Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

“I can do this all day!” the Skull told him. “You gonna let that happen? Gonna let me keep doing this until I run out of knives? All you got to do is cut him once. It would be an act of mercy.”

And that was how you broke somebody for good: made him do a thing like this.

“You tell me no one more time, the next thing you get to do is pick which one of your people you get to watch me gut in front of you. Your choice.”

Took one piece of his soul at a time.

Bas must have quietly acquiesced. The Skull handed him a knife, one of the big, mean looking ones, maybe the same go-to blade he’d used to finish things last night. And the finish was the same. From this angle, Enrique couldn’t see much, Sebastián in a kneeling position, his elbow pumping back and forth in a sawing motion. Two hideous screams. One ended quickly, the other one kept going. And going.

That was the impressive thing about Bas. He could hold a note for a long time.

Way past what for most people would be the breaking point.

It was hours before he could talk, another hour after that before anything intelligible came out. Until then, it was just Bas in a corner, huddled up like a whipped dog, catatonic sometimes, shaking when he wasn’t, eyes focused on nothing. Sofia held him, rocked him, reported that he felt like he’d crawled out of a cold river. Morgan and Olaf hung close, ready to help if they could, but they couldn’t.

“He wanted to know,” Bas said, halting every few words, “about the last album.”

La máscara detrás de la cara , that would’ve been. The Mask Behind the Face .

“What about it?”

“He wanted to know where it came from.”

Enrique had to let this sink in, double-check to make sure Bas had it right. Even if it explained why they’d returned him alive, Enrique still couldn’t believe it come down to this: that they’d been taken by a fan who wanted to get close to the band.

“I didn’t understand what he meant. I couldn’t follow him. I didn’t know what to tell him.” Sebastián seemed unable to stop replaying everything in his mind, or stop shaking his head. “He made me look at a rock. He kept making me look at the rock. I couldn’t see what he wanted me to. But he wouldn’t let me look away from the rock.”

It was about all they got out of him.

Things were quiet for the evening and the rest of the night, sitting in the dark with los muertos , the other dead. A whole new heavy black mood had settled in. Forced to butcher each other—this was an escalation nobody had seen coming, and now that it was here, how was anyone supposed to look at the person next to him without imagining which of them might end up forced to hold the knives?

None of them had overheard what Bas had said—it was too soft to hear unless you were right next to him—and Enrique wasn’t going to tell the rest to ease their minds. Go on, keep trusting one another, you’re still in this together, because if it happens again, it’ll only be me or Sofia holding the knife . Yeah, that would go over great.

Just Olaf, just Morgan. He told them.

The rest? Let them live with it, the same fear they’d spent their lives inflicting on their neighbors. This is what it takes to start paying for your sins .

He listened in the dark as Padre Thiago ministered to the ones who decided they’d lived as wolves long enough and it was time to be lambs again. Time to let a priest pray over them, deliver them of the cruel devils that had taken them over to make them do such terrible things. If they were going to God soon, they wanted to go clean and pure and forgiven.

And there it was—the reason he’d never had much use for God. If he had to believe in a god at all, he wanted one who would really hold you to your life’s choices.

When they came for him the next morning Enrique was ready for it, the only one in the room who didn’t retreat to the far wall like the others. They were so used to it, these guys with their guns and their yelling, they didn’t know what to make of him, that somebody would sit in the floor waiting for whatever came next. His passivity unnerved them, all eight guys peeking at each other like they didn’t trust it and didn’t know what to do next, afraid they were being suckered into the struggle of their lives.

“I’ll go,” Enrique said. “No big deal. When did fighting it ever work for anybody? I’ll go.”

They took him alone, him and nobody else. They escorted him around the side of the church, three days since he’d felt the ground beneath his boots and the open sky and the direct searing heat of the sun. At the end of it, the Skull was waiting, and behind him, that colossal likeness of Santa Muerte with her scythe, grim against the cloudless blue and gritting her ivory teeth at the horizon. Everything else looked baked to shades of brown.

Somebody shoved a foot into the back of one knee to drop him to the earth. He knew better than to get up. The guards backed off to give them space.

“I figured it was either you or Sebastián,” the Skull told him. “Drummers, they’re the heart, they’re not usually the visionaries. They feel the pulse of the earth. They don’t see through time. So it had to be you or him. And it wasn’t him.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yeah you do. You’re just playing stupid.”

From here, close up, it was like seeing this guy for the first time. He was more than a living skull now. Skulls didn’t have eyebrows. Skulls didn’t have lips. Enrique could see the way his skin moved over his actual bones, could discern the numbers and words, patterns and pictures, inked into his skin. He looked close to emaciated, either by genetics or by choice, or maybe he was an example of function creating form. He had only as much as a reaper needed, and no more.

“You keep playing stupid, I’ll treat you like you’re stupid. You’ll make me do something to smarten you up. Is that what you want?”

“I want to be gone from here. Me and mine. That’s what I want.”

The Skull nodded as if this were one of many possibilities. “It could happen.”

Three little words, so much hope. It could happen . But probably an illusion.

“Sebastián may be the one at the front of the stage, but he does what you tell him to. He’s only got as much to work with as you give him. You’re the architect of what you three do,” the Skull said. “Tell me I’m wrong.”

“It’s more complicated than that. But you’re not wrong.”

“I get it. You need him and he needs you. You, you’re not the kind of guy who’ll ever be at the front of the stage. You don’t have the look. But you got something better. You got the brains. You got the vision.”

It was one of the more backhanded compliments anyone had given him. But under the circumstances? He’d take it.

“So… The Mask Behind the Face . I could tell, just from the title, here’s someone who knows some things. Here’s someone who sees. Then I listen and read the lyrics, and I think, here’s someone who understands . How you did it, that’s beyond me, I don’t know how a studio works, but you managed to put together the electronics and all that other aggro shit with those ancient flutes and grinding stones and old drums, and made a sound not like anything I ever heard. An effect not like anything I ever felt. A sound, that’s just noise unless you got an idea behind it. And you did. That was the thing that convinced me, whoever did this is some kind of shaman.”