The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

We set off home straight after. All day I lead him on a length of rope, letting him take his time. I am not impatient to get back. No one will be happy with me, that I lost Phillips. Oh, they will be angry, however much I say it was an accident, a slip of the man’s boot as he squatted by the torrent washing himself. No one will want to take the spindles down to the town, and find whoever he traded them to, and buy the goods he bought. I will have to do all that, because it was I who lost the man, and I will, though the idea scares me as much as it will scare them. No one will want to hunt again, in years to come as the mulberries die off and no new ones are made; no one will want to gather roots and berries, and make nut flour, just to keep us fed, for people are all spoilt with town goods, the ease of them and the strong tastes and their softness to the tooth. But what can they do, after all, but complain? Go down to the town yourselves, I’ll tell them. Take a mulberry with you and some spindles; tell what was done to us. Do you think they will start it again? No, they will come up here and examine everything and talk to us as fools; they might take away all our mulberries; they might take all of us away, and make us live down the town. And they will think we did worse than lose Phillips in the torrent; they will take me off to gaol, maybe. I don’t know what will happen. I don’t know.

“It is a fine day, George of the Treadlaws,” John Barn says behind me. “I like to breathe, out here. I like to see the trees, and the sun, and the birds.”

He is following behind obedient, pale and careful, the stitches black in his paunch, the brace hanging off the silk-end. Step, step, step, he goes with his unaccustomed feet, on root and stone and ledge of earth, and he looks about when he can, at everything.

“You’re right, John.” I move on again so that he won’t catch up and be upset by the smell of me. “It’s a fine day for walking in the forest.”

ROOTS AND ALL Brian Hodge

The way in was almost nothing like we remembered, miles off the main road, and Gina and me with one half-decent sense of direction between us. Do you need us to draw you a map, our parents had asked, hers and mine both, once at the funeral home and again over the continental breakfast at the motel. No, no, no, we’d told them. Of course we remember how to get to Grandma’s. Indignant, the way adults get when their parents treat them like nine-year-olds.

Three wrong turns and fifteen extra minutes of meandering later, we were in the driveway, old gravel over ancestral dirt. Gina and I looked at each other, a resurgence of some old telepathy between cousins.

“Right,” I said. “We never speak of this again.”

She’d insisted on driving my car, proving… something… and yanked the keys from the ignition. “I don’t even want to speak about it now.”

If everything had still been just the way it used to be, maybe we would’ve been guided by landmarks we hadn’t even realized we’d internalized. But it wasn’t the same, and I don’t think I was just recalling some idealized version of this upstate county that had never actually existed.

I remembered the drive as a thing of excruciating boredom, an interminable landscape of fields and farmhouses, and the thing I’d dreaded most as a boy was finding ourselves behind a tractor rumbling down a road too narrow for us to pass. But once we were here, it got better, because my grandfather had never been without a couple of hunting dogs, and there were more copses of trees and tracts of deep woodland than the most determined pack of kids could explore in an entire summer.

Now, though…

“The way here,” I said. “It wasn’t always this dismal, was it?”

Gina shook her head. “Definitely not.”

I was thinking of the trailers we’d passed, and the forests of junk that had grown up around them, and it seemed like there’d been a time when, if someone had a vehicle that obviously didn’t run, they kept it out of sight inside a barn until it did. They didn’t set it out like a trophy. I was thinking, too, of riding in my grandfather’s car, meeting another going the opposite direction, his and the other driver’s hands going up at the same moment in a friendly wave. Ask him who it was, and as often as not he wouldn’t know. They all waved just the same. Bygone days, apparently. About all the greeting we’d gotten were sullen stares.