The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

I knew it was too late, my hand on the gun slumped. The blood just poured out of him, and one of the women caught it in a wooden bowl. He kept moving for a while, but he was dead. I couldn’t have saved him. I keep telling myself that, and I hope it’s the truth.

Then they did what she said they’d do in the song. And I could only crouch there in the shadows and watch, afraid to move, praying the moon wouldn’t light me up. Hell, I didn’t know what they were, I didn’t know if I even could shoot them, if it’d do any good. It wouldn’t do Pete any good, that was for sure.

After they got done with Pete — taking what they wanted from him — they went into the cabin, and they ate and drank like the song said, and I was still too scared to move, to make a sound. But after a while the sounds inside the cabin, like pigs eating from a trough, they stopped, and it got quiet, and it was darker too. I’d just started to move when I heard the old woman’s voice — at least I think it was hers. It sounded different, soft but… stronger. It was singing.

It was singing a final chorus, a chorus that maybe nobody outside this hollow had ever heard.

When it was finished, I looked into the cabin through the chinks. All the candles but one had burned out. The Lovins, all five of them, were lying on the floor, like hogs that had eaten their fill and fallen asleep.

I stood up and took a step away from the cabin, and my foot lit right on a dry branch that snapped loud as a breaking bone. I held still. I could feel sweat just oozing out of me. I waited for footsteps crossing the cabin floor to the door, but they didn’t come.

So I got a little braver and looked in through the window. None of them were moving at all. It was like they were dead drunk. And then I knew what I had to do.

I thought about it as I picked my way through the trees toward the RV. Whatever these things were, they were evil. I didn’t know if they’d magicked Pete or what, but my folks are from the hills, and my grandpas and grandmas and aunts and uncles told me things that people would say were crazy, but which they really believed in. They saw things happen with their own eyes that we’d say were impossible. And I saw something tonight that made no sense at all in the real world. At the very best, these… people were murderers. Pete was dead, and they’d killed him. And worse.

I’d seen the two-gallon can of gas in the back of the RV, so I took it and a pack of matches and went back to the cabin. It was still dark but for the moon, and I finally looked at my watch. Two thirty-five. There was plenty night left — too much of it.

It took me some nerve to go inside, but I did. The Lovins weren’t moving. Hell, they didn’t even seem to be breathing now. The last candle was burnt out, but the moon gave me just enough light to work. I slopped the gas all up the dry wood walls and over the floor. I didn’t splash any on the Lovins, though, just in case they might wake up, but they didn’t. The tallest man, who I took to be the father, was lying in a patch of moonlight, and he wasn’t what he’d been before. His hair was full and long and dark, except for gray at the temples, and his skin was whole again.

That was enough. I didn’t want to look at the others.

I poured a trail of gas out through the front door and then touched a match to it. It ran inside quick as a snake and the whole shebang went up at once. That dry wood took to fire like kindling, and in less than a minute the cabin was blazing. Nothing moved inside. I don’t think even the burning woke them up.

The hollow was pretty well hid, so I doubted anybody’d see the flames, and there was enough of a clearing around the cabin that I didn’t think it’d set the woods on fire, though I didn’t give a damn if it did or not. I wasn’t thinking real clear.

But clear enough to haul down what was left of Pete. I found an old shovel in an outbuilding and buried him away from the cabin, back in the woods. It would’ve been quicker to toss him in the fire, but I didn’t want him with them. Not any more than he was.

I said some words over him, climbed in the RV, and drove through the dark back toward Nashville. I got lost a couple times on those dirt roads, but finally hit a blacktop and got my bearings. Back at Pete’s I put the RV in his driveway and pulled my car out of his garage without anybody seeing me, and drove home.

I had the song with me. I had it in my head. And by God, I was gonna do something with it. I couldn’t tell the truth about how I got it, so I figured I pull that journalistic thing and say I couldn’t reveal my sources. If people don’t believe me, the hell with them. One thing in my favor is that it makes something terrible out of a song everybody loves, and if I’d made it up on my own, I sure wouldn’t have done that.