The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

“It’s still drivable, and there won’t be any traffic — that’s the point. To get away from everyone. Don’t worry.”

“Aren’t we going back home?” Jaime asks. “Where are we going?”

“We’re not going all the way to the end of Hot Springs, anyway,” Father continues over Jamie. “I told you we’re taking the logging roads, they go deeper into the mountains. We already mapped this all out, last week.”

“We didn’t discuss this.” Your mother has put on her “we need to speak in private” voice.

“Take a look at the map. June has it,” Father says.

“I don’t need to look at the map, I know where we planned on going. I mean, this is ridiculous — where in heaven’s name do you think you’re taking us to?”

“I said we’re going all the way.” His hand slides away from her shoulder, back to the wheel.

“All the way to where?”

“All the way to the end.”

The map Father gave you to hold is an ordinary one, a rectangular sheaf of thick paper that unfolds into a table-sized version of your state. Jamie scoots closer to you as you struggle with the folds, his free hand resting light on your bare thigh, just below your shorts. His hands are large and gentle, like the paws of a young German Shepherd. You move your forehead close, until your bangs mingle with his, and together you stare down at the state you were born in, and all its familiar nooks and crevices. In the upper corner is your small city — you trace your route across the water and up the right hand side of the peninsula to Port Angeles, then down. The park and mountains are a blank green mass, and there are no roads to be seen.

You lift the edge of the map that rests on your legs, and dark markings well up from the other side. “Turn it over to the other side,” you say.

“Just a minute.” He holds his side tight, so you lift your edge up as you lower your head, peering. The other side of the paper is the enlarged, fang-shaped expanse of the Olympic Mountain Range. Small lines, yellow and pink and dotted and straight, fan around and around an ocean devoid of the symbols of cartography, where even the logging roads have not thrust themselves into. You can see where your father has circled small points throughout various squares, connecting each circle with steady blue dashes that form a line. Underneath his lines, you see the lavender ink of your mother’s hand, a curving line that follows Whiskey Road to its end just before Windy Arm. Over all those lines, though, over all those imagined journeys, someone has drawn another road, another way to the interior of the park. It criss-crosses back and forth, overlapping the forests like a net until it ends at the edges of a perfect circle — several perfect circles, in fact, one inside another inside another, like a three-lane road. Like a cage. The circles encloses nothing — nothing you can see on the map, anyway, because nothing is in the center except mountains and snow, nothing the mapmakers thought worth drawing, nothing they could see. The circles enclose only a single word:

Xάος

Someone has printed it in the naked center of the brown-inked circles, across the mountains you’ve only ever seen as if in a dream, as smoky grey ridges floating far above the neat rooftops of your little neighborhood, hundreds of miles away. Letters of brown, dark brown like dried-up scratches of blood — not Father’s handwriting, and not your mother’s.

“Do you see that?” you ask Jamie. “Did you write that?”

“Write what?” He’s still on the other side of the state. He doesn’t see anything. He doesn’t care.

You brush a fingertip onto the word. It feels warm, and a bit ridged. “Help me,” you whisper to it, even though you’re not sure to who or what you’re speaking, or why. The words come out of your mouth without thought. They are the same words you whisper at night, when Father presses against you, whispering his own indecipherable litany into your ears. Your finger presses down harder against the paper, until it feels you’ll punch a hole all the way through the mountains. “Save me. Take me away. Take it all away.”

The word squirms.

Goosebumps cascade across your skin, a brushfire of premonition. As you lower your edge of the map, Jamie’s fingers clench down onto your thigh. Perhaps he mistakes the prickling heat of your skin for something else. You don’t dissuade him. Under the thick protection of the paper, hidden from your parents’ eyes, your fingers weave through his, soaking up his heat and sweat; and your legs press together, sticking in the roaring heat of engine and sun-soaked wind. Your hand travels onto his thigh, resting at the edge of his shorts where the whorls of your fingertips glide across golden strands of hair, until you feel the start, the beginning of him, silky soft, and begin to rub back and forth, gently. His cock twitches, stiffens, and his breath warms your shoulder in deep bursts, quickening. You know what he loves.

“Do you see where we’re headed to?” Father asks.