The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

I can’t help but be aware, though, of what the man is doing there, down at the wound. For one thing, besides the two fires it is the only visible activity, the only movement besides my own. For another, for all that the sight of those blood-tipped white hands going about their work repels me, their skill and care, and the life they seem to have of their own, are something to see. It’s like watching Pa make damselfly flies in the firelight in the winter, each finger independently knowing where to be and go, and the face above all eyes and no expression, the mind taken up with this small complication.

The apple and the radish, all chewed and reduced and cooked smelly by John Barn’s body’s heat, are caught in the snarled silk. Phillips must draw them, with the skein, slowly lump by lump from Barn’s innards, up into the firelight where they dangle and shine like some unpleasant necklace. Sprawled beside John Barn, in his breathing and his bracing himself I feel the size of every bead of that necklace large and small, before I see it drawn up into the firelight on the shining strands. Phillips frowns above, fire-fuzz at his eyebrow, a long streak of orange light down his nose, his closed lips holding all his thoughts, all his knowledge, in his head — and any feelings he might have about this task. Is he pleased? Is he revolted? Angry? There is no way to tell.

“Do you have something for their pain, then,” I say, “when you make them into mulberries?”

“Oh yes,” he says to the skein, “they are fully anaesthetised then.” He hears my ignorance in my silence, or sees it in my stillness. “I put them to sleep.”

“Like a chicken,” I say, to show him that I know something.

“Not at all like that. With a chemical.”

All is quiet but for fire-crackle, and John Barn’s breath in his nose, and his teeth crushing the leaves.

“How do you learn that, about the chemicals, and mulberry-making? And mulberry-fixing, like this?”

“Long study,” says Phillips, peering into the depths to see how the skein is emerging. “Long observation at my father’s elbow. Careful practice under his tutelage. Years,” he finishes and looks at me, with something like a challenge, or perhaps already triumph.

“So could you unmake one?” I say, just to change that look on him.

“Could I? Why would I?”

I make myself ignore the contempt in that. “Supposing you had a reason.”

He draws out a slow length of silk, with only two small lumps in it. “Could I, now?” he says less scornfully. “I’ve never considered it. Let me think.” He examines the silk, both sides, several times. “I could perhaps restore their digestive functioning. The females’ reproductive system might re-establish its cycle, with a normal diet, though I cannot be sure. The males’ of course…” He shrugs. He has a little furnace in that hut of his by the creek. There he must burn whatever he cuts from the mulberries, and all his blood-soaked cloths and such. Once a year he goes in there with the chosen children, and all we know of what he does is the air wavering over the chimney. The men speak with strenuous cheer to each other; the mothers go about thin-lipped; the mothers of the chosen girls and boys close themselves up in their houses with their grief.

“But what about their… Can you undo their thinking, their talking, what you have done to that?”

“Ah, it is coming smoother now, look at that,” he says to himself. “What do you mean, boy, ‘undo’?” he says louder and more scornfully, as if I made up the word myself out of nothing, though I only repeated it from him.

I find I do not want to call John Barn a fool, not in his hearing as he struggles with his fear and his swallowing leaf after leaf, and with lying there belly open to the sky and Phillips’s attentions. “They… haven’t much to say for themselves,” I finally say. “Would they talk among us like ourselves, if you fed them right, and took them out of that box?”

“I don’t know what they would do.” He shrugs again. He goes on slowly drawing out silk, and I go on hating him.

“Probably not,” he says carelessly after a while. “All those years, you know, without social stimulus or education, would probably have impaired their development too greatly. But possibly they would regain something, from moving in society again.” He snorts. “Such society as you have here. And the diet, as you say. It might perk them up a bit.”

Silence again, the skein pulling out slowly, silently, smooth and clean white. Barn chews beside me, his breathing almost normal. Perhaps the talking soothes him.

“But then,” says Phillips to the skein, with a smile that I don’t like at all, “if you ‘undid’ them all, you would have no silk, would you? And without silk you would have no tea, or sugar, or tobacco, or wheat flour, or all the goods in tins and jars that I bring you. No cloth for the women, none of their threads and beads and such.”