The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

She shuts the door — a final sound. Jackson’s heart skips, jitters erratically, worse than when he ran all the way here. Carrie gestures to a room opening up to the left.

“Sit. I’ll make coffee.”

She leaves him, disappearing down the narrow hall. Jackson lowers himself onto a futon covered with a tattered blanket. Upended apple crates flank it at either end. A coffee table sits between the futon and a nest-shaped chair. The walls are painted blood-rust red; they are utterly bare.

Carrie returns with mismatched mugs and hands him one. It’s spider-webbed with near-invisible cracks, the white ceramic stained beige around the rim. The side of the mug bears an incongruous rainbow, arching away from a fluffy white cloud. Jackson sips, and almost chokes. The coffee is scalding black; she doesn’t offer him milk or sugar.

Carrie Linden sits in the nest chair, tucking bare feet beneath her. She wears a chunky sweater coat. It looks hand-knit, and it nearly swallows her. She meets Jackson’s gaze, so he can’t possibly look away.

“Well, what do you want to know?” Her voice snaps, dry-stick brittle and hard.

Jackson can’t speak for his heart lodged in his throat. There’s a magic to watching Kaleidoscope (unless you watch it alone). The people on screen dying and fucking and screaming and weeping, they’re just shadows. It’s okay to watch; it’s safe. None of it is real.

Motes of dust fall through the light around Carrie Linden — tiny, erratic fireflies. The curtains are mostly drawn, but the sun knifes through, leaving the room blood hot.

“All of it,” Carries says, when Jackson can’t find the words.

“What?” He gapes, mouth wide.

“That’s what you’re wondering, isn’t it? That’s what they all want to know. The answer is — all of it. All of it was real.”

Jackson flinches as though he’s been punched in the gut. (In a way, he has.) Should he feel guiltier about the cracked light in her eyes, or the fact that his stomach dropped when she said “that’s what they all want to know”? He isn’t her first.

Carrie Linden’s hands wrap around her mug, showing blue veins and fragile bones. Steam rises, curling around her face. When she raises the mug to sip, her sleeve slides back defiantly and unapologetically revealing scars.

“Well?” Carrie’s gaze follows the line of Jackson’s sight. “Why did you come, then?”

She bores into him with piercing-bright eyes, and Jackson realizes — even sitting directly across from her — he can’t tell what color they are. They are every color and no color at once, as if her body is just a shell housing the infinite possibilities living inside.

“I wanted to talk about the movie. I thought maybe…” Jackson glances desperately around the bare-walled room — nowhere to run. In his head, he’s rehearsed this moment a thousand times. He’s always known exactly what he’ll say to Carrie Linden when he finally meets her, but now it’s all gone wrong.

I’m sorry, he wants to say, I shouldn’t have come, but the words stick in his throat. His eyes sting. He’s failed. In the end, he’s no better than Justin, or Kevin. He’s not a Kaleidophile, he hasn’t transcended the sex and gore — he’s just another wanna-be.

Unable to look Carrie in the eye, Jackson fumbles a postcard out of his coat pocket. The edges are frayed and velvet-soft through years of wear. It’s the original movie poster for Kaleidoscope, wrought in miniature. Jackson found it at a garage sale last year, and he’s been carrying it around ever since. He passes it to Carrie with shaking hands.

As Carrie looks down to study the card, Jackson finally looks up. Like the movie, Jackson knows the card by heart, but now he sees it through Carrie’s eyes; he’s never loathed himself more. His eyes burn with the lurid color, the jumbled images piled together and bleeding into one.

The backdrop is a carnival, but it’s also a graveyard, or maybe an empty field backed with distant trees. A woman studded with fragments of glass lies spread-eagle on a great wheel. Between her legs, Carrie lies on an altar, covered in writhing snakes. Behind Carrie, Elizabeth’s blood-sheeted face hangs like a crimson moon. From the black of her wide open eyes, shadowy figures seep out and stain the other images. They hide behind and inside everything, doubling and ghosting and blurring. The card isn’t one thing, it’s everything.

“I’m sorry.” Jackson finally manages the words aloud.

Slowly, Carrie reaches for a pen lying atop of a half-finished crossword puzzle. Her hand moves, more like a spasm than anything voluntary. The nib scratches across the card’s back, slicing skin and bone and soul. She lets the card fall onto the table between them, infinitely kind and infinitely cruel. Jackson thinks the tears welling in his eyes are the only things that save him.

“It’s okay,” she says. Her voice is not quite forgiving. For a moment, Jackson has the mad notion she might fold him in her bony arms and soothe him like a child, as though he’s the one that needs, or deserves, comforting.