Fears: Tales of Psychological Horror

by Ellen Datlow

Genres: Anthologies; Horror

Synopsis

Simon Bestwick, Annie Neugebauer, Josh Malerman, Dale Bailey, Steve Duffy, Margo Lanagan, Bracken MacLeod, Tim Nickels, Stewart O’Nan, Priya Sharma, John Patrick Higgins, Livia Llewellyn, Laird Barron, Theresa DeLucci, Sharon Gosling, Joyce Carol Oates, Ray Cluley, Carole Johnstone, Hailey Piper, Charles Birkin, Stephen Graham Jones

Bestselling horror editor Ellen Datlow (Body Shocks) returns with twenty-one stories of extreme psychological dread from such horror icons as Stephen Graham Jones, Priya Sharma, Josh Malerman, Margo Lanagan, and more. The unsettling tales explore the nature of fear as it stirs in dysfunctional families, toxic friendships, and mismatched lovers, which culminates in relentless stalkers, remorseless killers, and perpetrators of savage rituals.

Far beneath the mere supernatural lives something worse: the depths of human depravity. Your child is sacrificed in compensation for your social misstep. You compete in a sick game to save your loved ones. Your mom is insane, your dad is dying, your brother is not your brother, and you're stuck in the same house until one or all of you are dead. In her newest landmark anthology, Ellen Datlow has unearthed twenty-one exemplary tales of what people should fear the most: other people.

 

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Release date: September 10, 2024

Publisher: Tachyon Publications

Print pages: 336

Sample

“Bait”

Simon Bestwick

 

 

 

Late night, in a bar where you couldn’t smoke anymore but where the memory of stale tobacco hung in the air like a ghost. I was nursing a double Black Bush against the evil hour of having to go out into the cold, when the door flapped open and in she came, chased by a flurry of snow and a gust of bitter wind.

She barely looked old enough to drink but the barmaid didn’t bother her for details like ID; Mulligan’s wasn’t that sort of bar, or the kind that can afford to turn away paying custom. So she served the girl—a pale slip of a thing, flower-pretty and flower-fragile to look at, dark-haired and white-faced—a beer, then went back to polishing glasses while the girl sat at a table and drank.

With its old worn carpets, padded bench seats, and faded flock wallpaper, Mulligan’s isn’t the kind of bar that pretty, innocent-looking girls like this one came into either, as a rule, and while my normal tendency’s to mind my own business, I found myself keeping an eye on her as I nursed my drink. Some of it might have been out of a vestigial sense of chivalry or paternal instinct, but—at least to start with—it was probably the kind of fascination that draws the eye to a car wreck as it happens.

There were three or four other customers in the bar, none of whom I knew by name and a couple of whom I knew by sight; I’d never exchanged more than a dozen words with any of them. Because—all together now—Mulligan’s isn’t that kind of place. You don’t go there to socialise or get lucky, except maybe on the rare occasions one of the working girls from Becker’s Lane comes in to warm her bones between customers. You go there to drink and either brood on, or temporarily blot out, any recollection of the circumstances that had made you the kind of person who spent their nights drinking at Mulligan’s.

That, and occasionally you’d put something on the jukebox. They had a good selection—Pink Floyd, Sisters of Mercy, Leonard Cohen—along with the usual crowd-pleasers. Just then it was playing Shine On You Crazy Diamond, all thirteen or fourteen minutes of it. That’s what’s known as value for money. The song was still on the intro, where the opening G-Minor chord’s giving way to Wright’s low, mournful Minimoog solo but Gilmour hasn’t come into on the guitar yet, all of which suited the mood of painless melancholy I’d been sinking into throughout the night.

And then the prick in the corner had to spoil it all.

He didn’t do anything—not there, not then—but I’d seen him in Mulligan’s a couple of times before. He wasn’t big, but he was wiry, with scrubby gingery hair and an equally scrubby ginger beard. There was an eerie stillness about him: I’d never seen him move except to drink. The

rest of the time he’d just sit, staring blankly ahead, until it was time to get another vodka and Coke or to leave.

Except this one time; the last time there’d been a pretty woman in the bar at the same time as him. Ginger’s head had swivelled ’round like part of a machine, and he’d hunched forward, staring at her. It was the only time I’d ever seen anything resembling emotion on his face. It had looked like hunger. When the girl had gone out—maybe because his scrutiny had started to disturb her—Ginger’d sat in silence for a count of five, then got up and followed her out, leaving his drink half-finished on the table. I hadn’t gone after them, and I’d purposely avoided reading the papers or looking at the news for several days afterwards. I’d done my best to screen out the bar gossip, which I normally liked to eavesdrop on. But I didn’t want to know. I knew enough. And while not much bothers me these days, that did.

And so I wasn’t surprised to see Ginger looking at the girl, the same way he had the other one. Nor was I at all surprised when, after the girl finished her beer—tapping the base of the bottle to coax the last few suds into her mouth—got up and went out, Ginger sat still for a mental count of five before getting up and going out too. The only surprise was the one I gave myself, when I knocked back the last of the Black Bush and went across the bar, pulling my parka on as I went.

 

 

 

I had no real idea what I was going to do beyond not letting history repeat itself, and I had even less of a clue once I made it out onto Cairn Street, because there was no one in sight—not the girl, and not Ginger. A car swished by, wheels churning at the slush on the tarmac and headlights trapping swirls of snow, but the only person in it was an old man with white hair and thick moustache.

I spun first one way and then the other, but all I saw was the light shining on wet empty pavement and grey slush. Cairn Street cuts a pretty straight line through downtown, linking two other main roads, and there’s little or nothing branching off.

Other, I remembered then, than the side-alleys that connect it to China Row, a narrow 

cobbled back-street that runs behind the buildings on this side of the road, where the various businesses put out their garbage. One of those side-alleys was three or four yards ahead, and now I could see what’d happened very clearly, projected onto the screen on the back of my skull: Ginger coming out of Mulligan’s, seeing the girl, and then accelerating after her with a cat’s speed and silence.

I went towards the alley, converting my normal shuffle into something like a shambling trot, and I was almost there when I heard the scream.

I did the only thing I could think of and blundered down the alley onto the backstreet with a bellow. “Get off her you bastard” were, I think, my exact words. Definitely something along those lines, anyway. Something that would have immediately made clear why I was there; I know that much, because I left China Row alive.

I caught a glimpsed blur of motion darting into the shadows, but my main focus was the small thin body lying on the ground and the blood shining black around it in the reflected light pollution from the snowclouds above. “Fuck,” I said, and then “Fuck,” once again. I dropped into a crouch by the body, although I could already guess from its stillness and the amount of blood that there wasn’t much point. Maybe I was just glad of the excuse not to try and chase Ginger and risk serious injury even if I caught the bastard.

I genuinely

thought the body was her, though—I’ll blame the dim light and the influence of several Black Bushes for that—until I flipped it over and saw who it really was.

Ginger was actually still alive, if only just. His eyes were staring up at the falling snow and his lips were twitching. If I had to guess, I think he was trying to say something along the lines of What just happened?

A switchblade lay in the snow beside him, but there was no blood on the blade: his weapon, not hers, so I guessed I’d read his intentions correctly. There was a stab wound in his throat, but it wasn’t a cut. I felt a little sick when I realised what she’d done: her knife had both a cutting edge and a sharp point, and she’d used the point to puncture his voicebox, so that after the initial scream all he’d been able to manage were the thin whistling sounds I finally registered he was making.

As for the rest of the wounds: he’d been cut up badly, and in what could only have been seconds, given the time it’d taken me to get down the alley. But I could see, too, that it hadn’t been a frenzied act; madness might or might not have been involved, but a method of some kind certainly had been. One of the wounds, for instance, ran down his right arm from the shoulder to the elbow, slicing through coat, clothing, and muscle like warmed-up butter. Bone gleamed white through the red. That would’ve been when he’d screamed, at a guess: when she’d turned on him and turned the tables. Then the stab to the throat, silencing him. And then, the rest of the damage.

The crotch of his jeans was a sodden, ragged hole, and the source of most of the blood, although he was leaking from a couple of torso wounds too. When I looked across the alley, I could see something else lying wet and steaming in the snow. A chunk of blood-soaked denim, and something else. It was too shadowy to see it in any more detail, thankfully, but lying a few inches from it was something small and egg-shaped, and I quickly looked away.

A very sharp blade, indeed. She’d grabbed his groin and sliced—quickly and surely, presumably without injuring herself—then stabbed him and run. If I hadn’t turned up, I suspected she’d have taken a lot more time and been considerably more inventive. What she’d done to Ginger hadn’t been about self-defence. It had been punishment.

Boots clicked on the cobbles, down in the shadows she’d run into. I could hear the sound of cars up on Cairn Street, the hiss and swish of their tyres on the road, but it seemed very distant suddenly, and China Row seemed far colder and lonelier than it usually did.

She was holding two knives when she came out of the darkness. Both had long, thin, black triangular blades. Old-style commando knives, I guessed. One glistened and dripped.

I stood up and stepped back from Ginger, who let out a last whistling breath which then rattled in his ruined throat. I hadn’t realised how much noise he’d been making—relatively, at least—until he stopped and

alley was silent.

She stood there, very still. There wasn’t, as far as I could see, a drop of blood on her, not counting the knife and the fingers of one preternaturally white—latex-gloved, I realised—hand. Her face was very pale, haloed by her dark hair, and utterly calm, almost like a Madonna. Dark eyes, studying me.

She cocked her head, lips pursed. I was a problem: not a threat, because she clearly knew how to deal with one of those and could have caught and finished me long before I reached the alley, but a puzzle, a conundrum. I’d come to help her, after all. And I wasn’t trying to run, or screaming for help or cops (which, in my experience, are rarely the same thing). All that, I suppose, is why she hesitated; for a few seconds, she had as little idea as me what to do next.

And so I said: “Fancy a drink?”

The corner of her mouth went up; then she showed her teeth in a small laugh, and nodded. “All right,” she said, then motioned with her blade in the general direction of Mulligan’s. “Not there, though.”

“Obviously.”

She moved across the alley, moved one of the bins aside, and took out a rucksack, shrugging it on. “Know anywhere near the bus station?”

“Yeah.”

“Lead on, then.”

 

 

 

But not from too great a distance, she added without actually saying it aloud. She was no more than a couple of paces behind me when we came out onto one of the city’s more populated streets, the knives out of sight but no doubt ready to be deployed at a second’s notice.

“You

broad-minded?” I said, nodding in the direction of the Black Swan.

“Take a guess.”

I guessed she was, and led the way into the bar.

Once upon a time, the Swan had been the hub of the city’s queer community; these days it was more of an outlier, although it still had a loyal, if ageing, clientele of the drag queens who’d frequented it in its heyday. But when they’d built the new coach station—twenty years ago now, so not really so new—the Black Swan had had the good luck to be on the corner beside it, giving it a new lease of life from people just arriving or departing who wanted the permanent chill chased out of their bones.

“Get us a drink,” she said. “Bottle of Beck’s for me.”

I did as she told me to, plus a double Jameson’s for myself—the Swan sadly didn’t run to Bushmills—and joined her at the out-of-the-way corner table she’d selected. I didn’t sit too close; I didn’t want to crowd her, having seen how swiftly and decisively she reacted to anything she interpreted as a threat. Not to mention gruesomely. I had a mental flash of the dark, clotted thing lying in the alley a few yards from Ginger, and that little egg-shaped object beside it. I took a larger sip than I usually manage of the Jameson’s, and wished I’d ordered a triple.

The girl, meanwhile, had picked up her beer. She’d scooped up a couple of the paper napkins the Black Swan’s staff left on their tables—they serve food within certain hours—and wrapped it ’round the bottle’s neck. No fingerprints that way. Good at covering her tracks, this one.

“You’ve done this before, haven’t you?” I said.

She raised an eyebrow. “Done what? Gone for a drink with a strange man in a gay bar?”

“What you did in the alley back there.”

“Keep your voice down.” She wasn’t even looking at me while she said it, but scanning the bar; even so, and despite the lack of volume or inflection, I knew that was a threat. She spent a little longer taking in her surroundings, then returned her attention to me. “You only just realised

 that?”

I sighed. “Suppose I always knew it. Ginger didn’t stand a chance, did he?”

“You’re sorry for him now?”

I suppose a part of me was, having seen how thoroughly and brutally she’d dealt with him; besides, anyone dying like that is going to look so lost and alone in those last few seconds it’s hard not to feel a glimmer of pity, whatever they’ve done. But I shook my head. “He got what he paid for,” I said, which was just as true.

“That he did.” She smiled for the first time, and there was something oddly genuine and warm about it; in that moment she just looked like a girl, barely old enough to drink legally, who’d just heard a joke she liked. “They always do.”

“Right.”

I hadn’t meant to sound sceptical, but her smile faded. “Hey. You saw what happened. You didn’t come chasing after us for his sake, did you?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Well, then.” Another swig of Beck’s, and she leant back in her seat. “This is nice.”

“Really?” I’ve heard the Swan called a lot of things over the years, but never that.

“Mm.” She closed her eyes. “Actually being able to relax in someone’s company—’specially a man’s. Don’t think I’ve ever done that bef—”

I only moved to pick up my drink, but that was enough; her eyes snapped open and she sat up straight, one hand in her pocket where her knife lived. After a moment she breathed out and settled back again. “Sorry,” I muttered.

“Forget it.” A sigh. “Force of habit, I suppose. I’m out of practice relaxing. But it’s nice, all the same. Nice to be honest with someone for once.”

“Yeah, I can see that wouldn’t be an option.”

“It’s easier with 

 women,” she said. “You can tell some of the truth. Cry them a river about abuse or whatever. But even then—it tends to mean having to play the victim.” When she looked at me this time, all the warmth that had seemed to accumulate between us was gone; I think I actually drew back from her a tiny bit, hunched inside my parka against the sudden chill. “And I don’t like that.”

Sometimes it’s better to say nothing; I couldn’t think of any response that wouldn’t have sounded either fatuous or like clumsy, unsubtle probing. So I waited instead; if she wanted to talk, she would.

“I never do anything,” she said. “Well, you saw that yourself, back in that shithole bar.”

“Hey,” I said. “That shithole bar’s my local.”

She gave me a look that rendered words superfluous. “I just need to go in and have a drink. That’s all I ever seem to need do. Have a drink and look halfway pretty—that’s all any girl needs to do in the right place, right time of night. Sometimes you don’t even need that. And they come trotting after you. Just like that little creep did tonight.” She smiled now; it would have been warm and welcoming if not for the context. “They think they’re going to have their fun with you.”

“And you disabuse them.”

She nodded. “Pretty much, yeah.” She looked mildly impressed that I knew a fancy word like ‘disabuse.’ Well, as she’d said, opportunities for this kind of conversation couldn’t be common, so it must be nice to feel as though you were talking to someone with half a brain. “It’s very easy,” she said. “Because they think it will be. They think it’s going to play out one way, and before they know it, it’s playing out the other. That’s half the battle right there; by the time they even realise they’re in trouble—”

“Their knackers are lying on the floor,” I said.

She actually laughed out loud at that—a genuine laugh, like her smile a minute ago. “You’re funny,” she said, with what sounded like real—affection? No, that would be going too far. Warmth, anyway. “But yeah. I mean, not that I can’t handle myself in a fight, if one of them did know what’d hit him. I know that because I have. But nine times out of ten—ninety-nine out of a hundred, really—they never get that far.”

“Ninety-nine out of a hundred?” I said. “You’ve done that many?”

The smile faded. “I’ve actually lost count,” she said. “I’ll go somewhere new, enjoy myself for a bit, then catch the bus or the train or whatever before anyone starts asking questions. You’ve just got to keep moving.”

“Like a shark?” I heard myself say. “If you stop moving, you die?”

“That’s a myth,” she said. “About sharks. But—” Another smile. “I suppose, yeah. I kinda like that idea. And if you think about it, it’s a kind of public service. Cleaning up the streets.”

“How long have you been—”

“No idea. Feels like forever. Next question.” There was a sudden, brittle coldness in her voice: I don’t want to explore that topic, it said. Move on if you know what’s good for you.

“All right,” I said. “Why, then?”

She gave me a long, cold look: I guessed—and it shouldn’t have been hard to—she found this question no less intrusive than the one before it. I remembered the knives and sat very still; I wanted to look around for potential escape routes if she went for me, but I was afraid to break eye contact. It was hard to gauge how long that moment lasted, but in the end she reached for her beer, picked it up again and took a swig. “A man raped me,” she said. “He raped me and he got away with it. So I went after him and I punished him myself, and then I ran away, so that the police couldn’t get me. And since then I’ve got by by doing the same thing over and over again. Your friend, back in the alley there?”

“He wasn’t my friend —”

“Emptied his wallet out first. That’s how I do it. Revenge and money.”

She finished her beer and put the empty bottle down. “No?”

“What do you mean, no?”

“Is that a neat enough explanation or not? How about this? It was my daddy. He used to molest me when I was a little girl. Died before I ever got the chance to do anything about him. So now I’m getting my own back. Again: plenty of men like that out there, and there’s nowhere near

enough being done about them. Which works better for you? Both are pretty clichéd, I know. The childhood trauma angle makes me more sympathetic, doesn’t it?”

“I just asked why.”

“You did, yes. But those were the answers you were expecting, weren’t they? I was a victim, so now I’m a monster. I told you before—I don’t play the victim. I hate that. That isn’t why I do this.”

“So what is?”

“Does it matter? You want an explanation. X happened, therefore Y. It isn’t like that.” She leant forward. “There was somebody I thought was the one I’d marry, and he dumped me. Or ghosted me after one date. You wouldn’t feel so sorry for me then, would you? And you’d be a lot more scared of me.”

I wasn’t exactly feeling free of fear just then as it was. “Is that true?” I said. But she just smiled.

“Maybe,” she said, “there isn’t any explanation. Maybe I just do it because I like it.”

I think—I can never be sure, of course—but I think that she didn’t know, herself. Or she’d forgotten, along with how long she’d been doing it. I wondered how old she was; even under the lights in the Black Swan, which were brighter than those in Mulligan’s, she looked no older than her early twenties. How many Gingers could there have been for her? Maybe she didn’t get old: maybe she was a kind of Flying Dutchwoman, condemned to walk the earth eternally luring predators to their doom, like a landbound siren with a sharp knife. Too many whiskies talking, there: I shook my head.

“What?” she demanded.

“Nothing,” I said. “Just . . . I suppose you’re right. It doesn’t really matter why.”

“That’s right,” she said. “This is what I do. It’s what I am.”

I thought, again, of sharks; moving, killing, and moving on. Or maybe it wasn’t even that. It’s what I am, she’d said. She was a function; she was what she did. Like a machine. This little encounter was an

aberration: what had happened in the alley was the norm.

“So what happens now?” I said at last.

She shrugged. “Are you going to go to the police?”

“I don’t think we’d be here if I was, would we?”

“Do you not think so?”

“It’s a bit of a public place for a murder,” I said.

“It wouldn’t be murder. It’d be simple self-preservation on my part.”

“The police wouldn’t agree.”

“The police.” She gave a short laugh. “Yeah, well. They’ve never been a problem in the past.” She settled back in her chair and gave me a calculating look. “You’ve seen how fast I work. And I didn’t pick this seat by accident. We’re tucked away, out of sight. And you’re the one who went to the bar. How many people here do you think would remember my face?”

Under the parka, under the sweater, under the shirt, under the vest, I felt sweat run down my spine.

“You’re thinking you could call out for help. And I mean, yeah, you could try. You could definitely try. Like I just said, you’ve seen how fast I am.”

I licked my lips, which were very dry. I badly wanted to take a sip of my drink, but I was afraid to move. She was right. It had taken her seconds to practically dismantle Ginger. She wouldn’t need anywhere near as much time for me.

“Oh, it’ll be a quicker death than he got,” she said. “You’re not like him. You’re just a loose end. Nothing personal. Just covering my tracks. You’ve got a few layers on there, but . . .” She shook her head. “My knives are good. Very sharp, very strong. And I know exactly where to slide it in. Straight into your heart. You wouldn’t make a sound. It would look like a quick hug, if anyone even bothered glancing our way.”

She settled back and added, distantly: “And then I get up and walk out, get the first coach to somewhere else. I get off, somewhere along the

 way, find a place with a bathroom and make a few quick changes.” She tapped the rucksack beside her. “Makeup. Hair dye. A change of clothes. And then go back to wait for the next coach. Everyone’s looking for a brunette in a long coat, but I’ll be a blonde in leather, or a redhead in a hiking jacket by then. Or . . .” She shrugged. “You can take your pick. That’s if anyone here’s even noticed you by that point. But none of that’ll matter to you, will it?”

A shark. A machine. A process, repeated over and over again, and she didn’t even know why. Despite everything, I almost felt sorry for her, but I didn’t say that and hoped to God she couldn’t see any sign of pity on my face. I was pretty sure she would kill me if she did.

“Will it?” she said.

“No,” I said. “I suppose not.”

She looked at me for a few seconds, toying with her beer bottle (still keeping that paper napkin between her fingers and the glass); I felt more sweat trickling down my spine and wondered what she expected to see in my face and what she’d do about it if she did. I tried to keep my expression blank, but in the end she smiled. “You are a cool one,” she said. “Especially for a drunk.”

I shrugged. It seemed safest.

“That, or you’ve just got a good poker face.”

I shrugged again, for the same reason.

“I don’t want to kill you,” she went on, “but I’m struggling to find a good argument why I shouldn’t.”

“Still very public out here,” I said. “Still a risk you’d be seen.”

“True,” she said. “But we could walk out of here, then down an alleyway. Plenty of them around the coach station. Two minutes’ work before I get the coach.”

“And you think I’d go with you? When staying put’s my best chance?”

“I can be very persuasive.”

“I bet.” I reached for my whisky, very slowly. I couldn’t wait any longer for another sip. “I’ve already said I’m not gonna go to the police.”

“And why

 should I believe that?”

“Because he deserved it. Ginger did.”

“Come on. Can’t you do better than that?”

“Maybe I lost someone to a scumbag like him,” I said. “How’s that? Maybe that’s why I’m drinking myself to death in shitholes like Mulligan’s.”

“I thought you said it wasn’t a shithole.”

“I said it was my local,” I said. “Not the same thing. It’s different when I call it that. So there’s one reason. Or, hang on, here’s another—maybe I’ve got a daughter I haven’t seen in years and you’re the right age and you remind me of her. How would that be?”

That got me an eye-roll by way of a response.

“Or how about this one?” I said. “I just don’t give a shit.”

She laughed. “That’s a good one. But”—she pointed the bottle at me—“if you really didn’t give a shit you wouldn’t have gone chasing after Ginger in the first place.”

She had a point.

“Not looking good for you, is it?” she said.

“Suppose not,” I admitted. “But what’s it to you if I did go to them? You said yourself, they’ve never been a problem.”

“I don’t like tempting fate,” she said. “Hm. What to do? What to do?” She extended a forefinger and began tick-tocking it back and forth from side to side. “Ip, dip, sky, blue, who’s it? Not you.” She pursed her lips and cocked her head, looking over my shoulder. I had a brief, momentary fear there was someone behind me, an accomplice, and that in a second the edge of a knife would slide across my throat.

Then she grinned. Suddenly, she was just a young girl again, and the idea of her being any harm to anybody was ridiculous. “Oh, what the hell,” she said. “Go on. You can live.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re funny. I don’t get to have a proper break very often. This has been nice. Better get on, though.”

She stood up, then hesitated. She rummaged in her pocket, took out a couple of

 high-denomination notes and dropped them on the table. “You’re a lucky man,” she said, then leant over and kissed my cheek. It was like ice, and I tensed up, convinced that the knife was going to slide between my ribs after all, but it didn’t, and she straightened up. “Have a drink on me,” she said, “lucky man.”

And that was it. She turned away and walked out of the Black Swan, into the night and (presumably) towards the coach station, and I never even got her name. I don’t suppose it would have been her real one, anyway, even if she still remembered what that was. No one else in the bar even looked up to see her go.

As for me, I finished the rest of the Jameson’s, then went on out in search of another bar that served Black Bush. Have a drink on me, lucky man, she’d said. So I did.

 

 “The Pelt”

Annie Neugebauer

 

 

 

The dogs hadn’t barked.

Debra knew because she’d been up all night fuming about the fight she’d had with Mike. Even if she had caught a few minutes of sleep here and there, she still would’ve woken up. A little whining or whimpering would’ve done it, but the dogs hadn’t made a sniff. As she stared at the strange animal shape on the electric fence, she wondered why.

When she came out to the porch in the predawn dim with a mug of coffee so hot she had to hold it by the handle, she thought at first that a calf had gotten stuck on the fence somehow. It wasn’t surprising that the fence’s charge was down. They were constantly behind on something, and the fence was as finicky as a housecat in the barn. Truth be told, the place was too big for the two of them. A hundred and thirty acres for two people with no kids was ludicrous, but when the love of your life tells you this is his dream, you make it work.

And so they’d bought a gorgeous house on some land in Anderson, Texas—a town so tiny Debra instead called it by the nearest small town’s name: Navasota, ten miles southwest and still in the boonies. It was the type of property people called “land,” not a ranch or a farm. It was the lifestyle of those wealthy enough to be nostalgic for the good old days they’d never experienced.

They’d stocked it with cattle, a chicken coop, a few horses, two dogs, innumerable cats, and even some fish for the little pond. With two people to maintain everything, and Mike still working as a vet, it was no wonder the fence was dead as often as it was charged.

The dark shape against the fence didn’t move. Debra stared, trying to force it into a recognizable form. After a few moments, she began to think it had no head. She went back inside to grab a flashlight. She shucked her flip-flops, got a pair of socks, and shook out her boots before sliding them on.

Grasshoppers vaulted as she walked through the yard. Her flashlight beam caught their movement like the backsides of tiny fleeing ghosts. The most persistent crickets of the night creaked out their cryptograms, and the air was ripe with the scent of sulfuric water but no under-notes of manure. The cattle hadn’t been up to the house in a while. So what was this thing without a head?

Her light traced it, and soon she realized it wasn’t actually an animal but a pelt draped over the fence. In the off-yellow beam of her flashlight she couldn’t determine a color. Something middling, probably, not black or white. It was large but not overwhelmingly so. It was the pelt only. The feet, head, and tail had been detached, so Debra couldn’t pose a guess at what type of animal it had come from. Why was it here?

Debra reached out

to touch the fur but hesitated. Was it drying, or curing, or whatever the process of preserving an animal hide might need? And if so, why on their property? Neither she nor Mike hunted. Was it a message of some kind? Someone had to have placed it here, which meant that someone had walked over a mile from the road and their gated drive. And she’d looked out at this portion of the property last night, from their bedroom’s French doors. Wouldn’t she have seen it then? Had someone hung it here in the middle of the night?

She saw the random, vivid image of the animal, whatever it might be, still out there running around without its fur or skin. An unidentifiable living hunk of muscle, fat, and veins. A sound escaped her, something she’d intended to be a word that instead came out formless. She felt suddenly worried, threatened, and lifted her light.

The fence looked whole, wooden posts of about chest height holding up the four lengths of wire. She didn’t see any obvious downed spots or gaps, but that didn’t mean anything. ...