BEST NEW HORROR - VOLUME #28 by Stephen Jones

Author:Stephen Jones [Jones, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PS Publishing Ltd
Published: 2018-04-20T22:00:00+00:00

In retrospect, I wasn’t sure what I expected from the meeting. It only validated a hatred I was going to feel anyway for men whose evil came not from some grand design, but cost-benefit analysis and spite. It didn’t bring Drew back. It didn’t dissipate the pall of mourning that settled over our home like a cloud that might never leave.

Most of all, it was never going to dissuade Katee of her notion that Drew was not dead, a fixation she persisted in nurturing as the months went by. To her, everyone had conspired out of a growing sense of inconvenience to bury her brother alive. It put me in the worst position imaginable— hoping Drew had died within the first hour of the accident, that he’d staggered dazed from his car and tumbled to a swift and merciful end in the cold black water at the bottom of the shaft. Better this than lingering to dehydrate and starve.

Only Katee didn’t see it happening that way, either.

“He’s alive,” she said in late April. “I’d know if he wasn’t.”

As Ginny and I felt like the enemy, reminding her that denial was a normal phase of loss, and would pass.

“He’s alive,” she said in May.

As Ginny and I wondered if we shouldn’t get her to a grief counsellor.

“He’s alive,” she said in June and July.

The question was, was Katee, anymore?

This was her nineteenth summer, and it bore no resemblance to the previous eighteen. It was as if she no longer had friends, or anyone she wanted to date. She had secured no job or summer internship, not even with me. Last year, I’d hired her as my assistant while on the road from seminar to corporate seminar. Not this year—but then, I’d cut my schedule to the bone.

Katee had her bedroom, and that was all she wanted. Its window overlooked our street, but she now rejected the view, and covered the glass with black construction paper. When we asked if she didn’t want to paper over it with a poster, something with a view of a beach or ski slope, she pointed at the solid black and said, “Why? That’s what Drew sees now.”

As Ginny held her through some very long nights.

Me, I mostly wondered how to bring her back.

She’d always been the most forward-looking person I’d ever known. Her course of study at Carnegie Mellon was called Transition Design. Katee wanted to steer cities and systems and products towards sustainability rather than using everything up and throwing it away as fast as possible.

Now her sketchbooks gathered dust.

We’d all gone down that hole, and one way or another, had to find our way out.

Wesley McNabb probably understood this as well as anyone.

As for the rest of what he’d had to say, the parts that came down to supposition and rumour, I wasn’t sure what I believed and what I didn’t. Or rather, what I wasn’t prepared to believe.

Ginny, however, had taken a lot more on board than I realised that July evening I came back from Wilkes-Barre with the ugly history behind Tecumseh #24.

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