Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (46 page)

    "Sorry," she whimpers.

    "Just… sssh," her father says.

    
It's the move,
Chloe thinks, chants to herself. She lies back flat, and the Miracle stretches as much as he can stretch beside her.

    "The Pony Man" is on again, so the same CD has played through twice, but only Chloe seems to have noticed. She's listening very closely, like the song says, so she'll hear the Pony Man if he comes. But all she hears is their station wagon's tires
shushing
on the nighttime road, which she imagines to be black and wet, like one of those oil puddles birds get stuck in on nature shows. She's fairly sure she can hear her father's thumbs, too, drumming the beat on the steering wheel, and if she closes her eyes, she can see his stain-y SHOW ME! shirt and the wonderful, white prickles around his happy mouth. He has told Chloe he's secretly a cat, and the prickles are whiskers he keeps trimmed so Mom won't know.

    He's been shaving more closely lately, though. Smiling less.

    Then she realizes she can hear her mother, crying now. Even the cry is new, a low-down bear-grunt, and Chloe turns towards the Miracle's back and pokes it.

    "Tomorrow I'll be half as old as you," she whispers. The Miracle doesn't respond. So she adds, "The next day, I'll be
more
than half."

    The Miracle still doesn't respond, and she wonders if he's sleeping. His back is hard and curved like an armadillo shell.

    "Catching up," she tries, a very little bit louder, and as she speaks she glances into the seatback above her head, as though she could see through it, through the cartons to her parents. As though they could see her.

    "You'll never catch up," the Miracle murmurs, just as quiet, and Chloe thinks she sees his head tilt towards the front, too.

    "I can if you wait."

    "Will you just go to
sleep?"
he hisses, and Chloe startles, squirms back. The Miracle's whole body drums to the road or the steady beat of her father's thumbs. But when he speaks again, he's using his nice voice. "It'll make the drive go faster."

    Chloe almost tells him she doesn't want it to go faster. She likes the way-back, always has. Shut in with her brother, Gordyfoot's voice floating over and among them, her parents close but not with them, the stars igniting and the hours stretched longer and thinner than hours should be able to go. Silly Putty hours.

    Chloe doesn't remember falling asleep, has no idea how long she sleeps. But she dreams of bird-feet hands. Hands, but the fingers too thin, yellow-hard.
Her
hands?
Reaching through the bars towards the frantic, fluttering thing, all red and beating its pathetic little wings…

    A bump jolts her awake, or else the
cold,
that
old
cold, she almost cries out, wraps herself in her own arms, blinks, holds on, drags her brain back to itself.
Air-conditioning, it's just her father blasting the air-conditioning to stay awake, it's not in her chest, there are no hands in her chest.
Chloe's eyes fly all the way open, and just like that, she knows.

    She
knows.

    
They're not my parents.

    She knows because "The Pony Man" is on again, the CD repeating,
how many times, now?
She knows because her father
isn't
tapping the steering wheel, which he always does, always always
always,
especially to Gordyfoot. She knows because her mother would never let it get this cold, her mother can't stand the cold, they always wind up fighting about it on night-drives and then swatting each other off the temperature controls and laughing and sometimes, when they think Chloe and the Miracle are sleeping, talking love-talk, very quietly.

    They are talking now, but not that way. And in their changed voices. Her mother's bumpy, grunty and low. Her father's a snarl. Someone else's snarl.

    Most of all, she knows because her mother's eyes - her
real
mother's eyes - are
green,
not blue. She very nearly screams, but jams her fist in her mouth, holds dead still. But the realization won't go away.

    
They aren't my parents.

    It's ridiculous, a bird-feet hands dream. She wiggles furiously, trying to shake the realization loose.

    But in the front seat, the new people - the ones that were her parents - are grunting. Snarl-whispering. And Chloe's mother's eyes are green.

    At least "The Pony Man" finally goes off. But the next song is the "Minstrel of the Dawn" one. Another song about someone coming.

    
Stupid,
Chloe insists her to herself.
This is stupid.
She feels around for the snack bag her father has let the Miracle stow back here, even though they've already brushed their teeth. The spiny, sticky carpet of the way-back scratches against her palms, and the engine shudders underneath her. Her hand smacks down on the paper bag, which makes a little
pop.
Chloe quivers, holds her breath, and up front, the grunting and the whispering stop.

    Chloe doesn't move, doesn't breathe. Neither does anyone else in the car. They are four frozen people hurtling through the empty black. Even the CD has gone silent - because her parents have shut it off, Chloe realizes. It is so quiet inside the car that she half-thinks she can hear the cornfields passing, the late-summer stalks looming over the road like an army of aliens, an invasion that didn't come but grew, their bodies grasshopper-thin, leaves heavy, fruit swollen fat and dangling.

    "Chlo?" says her not-father, in his almost-snarl.

    Nearly faint from holding her breath, Chloe says nothing. After a second, she hears rustling, but whether from the corn or up front, she can't tell.

    "See?" her mother whispers. "I told you. I told you, I told you, I-"

    "Oh, for Christ's sake," says her father. "Five years of this.
Five years.
You can't really bel-"

    "But I can. And so do you. You always have."

    "Just shut up, Carol."

    "He's coming."

    "Carol-"

    "He's coming. Face it. Face it. He's-"

    
"Shut up!"

    The CD blares to life, and Chloe almost bangs her head against the seatback in surprise. Her breathing comes in spasms, and she can't get it calm. "The Pony Man" is playing again.
Why,
she wonders?
And why is she minding, anyway? According to her mom and dad, this is the first song she ever knew. The one they sang her to sleep with when she woke up screaming when she was a baby.

    Then Chloe thinks,
Shut up?
Her fingers grab so hard at the carpet that she pulls some out, little quills like a porcupine's.
When has her father ever said that, to anyone?

    
And why is her mother laughing?

    If that is laughing. It's mostly grunt. Panic breathing.

    What Chloe wants to do, right now, is wake the Miracle. She can't believe he isn't awake already, but he hasn't stirred, still lies there with his back curved away and his scar smiling at her. If she wakes him, she knows, she'll have to tell him. Explain, somehow. And she's worried they'll hear.

    Instead, she lifts herself - so slowly, as silently as she can, matching her movements to the
shush
of the tires - onto her elbows again. Turns over onto her stomach. Raises her head, then raises it more. Until she's above the seatback.

    She's hoping she can see.
One good glimpse,
she thinks.
Then she'll know. Then she can decide what to do.

    But her father has packed the boxes too tight. There aren't even cracks between them. The only empty space is at the very tiptop. Pushing all the way up, Chloe straightens, and her beads
clank.

    This time, she very nearly throws herself out the back window. She's ready to. If they turn… if they pull to the shoulder and stop… she'll grab the Miracle and yank him awake, and they'll
run.

    But the car neither stops nor slows. The CD player continues to blare. The "Minstrel of the Dawn", who'll say your fortune when he comes. If her parents are talking, they're whispering so low that Chloe can't hear them. Apparently, they haven't realized she's moving around. Not yet.

    Stretching, gripping her beads to keep them still, Chloe tries to get her eyes level with the opening at the top of the boxes. The little crack. But all see can see is the dark inside dome-light, the tiniest sliver of windshield, at least until a truck passes going the other way, its lights flooding the car and shooting shadows across the ceiling, but the shadows could be corn, seatbacks, surely her parents aren't that thin or that long. It's all Chloe can do to keep from burying her head between her knees in the tornado-position they taught her in kindergarten.

    The words are out of her mouth almost before she's thought them or had time to plan.

    "I have to go to the bathroom."

    For a second, she just sits, horrified, clutching her beads.

    But she had to. She needs to see. She's smushing her beads against her chest and holding her breath again, as though any of that matters now.

    There is no response. Nothing at all. The car plunges on into the dark, and out her window the corn stalks twist their grasshopper shoulders to squirm even more tightly together, denying any glimpse of field or farmhouse behind them, so that Chloe's vision is blocked on three sides. The only way she can see is behind, the road that leads back to the home they've left.

    "I have to go to the bathroom," she says again, meaning to be louder but sounding smaller.

    This time, though, the CD shuts off, and that silence wells up from the floorboards. Chloe has begun to cry again, and this makes her angry.
It's stupid,
she thinks,
this is stupid. Or the world is a nightmare.
Either way makes her angry.

    Then comes the sigh, long and explosive, from the front seat.

    "I thought I told you to
go,"
growls not-Dad.

    "Sorry," Chloe says. "I did."

    All too soon - sooner than she thought possible, and she's seen no exit sign or prick of gas station light penetrating the leafy, squirmy blackness of the fields around her - Chloe feels the car start to slow, hears the
CLICK-click, CLICK-click
of the station wagon's blinker. In her mind, she can see it so clearly, that little green triangle-eye winking at her from the dashboard.
"It's where I keep the frog"
her father has always said, patting a spot right above the blinking turn-signal, and they'd watch it blink together, and he'd say,
"Ribbit"
in time with the clicking. Until now.

    It happens all at once, the corn parting like a curtain and the station appearing, its light so bright that Chloe's eyes water and she has to look away. The Miracle mumbles and rolls over. The light sweeps across the old-mannish wrinkle on his forehead as he dreams. Chloe knows that wrinkle like she knows the frog in the dashboard, her father's cat-whiskers, "The Pony Man". A wave of affection so wide and deep rushes through her that it is all she can do not to throw her arms around her brother's neck and bury her face there.

    Then, all at once, she goes rigid again. She hasn't heard any doors opening, they've barely stopped moving. But the silence has gone just that imperceptible bit more still. Her parents -
both of them
- are out of the car.

    Chloe whirls just in time to see the face fill the back window, black and scarved, too big, the doors yawn open and she can't help it, she scurries back, pinning herself against the seat and the boxes with her hands raised and her mouth open to scream.

    But her mother is already gone, stalking across the blacktop towards the light, the mini-mart inside the station. She doesn't look back, doesn't wave Chloe on or call to her. But for one moment, the set of those shoulders - the stoop and shake of them - is almost enough.

    
That
is
my mother,
Chloe thinks.
That is my mother crying.

    She is half out of the car before she realizes she has no idea where her father is. Whirling, she bangs her head hard against the top of the door, expecting him to be right on top of her, with new long arms that open like wings and bird-feet hands. At first, she still doesn't see him, and then she does.

    He's at the edge of the lot, right on the lip of the road where the cornfield devours the light. Like her mother, he has his back to her, and abruptly Chloe wants nothing more than to call out, lure him here.
He and Mom have been fighting,
she thinks, rubbing the back of her head, making herself breathe.
That's all it is. It's the move, Chlo. Ribbit.

    Something red flickers in his fingers. Chloe has leapt from the station wagon and is backing across the tarmac after her mother before she realizes it's a cigarette. Fast on the heels of that realization comes another.
She has never seen her father with a cigarette before. But he's been smoking lately. That's what that smell has been.