The Best Horror of the Year Volume Six by Ellen Datlow

Author:Ellen Datlow [Datlow, Ellen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Anthology, Gothic
ISBN: 9781597805032
Publisher: Night Shade Books[Start]
Published: 2014-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

THE FOX

CONRAD WILLIAMS

The wind came for us as soon as we laid our heads on the pillows, as if it had been waiting for that moment. It spanked against the canvas, testing the guy ropes that were meant to keep the tent grounded. I kept thinking it would tear free at any moment and sail off into the sky. Kit was sleeping. Perhaps the weather didn’t affect her as much as it did me, or maybe she was able to shut it out; she was often talking to me about the powers of meditation. I concentrated on sleep but succeeded only in detecting another sound scampering around beneath the howl of the wind. It overcame the squeak of the tyre on the rope hanging from the oak branch, and the lowing of the cows in the next field, aggrieved at being out in such violent weather. It was something stealthier than that. Something that I almost dismissed as nothing, but for the way it kept coming back, like a heartbeat; trotting, slick. It might have been my wife’s breathing, and I might have believed that had I been tired enough.

I got out of bed and stumbled in the dark for the torch that I realised was still in the car down by the farmhouse. I checked on the children, Megan and Lucy, but they were softly snoring. You could always tell Lucy was deep because she would be murmuring, babbling, sometimes even laughing in her sleep. Her eyes were wide open. I was exactly the same when I was a baby. I bent over her and kissed her but she did not respond. There was a moment of panic when I thought that there would be something wrong, but she was breathing; she blinked when I brushed a fingertip against her eyelashes. It was as if she were doing what I had been doing, minutes before, listening intently to the scream of the weather, studying it almost, maybe identifying something that shifted beneath the patterns that were laid over the countryside. And I heard it again now. A beat against the flow; an anti-rhythm.

I went to the entrance that I had assiduously tied down not two hours previously, and started unpicking the knots. The tent smelled of old smoke from the stove that had been forced back down the flue by the wind. I paused as the last loop slipped free of the toggles. It was weird, feeling on the threshold between comfort and open miles of thrashing wild. Quickly, I ducked outside and loosely tethered the tent flaps. I could see nothing: cloud cover prevented any moonlight from picking out the shape of the farmhouse or the trees, though I could hear them hissing their shock over the ferocity in the sky. I felt afraid in that moment, at the glib way in which we had pitched ourselves against nature; thrown ourselves into the pit of the dark, separated from all it contained by one thin, trembling wall of canvas.

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