The Best Horror of the Year – Volume One

Except when I get up to go to the bathroom, Harry isn't on the couch.

I look on the verandah. No Harry. I step out onto the verandah and look in the front yard. No Harry. Feeling a little nervous now, I walk round the left side of the house, round the back yard with the washing machine and the sink, continue round the house and back to the front yard.

No Harry.

I go to the gate-which someone has slid open. Not very much, but wide enough for a small boy to slip through.

Now I look back on it, I'm almost certain I shut that gate. Normally, I slide it shut every time, because if I don't the soi dogs get in and mangle my lawn. And besides, keeping the gate shut means Harry stays in the garden.

Maybe he opened it. Maybe I left it open.

Stories like this need a sin, don't they? It's the moralizing part in the urban legend. Don't sleep with your boyfriend. Don't speak to strangers. Don't steal. So maybe leaving the gate open was my sin-or Harry's sin.

Or maybe it was opened by… someone else.

I go out on the soi, look left and right. The soi dogs are sleeping at the far end of the soi. A couple of cars are parked: my neighbor's dark blue Kia, and the lawyer's silver Corolla. Clouds are dark to the west, above the sleeping soi dogs. Thunder rumbles.

I can't see Harry.

You can probably imagine my state right at that moment. If you have kids, I know that you know exactly what I was feeling. All parents have horribly vivid nightmares about nasty things happening to their kids.

I ran to the end of the soi and looked down the large road that runs through my moobahn. I couldn't see Harry. I ran to the entrance to the moobahn, ignoring the dogs barking at me over fences, and the looks I got from my neighbors. When I reached the security guard on duty, I asked him if he'd seen a little boy going out of the moobahn. He said no, and for a moment I relaxed, thinking Harry had to be somewhere in the moobahn and all I had to do was find him.

And then, as I looked along the entrance road-around two hundred yards long, leading to the main road beyond-I saw a black minivan waiting to turn left: indicator flashing, sunlight gleaming off the solar film in the back windows, thin puffs of blue exhaust as the engine burbled.

I'll be honest with you: I can't be sure quite what happened next. Strong emotion has a way of warping memory around it. I know I ran along the entrance road toward the van-not shouting, just ru

The van turned off onto the main road before I got within a hundred yards of it.

I didn't stop, of course. The next clear memory I have is reaching the end of the road and looking left, with that kind of hollow feeling you get when adrenaline has drowned everything else in your head.

The van was pulled over to the side of the road about fifty yards away, engine idling. It had stopped next to a huge clump of bamboo by the edge of the rice paddy. The bamboo rustled as the wind shook it.

Harry was standing behind the van, holding a half-drunk bottle of milk and bawling.

I ran to the van, still incapable of coherent thought, snatched Harry up and hugged him hard enough so that he yelled and hit me with his bottle of milk on the side of my head.

Then I thought about who was in the van and I turned round, clutching Harry hard. The sun was bright, and I couldn't see anything of the inside of the van except a slice of the floor near the door-even though both the mid-section door and the passenger door were open.

I took a half-step toward the van. I know it doesn't make any sense, but that's what I did. And you know, I wasn't thinking about crazed Chinese organleggers, or ca

No, what I was thinking about was the fact that the handle of the sliding door in the middle of the van was bent round like half a pretzel, and that in front of the door was a large footprint, squished into the soft mud in the side of the road. I looked hard at that footprint. Believe me.

And then three things happened at the same time. The first was that I heard a snap from behind me, the sound of a length of bamboo cracking. One of those thick stems of bamboo. The second was that Harry said, "Monkey! Look, Daddy! Monkey! Monkey!" The third was that I saw a spot of bright red liquid just inside the van, glistening crimson against the steel floor where the sun caught it.

I didn't turn round. I was looking at the footprint, and thinking about big yellow teeth, and how I'd told Harry that monkeys didn't like to be stared at.

"Monkey!" Harry repeated. He bounced against me. "Monkey! Monkey! Monkey! Daddy, look!" Then he laughed in delight and hit me on the side of my head again.

The bamboo rustled. There was a sound like something dragging against the ground.

"Monkey, bye, bye!" Harry said. "Daddy, bye, bye, monkey!"

I waited, then turned round. One of the bamboo stems on the side of the road was broken, snapped in half and crushed-what you'd expect if something heavy had pressed on it. There was a pair of footprints in the mud nearby. Two more footprints led down the bank of the rice paddy, heading toward the bright green rice and muddy water. Between the footprints were lines in the mud, like you'd get if you dragged something behind you. On the far side of the paddy, the thick brush waved. The top of a wild banana tree quivered. It might have been something pushing through the brush. (Something big.) But then again, it might have just been the wind from the approaching storm.

Then it started raining.

The police never identified the van, or traced its owner. The plates came from a Toyota Camry that had been stolen a month before, and the serial number on the engine block apparently belonged to a van scrapped six months before. The blood traces didn't lead anywhere either. The lead cop told me afterward the spots in the back came from at least six different people. The gaffer tape could have been bought anywhere, and the same went for the child-size Ultraman t-shirt.

They kept asking me about the door handle. But after they'd checked my prints against the ones they found, I stopped getting suspicious looks. I didn't touch the handle-but someone did. And whoever it was, they gripped it so hard they bent the metal like it was hot plastic.

I didn't tell the police about the footprints, and as they didn't ask me anything about them, I assume the rain must have washed them away. I think I'm glad about that.

You see, those footprints weren't shoeprints, or bootprints. They were footprints, and they looked almost exactly like the footprints of a very large, barefoot man with long toes.

Almost… but not quite.

Some years ago, I read a story in the

Bangkok Post. It's dropped off their archive pages now, but if you contacted them directly, they could probably send you a copy. (I told you this was a true story.)

I can't remember the exact wording, but the story itself and the accompanying photo are still very clear in my mind. The photo showed a small crocodile in a pen at the Samut Prakarn Crocodile Farm and Zoo. The croc was basking in the sun, managing the difficult task of looking both lazy and vicious, and a local government official was standing close behind it-but not too close. The official was beaming, and pointing to the croc's head with a length of rattan.

They'd caught the croc in Ayutthaya -a city about thirty klicks north of Bangkok. It must have escaped from one of the crocodile farms around there, and rather than head for the Chao Phraya, it decided to swim into a storm drain under a large market in the center of the tourist area of Ayutthaya. And there it lived for several years, eating rats, monitor lizards, snakes, and all the garbage washed into the drain from the market. A word about Thai storm drains here: they're square concrete ditches about two/three feet on an edge, and the top is covered with concrete slabs. At my university, the monitor lizards use them for ru