The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

Not that it wasn’t tempting, in concept. Find some reprobate and put the squeeze on, and if he didn’t know anything, which he almost certainly wouldn’t, then have him point to someone who might.

“Good,” she said, then sat with it long enough to get angry. We’d never lost the anger, because it had never had a definite target. “But… if you did … you could handle yourself all right. It’s what you do every day, isn’t it.”

“Yeah, but strength in numbers. And snipers in the towers when the cons are out in the yard.”

She looked across at me and smiled, this tight, sad smile, childhood dimples replaced by curved lines. Her hair was as light as it used to get during summers, but helped by a bottle now, I suspected, and her face narrower, her cheeks thinner. When they were plump, Gina was the first girl I ever kissed, in that fumbling way of cousins ignorant of what comes next.

There was no innocence in her look now, though, like she wished it were a more lawless world, just this once, so I could put together a private army and come back up here and we’d sweep through from one side of the county to the other until we finally got to the bottom of it.

Shae was one of the ones you see headlines about, if something about their disappearance catches the news editors’ eyes: MISSING GIRL LAST SEEN MONDAY NIGHT. FAMILY OF MISSING COLLEGE STUDENT MAKE TEARFUL APPEAL. Like that, until a search team gets lucky or some jogger’s dog stands in a patch of weeds and won’t stop barking.

Except we’d never had even that much resolution. Shae was one of the ones who never turned up. The sweetest girl you could ever hope to meet, at nineteen still visiting her grandmother, like a Red Riding Hood who trusted that all the wolves were gone, and this was all that was found: a single, bloodied scrap of a blouse hanging from the brambles about half a mile from where our mother had grown up. The rest of her, I’d always feared, was at the bottom of a mineshaft or sunk weighted into the muck of a pond or in a grave so deep in the woods there was no chance of finding her now.

I’d had three tours of duty to erode my confidence about any innate sense of decency in the human race, and if that weren’t enough, signing on with the Department of Corrections had finished off the rest. For Shae, I’d always feared the worst, in too much detail, because I knew too well what people were capable of, even the good guys, even myself.

We made little progress that first evening, getting lost on a detour into some photo albums, then after an animated phone conversation with her pair of gradeschoolers, Gina went to bed early. But I stayed up with the night, listening to it awhile from Grandma Evvie’s chair, until listening wasn’t enough, and I had to go outside to join it.

There was no cable TV out this far, and Grandma hadn’t cared enough about it for a satellite dish, so she’d made do with an ancient antenna grafted to one side of the house. The rotor had always groaned in the wind, like a weathervane denied its true purpose, the sound carrying down into the house, a ghostly grinding while you tried to fall asleep on breezy nights. Now I used it as a ladder, scaling it onto the roof and climbing the shingles to straddle the peak.

Now and again I’d see a light in the distance — the September wind parting the trees long enough to see the porch bulb of a distant neighbor, a streak of headlights on one of the farther roads — but the blackest nights I’d ever known were out here, alone with the moon and the scattershot field of stars.

So I listened, and I opened.

The memory had never left, among the clearest from those days of long summer visits — two weeks, three weeks, a month. We would sleep four and five to a room, when my cousins and sister and I were all here at once, and Grandma would settle us in and tell us bedtime stories, sometimes about animals, sometimes about Indians, sometimes about boys and girls like ourselves.

I don’t remember any of them.

But there was one she returned to every now and then, and that one stuck with me. The rest were just stories, made up on the spot or reworked versions of tales she already knew, and there was nothing lingering about them. I knew that animals didn’t talk; the good Indians were too foreign to me to really identify with, and I wasn’t afraid the bad ones would come to get us; and as for the normal boys and girls, well, what of them when we had real adventures of our own, every day.

The stories about the Woodwalker, though… those were different.

That’s just my name for it. My own grandmother’s name for it, she admitted to us. It’s so big and old it’s got no name. Like rain. The rain doesn’t know it’s rain. It just falls.