Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

She slid her long legs into the hole just as darkness drowned the lantern again, and the shadow moved toward her, all thousand eyes fixed on her bone helmet as she dropped from the chamber into the narrow passage beyond.

She slid, fell, branching fingers clutching at empty air, then landed on a haystack of bones in a frenzy of fracture and splintering. Dry, ancient bones shattered against her armor. Three of her long fingers snapped. The stone jar had crushed against her chest, the sticky paste inside smearing her with its scent. She coughed a scream.

The eyes were all around her, stripping her, driving through her armor, under her skin. The old dry bones did nothing to slow it. These weren’t ritual bones. They weren’t marrow bones—these bones had already been drunk dry. She found the warm twigs of her broken fingers, phalanges five inches long—she could smell the meat in them, rich and fatty. Life itself, reborn over and over, the factory of longevity. She slid the bones through the small holes in her skull mask and wrapped her lips around the jagged edges, felt the needle-like texture of their surface prick at her lips. She sucked at the marrow. It slid over her tongue, thick and creamy. Her pain faded. Her eyes began to adjust to the darkness on all sides. She threw her empty bones at the shadow and it fell back, giving her room to see and breathe.

The sinkhole was a trash heap of abandoned remains. Eyes were etched deep into the walls as far up as she could see, as though the monster slept here under its own watch. Above her, the shadow swirled like a cloud of bats, all pupil, wide and dark. She slid her long fingers into the carved grooves and began to climb. Her overlong arms and legs quivered under the stone weight of her growing bone armor. They gave, and she plummeted back to the bottom, snapping more protrusions.

She sucked more marrow from her freshly broken digits, and her strength increased—the pain faded further. The fragments continued to drive back the shadow. The marrow from the jar smeared across her chest made her itch again, and she felt more stretching, more calcium armor growing with a deep bass rumble deep in her core. She began to climb again. When she weakened, her body growing too heavy even for her strengthened hands, she put a finger in her mouth and bit down, breaking it off with her teeth and sucking at it, drawing more strength, more ammunition against the monster. When her fingers were stumps just long enough to press into the grooves of the stone, she broke away pieces from her face—thick wings of bone from her eyes and jaw, ’til her head was free again but for the jagged edges of broken bone at the tattered eruption points. Her face a mask of ivory needles.

She reached the top and slithered back through the opening into the catacomb chamber. Her lantern was there, the monster no longer between her and the exit. The exposed nerves in her body sang with pain again in the open air of the chamber.

The beast emerged from a crack in the rocks. Its gaze buckled her knees and dropped her to the cave floor as she turned to face it. It bubbled up through the narrow vent, its vision multiplying as it filled the cavern.

Ashley’s bones bled from fragile, ragged fractures. There was nothing left to throw. Her bones weren’t growing fast enough.

She edged to the cave wall and reached into an alcove, running her fingers over the ritual skeletons till she felt the familiar curve of a skull, a jar. She pried it out of the jaw and brought it to her mouth. The neck of the jar shattered between her teeth and she drove her tongue into the opening, lapping at the gritty paste inside. Her body quaked. She screamed as bones burst from her, jutting from her hands, feet, and face. The shadow lurched, and she pitched an alcove bone at the monster. It hesitated, rushed forward.

Ashley scrambled back. She reached into the next alcove and claimed another jar, sucked its contents down, and grew again. Sheets of bone from her eye sockets crept into her periphery, growing across her face. She raked long fingers toward the shadow, swiping at it. She felt it blink—a momentary release from its boring gaze.

She danced on long toes across the narrow chamber to the other alcoves, and the last jar. More marrow, more bone, less darkness. Her ribs crisscrossed in front of her, a shield over her soft, bleeding center. She charged the monster. She glared into its gaze, eye to eye to eye, until it sank back through the crevasse, back to the eye-walled pit, its vision winking out, leaving her in only natural darkness. She drove her ossified fist into the stone above the fissure, pounding it into grit, her hardened hands like hammers glancing off the slick stone till it crumbled. The opening gave and the ceiling fell, thundering, sealing the side chamber shut—like the jars, like the bone closing over Ashley’s face.

Her rapid breath flowed back at her in the confines of her outer skull. Her vision narrowed to the width of a single finger. She reached through the small hole and tried to pull at the bone, to break herself free. The skull mask clamped shut on her fingertip, growing over it, trapping it, shutting out all but a little light. She screamed inside her skull and the sound bounced around her ears. The expanding lattice of her ribcage lifted her off the floor.

Her breathing slowed. Cradled in her bones, with her own soft breath against her face, her panic settled into calm. It was quiet inside her bones, and no one could see her. Not the monster with his thousand eyes or Henri through his camera lens, or the thousands who had stared over the years at her height, her scars. She was hidden. Shielded by armor of her own making.

They’d find her, though, she knew. Later. Long after her life was gone. She’d be a curiosity—a national treasure: the woman inside of a bone cave inside of a cave of bones. A freak. They’d take her bones away and seal them in jars. Study them. But the monster was gone. And so was the sacred marrow. Except for the sample in the lab. The open jar with its rich odor, its inescapable pull toward the cave. Perhaps, exposed, it would fall to dust. Perhaps, exposed, those who laid eyes on it would become monsters. Maybe covered with bone, maybe covered with eyes.

The last seams of her skull plates squeezed tight—only slivers of light slipping through and dancing across the inside of her skull like figures on a cave wall. All she could see was her own darkness, her own shadow, and the only eyes were hers. Nothing and no one looked back.

It was the photographer’s idea, get some shots of them in the city before heading west into the countryside. He’d done his homework. Good for him. Good for Olaf the photographer. He’d read up on how one of Mexico’s biggest shrines to Santa Muerte was here in Matamoros. So they might as well take advantage of that, right? The shots they’d already planned for, they wanted afternoon light for those, didn’t want that glaring vernal sun directly overhead. There was time.

Sofia thought it was cheesy and wasn’t shy about saying so. Sebastián was all for it, but then, he would be. More pictures meant more pictures of him . Enrique didn’t care either way. You choose your battles wisely. No point in getting into one here inside the airport terminal.

And see? The idea was a done deal anyway. Olaf had run it past the PR guy on their flight down from LA, so Crispin had arrived pre-sold. Crispin was all about the enthusiasm. That was his job: make cheesy things sound like a good idea. The label must have paid him well for enthusiasm.

Besides, Crispin reminded them, they had to stay in town long enough to find a carniceria for the pig’s heart. There had to be one close to a Santa Muerte shrine. They practically went together, right?