strands clung to his arm, stretched and snapped. When his hand appeared, he held tight to a squirming grub the size of his head. His fingers pierced its flesh; the wounds dripped clear fluid.

Its eyes were dark spots behind a veil of skin. Its tiny, toothless maw opened and closed in agony.

“Brother,” Peter said. He raised the grub to his lips and opened his mouth.

Helen swatted it out of his hand. The grub rolled across the floor of the cavern and plopped into the pool.

She ran, dragging Peter behind her by his elbow.

Helen slammed the door and braced it with her shoulder, throwing her weight against it as she jabbed the lock with the letter opener. Getting the door open had been sheer luck. She’d never get it locked again, not if she worried at it for a hundred years.

She couldn’t believe her stupidity. Opening doors that should stay shut. Going places she didn’t belong. Trusting Bärchen, as if she actually knew him. As if he were human.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” she said under her breath.

The lock clicked. She fell to her hands and knees, weak with relief. Pain shot up her leg. Her vision darkened.

Peter lifted the candle. “Yes, Miss York?”

She sucked air through her teeth and wrenched herself around to sit with her back against the door. She would get away from Peter, run as fast and as far as possible. Into the mountains, into the forest, anywhere but here. But she didn’t think she could stand. Not yet.

“Do you remember your mother? Your father? Do you know what they are?” Monsters, with hollow staring eyes. Her voice rose to a shriek. “Do you know what you are?”

“No, Miss York. I know you.”

He sat at her feet and slipped his hand into hers. His fingers were sticky with fluid from the grub. It stank like rot, like old meat turned green and festering with maggots. Her gorge rose once, twice. She took two convulsive gasps for air and then the stench changed. Her stomach growled. She raised Peter’s fingers to her mouth and licked them clean, one after another. Then she sucked the last of the juice from his sleeve.

There was more on the other side of the door, puddled on the stone floor. She could open the door again. But Peter looked so tired. His eyelids were puffy and the skin under each eye was stained dark with exhaustion.

“Come here,” she said, and the boy climbed right into her open arms.

Helen watched Mimi undress Peter and tuck him into bed. When the nursemaid tried to leave the bedroom, Helen stopped her.

“No. We’re staying here. Peter can’t be alone. We have to take care of him.”

Mimi hung her head.

“Do you understand?”

“Oui.”

“I don’t think you do. You let Peter go—every time. You don’t even try to stop him. Why don’t you care for him? He’s just a child.”

The boy watched them, hands folded between cheek and pillow. Mimi stared at the floor. A tear streaked down her cheek.

“We have to keep Peter safe, you and I, so he can grow up healthy and strong like his uncle. And then like his parents, out in the lake.” Helen sighed. “I wish we could talk properly, you and I.”

“Oui.”

“Wait here,” she said.

Helen ran to fetch a pencil and paper. When she returned, Peter was asleep.

“Tell me why you let him go.”

Mimi fumbled with the pencil. She couldn’t even hold it properly, and the only mark she could make on the paper was a toppling cross inside a crude shape like a gravestone.

Mimi’s lower lip quivered. A tear dropped onto the paper. Helen took the pencil from Mimi’s shaking fingers. “It doesn’t matter,” she said.

Mimi climbed onto the bed and lay beside Peter.

Helen pulled a heavy chair in from the hallway and slid it in front of the door. It might not keep him from getting out, but if he tried to drag it away the noise would wake her. Then she kicked off her shoes and climbed onto the bed, reaching around Mimi to rest her palm on Peter’s arm.

The girl was crying. Her back quivered against Helen’s chest.

“It’s all right,” Helen whispered, holding her close. “Everything is going to be all right.”

Mimi cried harder.

Helen expected to be awake all night, but Peter was safe, the room was warm, the bed cozy, and Mimi’s sobs were rhythmic and soothing. Helen slipped into sleep and tumbled through slippery dreams of inky shapes that writhed and grasped and tore at her skin. When she woke, the moon shone through the window, throwing the crossed shadows of the windowpanes over the rug. Her leg throbbed. The clock struck four. And Peter and Mimi were both gone.

On the pillow lay two bright pieces of copper wire, six inches long, worried and kinked, their ends jagged. The pillow was spotted with blood.

Helen ran down to the kitchen and fumbled with a candle, nearly setting her sleeve on fire as she lit it on the oven’s banked coals. She plunged downstairs, bare feet on the freezing steps, and when the smell hit her she stumbled. She slipped on a bone and nearly sent herself toppling headfirst.

She panted, leaning on the wall. The smell pierced her. It coiled and drifted and wove through her, conjuring the last drip of whiskey in her father’s crystal decanter, the first strawberries of summer, the last scrap of Christmas pudding smeared over gold-chased bone china and licked off with lazy tongue swipes. It smelled like a sticky wetness on her fingers, coaxed out of a pretty girl in the cloak room at a Mayfair ball, slipped into a pair of silk gloves and placed on a young colonel’s scarlet shoulder during the waltz.

The smell was so intense, so bright it lit the stairwell. The air brimmed with scents so vast and uncontainable they poured from one sense to the next, banishing every shadow and filling the world with music.

Helen fell from one step to the next, knees weak, each footstep jarring her hips and spine. Her vision spun. The cellar brimmed with haloes and rainbows, a million suns concentrated and focused through a galaxy of lenses, dancing and skipping and brimming with life.

The only point of darkness in the whole cellar was Mimi.

The nursemaid crouched in front of the crypt door. She humped and hunched, ramming her face into the wood as if trying to chew through it. The threshold puddled with blood.

Mimi’s jaw hung loose. It swung against her throat with every thrust. Her nose was pulped, upper lip shredded, the skin of her cheeks sloughed away.

The remains of her teeth were scattered at her feet.

Helen grabbed her foot with both hands and heaved, dragging her away. Mimi clawed at the floor, clinging to the edges of the stones with her shredded fingernails.

“Miss York?”

At the sound of Peter’s voice, the air cottoned with rainbows.

Peter stood at the head of the stairs, lit by a euphoria of lights. It cast patterns across his face and framed his head in a halo of sparks.

Mimi threw her head back and screamed, her tongue a bleeding live thing trying to escape from a gaping throat, a cavitied maw that was once the face of a girl.

Mimi lunged up the stairwell. Helen chased her.

“Peter, run!” Helen howled.

Mimi threw her arms around the boy. The huff of breath through her open throat spattered the walls with blood. She lunged down the hall, dangling Peter like a rag doll. Helen pitched after her, grabbing at the nursemaid’s hair, skirt, sleeves. In the foyer she caught hold of Peter’s leg and yanked the boy away.