The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

Cora shivered with relief and steered back across the restaurant. The muscles of Johnny’s face eased like she’d just walked back off a highway median. Behind him, over at table thirteen, Georgie Fiddler watched them and frowned.

Grandma Okpik had said Johnny had a bit of the medicine once, back when he’d rolled into town on the Tuesday Greyhound with nothing but a few changes of clothes and a set of knives that’d make your hair stand up until you found out they were for the kitchen. It wasn’t the kind of thing she’d got around to asking about, and this was, unfortunately, not the time for a hearty and extended chat about what it was Johnny Red saw.

“What d’you want to do?” she asked.

Johnny looked over her shoulder; watching him. “I don’t know yet,” he said, and went to whisper in Mike Blondin’s ear.

Aidan No-Last-Name picked at his food; the violent green vegetable soup Johnny Red had fixed for starter was barely below the rim when she came back to refill the coffee. His spoon leaned unused on his napkin. “He your boyfriend?” Aidan asked through a fall of brown hair.

“No,” Cora said, though Johnny Red had managed to kiss her in the storeroom once or twice, and she’d not turned away. “He just likes having people to boss around. Everything all right here?”

His hands stilled. He looked up at her. Opened his mouth and shut it again. He knows, she realized, sharply. Everything was not at all right.

He’s scared.

“Something I can do?” she asked carefully.

His hands were still on the table. He was staring, and she realized, not at her; past her, out the big windows of the Sunrise Restaurant, into the snow. She turned, and on the featureless white there was a splotch of black; low to the ground, ruffled, feathered.

The raven hopped one step, two, in the soft-packed January snow. It twisted its head near backwards, like birds do, and cawed a wicked laugh at the both of them.

Something dropped from its sharp little beak and landed in the snow: long, and thin, and red.

Aidan scrambled up against the back of the booth and howled, all the voice of wolves and snuffling bears and winter, eyes big and black and wide, and the cold spiralled out of him. The cold rushed in.

The raven fluttered into the night laughing, its wings snapping like falling trees. The coffeepot slid out of Cora’s hand and rang on the black and white tile. Coffee splashed her trousers, her shoes. She flinched back from the window, the raven, the boiling hot liquid on the floor. The fiddle had stopped, and the drum. Every head in Sunrise turned to stare out into the dark.

He took one step towards her. Two.

And ran.

Aidan jostled past her, between tables and chairs, out the oak front doors. “Hey!” she called, slipping in coffee, limping after him. The cold air hit like a knife to the throat. “Wait!” she managed, before she doubled over coughing.

He didn’t wait. Coatless, hatless, Aidan ran across the path and to the highway, head down and legs working like all the wickedness in the world was right behind him. His breath misted, a little plume to follow, and then her hip tightened sharp and he was disappearing, farther away. Going, smaller and smaller. Gone.

“Shit!” she said, and the footsteps behind her caught up: Johnny Red and Georgie Fiddler, one after the other, Johnny still with his fat blue oven mitts on.

“Cora,” he said, and threw an arm full around her to keep her from falling, or maybe just running any further. “What the hell?”

“He got away. The raven,” she said, and burst out again coughing. “It was out here. It dropped something—”

“I felt it,” he said. Felt, not saw.

“He’s scared,” she said. “It scared him.”

“We need coats,” Georgie called, and they picked their way back over the broken snow. Their feet had churned up the bird-tracks.

“It wasn’t too far.” Her teeth were chattering. She curled out of Johnny’s bracing arm and picked her way back to the parking lot: back under the edges of the sodium lights. Nothing. Nothing—

And then the wind rose and ruffled the snow, stirred it up and out and away, and Cora looked down at the smooth brown finger, slowly turning blue in the January snow.

The search party came back cold and empty-handed, and Johnny Red had nothing left over for soup.

“We found Gertie,” Jane Hooker said, staring at the specials board and the remains of Tropical Party Night. Her right mitten dangled from a string on her coat sleeve. “She’s…”

Mike Blondin swallowed. “We’re gonna need to call her nephew.”

Bile nudged into Cora’s throat. She forced it back. “Oh,” Daisy said, and it sounded like all the air had left her lungs forever. Johnny held his coffee filter between thumb and finger for one long moment, turned it around, and crumpled it in his fist.

“I went by Jane’s. We got an APB ’bout an hour ago,” Georgie Fiddler said, his face sallow and sick. Smudged fax paper fluttered from his left hand, limp as a dead child. “From the Mounties over in High Level.”