The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

It was always on the move, she told us, from one side of the county to the other. It never slept, but sometimes it settled down in the woods or the fields to rest. It could be vast, she told us, tall enough that clouds sometimes got tangled in its hair — when you saw clouds skimming along so quickly you could track their progress, that’s when you knew — but it could be small, too, small enough to curl inside an acorn if the acorn needed reminding on how to grow.

You wouldn’t see it even if you looked for it every day for a thousand years, she promised us, but there were times you could see evidence of its passing by. Like during a dry spell when the dust rose up from the fields — that was the Woodwalker breathing it in, seeing if it was dry enough yet to send for some rain — and in the woods, too, its true home, when the trees seemed to be swaying opposite the direction the wind was blowing.

You couldn’t see it, no, but you could feel it, down deep, brushing the edges of your soul. Hardly ever during the day, not because it wasn’t there, but because if you were the right sort of person, you were too busy while the sun was up. Too busy working, or learning, or visiting, or too busy playing and wilding and having fun. But at night, though, that was different. Nights were when a body slowed down. Nights were for noticing the rest.

What’s the Woodwalker do? we’d ask. What’s it for?

It loves most of what grows and hates waste and I guess you could say it pays us back, she’d tell us. And makes sure we don’t get forgetful and too full of ourselves.

What happens then, if you do? Somebody always wanted to know that.

Awful things, she’d say. Awful, awful things. Which wasn’t enough, because we’d beg to know more, but she’d say we were too young to hear about them, and promise to tell us when we were older, but she never did.

You’re just talking about God, right? one of my cousins said once. Aren’t you?

But Grandma never answered that either, at least not in any way we would’ve understood at the time. I still remember the look, though… not quite a no, definitely not a yes, and the wisdom to know that we’d either understand on our own someday, or never have to.

I saw the Woodwalker once, Shae piped up, quiet and awestruck. One weekend last fall. He was looking at two dead deer. None of us believed her, because we believed in hunters a lot more than we believed in anything called the Woodwalker. But, little as she was, Shae wouldn’t back down. Hunters, she argued, didn’t stand deer on their feet again and send them on their way.

I’d never forgotten that.

And so, as the night blustered on the wings of bats and barn owls, I listened and watched and took another tiny step toward believing.

“Any time,” I whispered to whatever might speak up or show itself. “Any time.”

The milk had gone bad and the bacon with it, and we needed a few other things to get us through the weekend, so that next morning I volunteered to make the run back to the store near the turnoff on the main road. I decided to take the long way, setting off in the opposite direction, because it had been years and I wanted to see more of the county, and even if I made more wrong turns than right, there were worse things than getting lost on a September Saturday morning.

Mile after mile, I drove past many worse things.

You can’t remember such a place from before it got this way, can’t remember the people who’d proudly called it home, without wondering what they would think of it now. Would they have let their homes fall to ruin with such helpless apathy? Would they have sat back and watched the fields fill with weeds? Would they have ridden two wheels, three wheels, four, until they’d ripped the low hills full of gouges and scars? Not the people I remembered.

It made me feel old, not in the body but in the heart, old in a way you always say you never want to be. It was the kind of old that in a city yells at kids to get off the lawn, but here it went past annoyance and plunged into disdain. Here, they’d done real harm. They’d trampled on memories and tradition, souring so much of what I’d decided had been good about the place, and one of them, I could never forget, had snatched my sister from the face of the Earth.

Who were the people who lived here now, I wondered. They couldn’t all have come from somewhere else. Most, I imagined, had been raised here and never left, which made their neglect even more egregious.