Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

We don’t really talk about what we’ve found. The van ride back to Constance’s house is mostly silent, with each sentence spoken seeming to crack the air like a gunshot. The others get in their cars and leave, and Constance offers me a drink, then catches herself, shakes her head, smiles, apologizes.

At the door to my hotel room, Constance offers to come inside. Her hand touches mine, and I want her to, every part of me aches for her to, but I don’t think it’s a good idea, maybe an even worse idea now than before, so I shake my head. She leans forward and kisses me on the cheek before she goes, and I resist turning my head to place my lips in the path of hers. When she’s gone, I sit on the bed and think about that empty bar down in the hotel lobby. I look at the phone and think about calling my sponsor, but I haven’t talked to him in months, and I don’t want to admit how tempted I am now, and I sure as shit don’t want to tell him why.

So I take a shower instead, turning the water up as hot as I can stand it, baking my skin red. Every time I close my eyes under the spray, I see that room, behind those screens. My nerves are still alive and tingling, woken by the adrenaline of the night and by so much time spent in such close proximity to Constance, so I lay on the bed and masturbate furiously and frustratingly. I swallow another alprazolam and turn on the TV, turning the volume way down, letting its insensate light and noise beat against me until I finally fall asleep.

In my dream, I’m sitting in the secret chamber of the Granfalloon, with the flickering walls alive around me. All five screens are identical, and I know they’re identical, even though I can really only see the three that are before me. Every screen is showing Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs , but everything looks wrong from this side, sinister and backward, the eyes and mouths just black spots like holes burned in the screen, like the gaping sockets of Castle’s corpse, staring out at nothing.

I wake with a start, my hand reaching out of its own accord to grope for the remote and turn off the TV. I pull on some sweatpants and a loose t-shirt and stand at the door for way too long, my palm pressed against its cool surface, talking myself out of walking barefoot down to that bar, or to the liquor store down the street that my brain marked without my permission when the cab first carried me here. I press my head against the door, close my eyes, but that doesn’t help, because behind my eyes I see those seven fucking dwarfs, marching along the wrong way, their eyes black and pitiless.

I open my own eyes, dig around in my bag until I locate a dollar bill, and walk down the hall to the Coke machine. The drinking may come later, but I’ll be damned if it’s going to be tonight.

I don’t see Constance again before I leave town. She offers via text to take me to meet my flight, but I tell her I’ll take a cab. On the way to the airport, I have the cab take me by the Granfalloon. In the daytime it looks less imposing, just a squat purple building alone among the vacant lots, waiting for the bulldozers to come and make way for a parking garage or a Starbucks.

The airport terminal is full of TVs, and I find myself unable to look at them for more than a few seconds. Every time I do, I see those black sockets, feel that terrible buzzing nothingness coming off the thing that was once Castle’s corpse, and I can’t help but wonder if that’s truly what flows out of us when we sit down in the dark and surrender ourselves to the images on the screen.

The door was thick. The room, well-made. I knew. I’d seen. Every step.

I never heard Mother screaming in the night. I knew she was, it was obvious. I’d seen her with the cameras. Father had made me watch when I was young. Father had worried I didn’t fully understand. Fully believe.

But I did.

My favorite days were when it was over and Mother was allowed to return. Mine and hers both, I imagine. She was never happier than after . She would hold me and squeeze me tight, and I’d laugh and she’d pepper my cheek, neck and forehead with kisses.

Father would stand by, watching, smiling, looking haggard and wistful. After giving us time to reshape our natural bond, he would join as well, hugging us both. Kissing us greedily.

I loved my parents. Loved them dearly.

Deep down, secretly, I worried I would wake up one morning and find myself alone. That the room would take them from me. I’m only a boy still, sure, only twelve. But I’m growing. Learning.

When Father first built the room I had watched. Had helped, even. In those days, Mother had been held elsewhere. By men I did not know. By friends of my father’s. But she always came back, happy and healthy, hugging and kissing, just like it was after the room was built. I liked it better, having the room here. Liked her being home , with me and Father.

The room is not large, but it’s well built. It has many fail-safes. Father explained these to me as he built them into the room’s design. The walls are steel. Thick, slick, impenetrable from the inside. The door also, steel. One foot thick of it. Handle-less. Released by internal bolts that are hidden behind the metal-plated walls.

There is one light. A pair of fluorescent tubes behind a cage in the ceiling. Impossible to reach. That’s what we thought.

The restraints, however, are really impressive.

Crafted to hold, but not hurt. That’s what Father said. To keep her, and us, safe. I nodded when he told me these things. I felt I was learning, getting older, wiser. Helping.

“Then there’s the gas,” Father said, showing me the vents high in the walls, just below the ceiling. Far above where even her unnaturally-lengthened hands could reach them. “That’s our last line of defense,” he said, ruffling my hair, messy as always. “That’s if all else goes to hell.”

I nodded, but Father could see I didn’t fully understand. He knelt down, took my arm, pressed kinda hard, looked into my eyes.

“If she gets free of the restraints,” he pointed to them lying listless on the smooth concrete floor, “she still can’t leave the room, see?”

I nodded again, growing.

“If she gets to the door, does some damage, then I hit a button, and whoosh!” He expanded his hands in a circle to show the spreading affect. “She gets the gas.”

“Then what? She goes to sleep?”

Father nodded, dropped his eyes a moment, then found mine again. “She’ll be dead.”

I thought about this. “And we’ll know she’s dead because of the cameras.”

Father smiled broadly, eyes sparkling with pride. “That’s right, Son. The cameras.”

We were standing in the half-constructed room at the time, and Father pointed to high corners where reflective orbs were tucked. I waved, saw a distorted reflection of another boy—a smeared, tiny boy—waving back.

“We’ll watch her and make sure she’s dead before we come in,” he said, then put a firm hand on my shoulder. “She’d want us to be sure.”

I knew this was true, because she’d told me so a hundred times herself. She told me to always be sure, if something were to go wrong, to always be sure we’d killed her. “I might lie,” she said. “I might pretend.”

“Like a game,” I said.

Mother smiled and nodded, stroked my hair away from my forehead. “Like a game you must always win.”