Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

Those tall, attenuated creatures. Their footsteps extinguished stars, put out of the light of worlds. What did it mean that I’d seen them in the sky? Were they an echo of the past, or a glimpse at our future? Maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe all that mattered was letting go.

I thought of Viader, falling, Reyes, vanishing into the night. Cities burning, a child buried under a tree. The seeds of a civilization that required blood and sacrifice to grow.

Adams reached into her pocket, and set a bottle on the table. Honey, the same color as her eyes. It sang, and my blood sang back. The harvest song, the lullaby. We’ll seal you up, but you’ll dream, and all your years of darkness will be worthwhile.

Gold dripped from my bones, written with history. I could taste it, curling my tongue with its sweetness so sharp it drowned everything else.

Adams touched the bottle with one finger. I shivered.

She unfolded a knife from her belt, and used the blade to nick the meat of her palm. Honey oozed to the surface. She didn’t need the cave anymore. She licked the wound, glancing at me. I pressed a hand against my chest. Under my breastbone, a hollow space waited for a hive.

Adams stood, skinning her shirt over her head. Her dog tags gleamed as she turned around. Her back was covered in raised welts, smooth and white, old scars.

“The map,” she said.

I stood, palm outstretched. The heat of her skin beat against me like a flame. Her scars met my touch, pearls stitched into her skin, the puncture wounds she’d received in Afghanistan. I traced my hands over the pattern. Stars, arranged in configurations eons old.

“It was never meant to show where we were going,” Adams said. “But where they had been.”

History, written on her skin. She guided me to one of the two remaining cots and pushed me down gently. The light from her eyes cast shadows on her cheeks. The bottle of honey appeared in her hand. Straddling me, Adams pulled the cork from the honey with her teeth. Liquid the color of a full harvest moon—ripe to bursting.

Adams dipped a finger in the honey and held it out to me. I pictured light leaking from her eyes like tears, seeping from her pores. The harvest song howled in the dark. Shadows bent over us, long fingers needle-sharp and venom-tipped, ready to stitch through skin and bone.

I sucked her finger clean.

It wasn’t sex, it was more like farewell. Adams flickered, her translucence overwhelming her solidity. My hands closed on empty air, but the memories kept flowing through me, hers and theirs.

I was in the cave in Afghanistan. Thousands of hexagonal cells covered the walls. Needle-thin legs brushed my skin, then the first stinger entered me. My body arched, my flesh trying to escape my bones. I was being torn apart, threaded back together. Adams’ map wrote itself onto me, stars burnt into my being in a pattern from before the world. But there was no pain. Bones dripped honey, skeletons embedded in the walls, but still living. They remembered. Everything. Wings beat inside the remains of their papered skin, a steady hum. A whole lost world, resurrected inside the dead, calling them—calling me—to sing.

There’s a certain quality of cold where temperature becomes color. Ramone, Kellet, and I walked into a solid wash of it, thick enough to feel. I’d shown them the map on my skin, and they’d agreed, we had to finish it out on the ice where it began.

We didn’t go far, just enough to be alone with the wind. Out here, we would hear Reyes when he screamed. We’d see Viader when she rose like a meteor out of the dark.

“I dream about Viader sometimes,” Kellet said as we huddled around a Coleman lantern in our tent. “Her flesh is still burning. She’s only got one eye. There are holes in her skin and she’s holding embers in her jaws.”

“Reyes came to see me,” Ramone said. His right sleeve hung by his side, his left hand held a mug filled with vodka. I’d never noticed the paler band of skin on the fourth finger before.

“He came to my bedroom window. His breath fogged the glass, so I knew he was really there. His hair was all matted. His teeth were broken, and his eyes were the color of dried blood. He tapped on my window.”

Kellet put her hand on Ramone’s knee. I could feel myself spreading in the wind. Still here, already gone.

“I didn’t know what else to do, so I let him in. He crawled under the covers with me. I thought he’d be cold from being out on the ice for so long, but he was warm. He smelled like red meat and wet dog.

“He put his head on my chest.” Ramone touched his knuckles to the spot. “And then he just lay there, listening to my heart.”

Ramone swallowed the rest of his drink, squeezing his eyes closed.

“The next morning, he was gone. That was the first time I tried to kill myself. I took pills, but then I chickened out and called 911.”

I put my hand on his other knee. Outside, the ice sang.

“I watched Martinez kill himself,” I said, my own unburdening. I’d already given the honey Al-Raqqah, everything else I had to give. This was the last thing.

“I wish we knew what happened to McMann,” Ramone said.

“He’s probably waiting for us,” I gestured at the tent flap.

Kellet reached for my hand across Ramone’s knees. She tangled her fingers with mine, and our joined hands covered Ramone’s one good hand. My lips brushed the corner of Ramone’s mouth. He closed his eyes again. We went soft, slow, all three of us together. It still wasn’t sex. It was a map, a shared history, a surrendering of our pain.

When they left in the dark, I didn’t hear them go.

I cut a bottle of honey from my veins, bled it into the glass, then drank it whole. Burning like Viader, I walked out into the cold.

My body is going up in flames, bits of me flaking away to ash. Martinez is here. I can see the stars through the hole in his skull. Reyes lopes beside me. Viader is an angel. Adams’ footsteps crunch through the snow, getting farther and farther apart. Ramone and Kellet, even McMann, they’re all here. We’re separate, but together, strung across vast distances, never alone.

There are tall, vast shapes moving across the sky. They have no faces. Their skin blushes like the aurora borealis, studded with stars. They are the beginning and the end. They harvest the honey; they sing the song. The wind dies down, and it’s the only thing I can hear. History, writing itself onto my bones. The dead being reborn.

Harvest. Gather. Change.

Open your bones, they sing. Make space inside your skin.

Let us in.

Ican feel their eyes on me. I’m perspiring, a trickle of sweat itching its way between my breasts, and my face and ears are flushed and hot, like they always are whenever I have to talk in front of anyone. I rub my palms against my slacks, catch myself doing it and stop, guiltily. I’m supposed to be the grownup here, the expert, the pro from Dover. I look out over their heads, their faces, trying not to focus on any one of them, until I catch the eyes of Constance—Professor Fisher now, I guess—behind her black horn rims. She smiles at me, the same look that I’m sure she gives her students when they’re giving a report in front of the class and faltering as badly as I am. I try to smile back.

“Who here has ever stood in front of the mirror, staring at your reflection, waiting for it to do something? To wink at you, maybe, or smile when you don’t? To reach out a hand, or tell you a secret? Even the least imaginative among us sometimes studies our reflection in the hopes that we’ll finally see what other people see when they look at us.” That’s how I start.