Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

Mimi dug her fingernails into the heavy chest and pulled. It scraped over the floor, throwing splinters across the foyer. She yanked the door open and turned. Blood puddled at her feet. Her tongue wagged from deep in her throat. She raised her arms, as if yearning for Peter to enter her embrace.

Helen clutched Peter to her chest. She forced his head against her neck so he couldn’t see his nursemaid’s pulped face.

Mimi yowled. Then she plunged out the door and clattered across the terrace. At the edge of the water she teetered for a moment, arms wheeling. In the moment before she fell, an inky shape welled up from the water. Its jaws welcomed her with barely a splash.

The boy knelt on the nursery window seat beside Helen, his nose pressed to the window pane. Two sinuous forms floated in the lake, lit by the pale rays of dawn poaching over the mountaintops.

“Come sit over here.” Helen patted the stool in front of her.

When the sun broke over the peaks, Peter’s mother and father were gone, sleeping the day away at the bottom of the lake, perhaps, or in the crypt pool, keeping watch over their precious, delicious children.

Helen kept Peter by her day and night. She barely took her eyes off him, never left his side. To him she devoted all her care and attention, until her lashes scraped over dry and pitted eyeballs, her tongue swelled with thirst, and her ears pounded with the call from below.

The scent slipped into her like welcome promises. Lights spun at the edge of her vision, calling, guiding her down to the cavern.

At night, the serpents tossed back and forth in the waves, dancing to the rhythm shuddering through the house. She didn’t have to look out the window to see them; every time she blinked they were behind her eyelids. Beckoning.

Helen made it three days before she broke. When her pen turned clumsy, when her handwriting dissolved into crude scratches, she was past caring. The crypt was all she could think of. Hunger gushed through her, overflowing and carrying her down each flight of stairs as if floating on a warm river to the source of everything left in the world worth wanting.

Her hands were too clumsy to open the door, but it didn’t matter. She could eat her way through it. The scent itself was nourishment enough. Every bite was a blessing. She drowned herself in it. Gave herself over until her mind hung by a thread.

Her world collapsed into pain when Peter pulled her out of the cellar. She resisted, a little, but she couldn’t fight him. Not if it might hurt him. When he got the wires through what was left of her teeth and jaw and twisted them tight, the light abandoned her, the call receded, the house darkened.

“Will you be all right now, Miss York?” Peter asked.

“Oui,” she said.

Growing up in Dieu-le-Sauveur, my friends and I told stories about ghosts—the Starving Man, the Sleeping Girl, and the House at the End of the Street. The summer I was twelve, I saw my first ghost for real. That was the summer my little brother Gen disappeared.

The first official day of summer, the day after school ended for the year, we gathered in Luke and Adam’s clubhouse—me, my little brother Gen, and Holly and Heather from across the road. Luke and Adam lived next door. By the time Gen was born, Luke and I had already spent years passing through the hedge between our houses.

That didn’t change immediately when Gen was born, but it changed when he got old enough to walk and my parents insisted I take him with me any place I wanted to go. Luke didn’t mind, but he was the younger brother in his relationship, the one used to tagging along. He couldn’t understand why I could be annoyed, and yet protective of Gen at the same time, the first to rush to him if he got hurt, or stand up for him if someone else gave him trouble.

This is what I couldn’t explain to Luke: It didn’t matter that I loved Gen or not, because I did; it didn’t matter that he was actually pretty cool for a little brother. What mattered was I didn’t have a choice anymore. I used to be just me, but for the last seven years, I’d been Gen’s big brother. I would always be Gen’s big brother, with all the weight and responsibility it entailed.

“This is that game I was telling you about.” Adam pulled out his phone. All week while we waited for school to be out, he’d been talking about an app called Ghost Hunt! where you collected virtual ghosts and stored them in a scrapbook. He already had twenty-seven unique ghosts, including the Bloody Nun.

“I found her behind the church. There used to be a cemetery there, but they dug up all the bodies and moved them somewhere else.”

He turned his screen to show us the Bloody Nun’s picture. The clubhouse was really a cleared-out garden shed, but Luke and Adam’s mom had put in a carpet for us and a mini fridge with an extension cord running to the garage. I reached to grab a soda, popping the tab before I looked at the picture on Adam’s phone.

The colors were washed out and strange, like one of those filters had been applied to make it look like an old photograph. The grass had a peachy tone, but I recognized the lawn behind the church, but not the woman, who wore an old-fashioned habit, with a wimple and a big silver cross. Her face was jowly, making me think of a bulldog, and at first I didn’t even notice her feet until Holly pointed it out.

“She’s floating.” Holly pointed at the screen.

Even though she was closer to Luke and mine’s age, Adam had a crush on Holly. Even though he hadn’t said as much, I’m pretty sure recruiting me and Luke to play Ghost Hunt! was Adam’s way of trying to impress her.

I leaned in for a closer look. Holly was right, below the nun’s full skirt, her feet just sort of vanished. Instead of standing flat on the ground, she hovered, casting a dark stain of shadow.

Gen jostled my shoulder. I glanced back, moving so he could see better, but he edged away from the screen as Adam continued to scroll. Heather looked doubtful, too. She and Holly were only eleven months apart, practically twins. Like me and Gen, they came as a set. Wherever Holly went, her sister followed.

“Certain ghosts show up more in certain places.” Adam continued flicking through his catalogue. “Like the Nun and the church, but regular haunts and ghouls can show up anywhere.”

He paused on the picture of a haunt, a black and white photograph made to look all harsh and full of contrast, so the boy in the picture appeared to have no eyes, only dark staring pits where his eyes should be. The ghouls Adam showed us looked like they’d been shot in night-vision, emerald-tinted blurs hinting at tooth-filled mouths and legs bending the wrong way.

“We should all play together.” Holly searched for the app on her phone, setting it to download, and Adam sat a little straighter. “I know some places where I bet we’ll find ghosts.”

Even though I didn’t know Holly all that well, I knew she considered herself an expert on ghosts. I looked back at Gen. He had his phone out, but he hadn’t downloaded the app yet. Our parents had gotten him his own phone just this year. They didn’t care if he used it to play games and watch videos as long as he kept it with him in case of emergency.

“It won’t be scary. I promise,” I said, taking his phone.

Gen scrunched up his mouth; I hadn’t played the game yet, so I had no way of knowing if it was scary, but I could tell he wanted to believe me.