“I wrote this story after a trip to see the island of Delos, near the centre of the Cyclades archipelago in Greece,” Marshall explains. “A former holy sanctuary and mythological birthplace for Artemis and Apollo Delos, it was absolutely gorgeous: full of collapsed temples, cobbled pathways, and ruined statuary. We were told there was a rule that after the Athenians purified the land, no one was allowed to be born or die on the island.
“I was allowed to wander wherever I wanted, and, of course, having climbed to the highest point of the island, I noticed with some shock that I only had about ten minutes to make it to the harbour before the ferry departed. I was lucky enough not to have been left stranded, but something about the place, the entire situation, captured my imagination.”
“DID YOU BRING the sunscreen?”
The boat was unsteady, hurled up the height of the enormous waves cast off in the wake of the cruise ships heading to more popular destination, sliding down with a lurch that made Serena feel like fucking hurling. Not her mother, though, no, Serena’s mother had a smile like a clenched fist.
“The sunscreen, Serena. Did you bring it? It’s important, I told you it’s important.”
Nothing.
“Serena, I asked you a question: did you bring the sunscreen?”
“Yes, Mom—Jesus!—I brought the sunscreen!”
A long pause. Serena squinted. The glare of the ocean was bleak and blinding. It should have been beautiful, being out on the ocean like this, it should have been glorious—but then, Serena should have been on one of the cruise ships, she should have been wearing a neat little black bikini, should have been sunbathing on the deck, should have been staking out the side of the pool and working on her tan.
Should have been.
“That’s it, it must be, in the distance, Serena, don’t you think that must be it?”
“I guess.”
“You guess? You guess? Ha, she guesses.”
Serena rolled her eyes, and her mother ignored it for once, too fucking happy to be here, too fucking happy to be part of the crowd of tourists. Not that there were all that many of them—there wouldn’t be, would there? Really, only a handful, German, Italian, English, American—all middle-aged men with bald patches, bulbous sunburnt noses—fucking gross. Some of them clutched at guidebooks and cameras. Her mother didn’t have a camera. Her mother didn’t want anything as crass as a camera. Whatever she wanted, she wanted to see on her own.
Serena didn’t understand it. This had never been her thing, this had always been her mother’s thing. When Serena was twelve her mother had dragged her to Athens. Last year it had been Istanbul. And, okay, maybe those places had a certain charm. Maybe there had been something to the Acropolis, watching the marble changing from gold to rose to white to pale blue as it reflected the last glow of the twilight—maybe that had been just a little bit nice—but then it got back to the way things always were between them, her mother screaming at her for forgetting the sunscreen, her mother freaking out when she talked to anyone for even ten seconds. Like the hotel concierge was some paedophile. And he wasn’t, of course he wasn’t! It was just cultural, right? It was just how they were in Greece!
Fucking Carcosa.
She could have gone to Venice.
She could have gone to Barcelona. Or Paris.
Carcosa was nothing but rocks, ruins—no one went to Carcosa, not now, not anymore. A few outcroppings, a few standing pillars. Once, Serena had read, the place had been beautiful. Once they had written about the towers. They had written about the Lake of Hali.
Dim Carcosa. Lost Carcosa. Strange the night where the black stars rise.
That’s what the guidebook had said.
But what was left of it now? Rubble. An ancient junkyard. No looming towers. No Aldebaran. No Hyades. No Alar. No Hastur. No Hali. A hundred years ago the French team of archaeologists had drained the fucking thing, and why? Malaria! The Lake of Hali had been breeding fucking malaria-infested mosquitoes!
“The sunscreen,” her mother reminded her, this time her voice was sharp, cutting.
Serena looked over her shoulder at the cruise ships heading for Mykonos—the white sand beaches she’d been staring at for months in the brochures—and tried desperately to discover the secret of self-teleportation, to will herself onboard that ship and not this one, not this dinky little boat fighting the waves, the sailors all dark-haired and dark-skinned, speaking whatever fucking language they spoke, and the tourists with their cameras primed and ready—like Carcosa really meant something to them, like this was it, this was it, this was fucking Carcosa!
Fucking losers, Serena thought.
Quiet now.
Blessed, fucking peace.
Serena walked along the shoreline. Her mother was somewhere—anywhere—not here, and thank God for that. Their split had been predictable: the spilled sunscreen, her mother scrubbing away at the oil-slick sand to find something usable, rubbing gravel and who knows what else into her arms until they glistened and blistered at the same time. She was mad, absolutely mad! Serena had been ecstatic to see her storm off, arms and legs crusted like a panko chicken breast, with a trio of tourists from Germany.
Five hours, she had been told. That was all.
Five hours to kill.
Serena kicked a rock. It rolled lazily for a moment, crushing the tiny shells that littered the beach. Serena had examined them earlier, strange spiralled things, flat, gleaming shards in the shape of fans, and amongst them the petrified husks of insects. It sent a shiver up her spine, the thought of what might be wriggling in the waters.
Serena did not like the waters. They were not blue waters as they should have been, but purplish like a fed tick. The algae, she had read. Something like that. And the light here was different. Too bright, but somehow thick, like mist, substantial—you could never see too far. The black stars, a trick of that same light, because they weren’t black, not really, not stars really—something to do with the atmosphere, some sort of dust in the air, like how the northern lights could make the sky seem alive and crawling, the black stars were like that, except they made the sky seem dead, they made the sky seem like a giant bloated corpse crawling with flies…
How the black stars seemed to move.
Serena didn’t like it.
She remembered the bus ride they had taken to the harbour city. Bouncing along on broken vinyl-covered seats, padding spilling out, her mother ignoring her, staring at the guidebook, not letting her see.
“You don’t care, Serena,” she had said, “so just fucking sit there, would you?”
So Serena had been staring out the window, watching the lights of the villages they passed. They were high up. The island was mostly mountainous, mostly volcanic rock, she remembered being thrilled by the heights when there had been daylight, looking out at the red rock beneath them, the tiny houses clustered together on sharp, improbable plateaus.
But then the storm blew in—sudden, furious—and it frightened her how high up they were. How the roads had gone slick and Serena could feel the back of the bus beginning to fishtail as they took the curves. She experimented with news headlines in her head: Two Americans Dead or No Survivors in Tragic Crash. Began to see if she could make them feel real to her, if she could envisage that future—but it all sounded too senseless. Prosaic in a way that made it ridiculous. Those kinds of stories didn’t involve Americans. It was always people from somewhere else—India, perhaps, or China. It couldn’t happen to her. She watched the lights of the villages like constellations below her. If they were there, she knew she would find her way home.
And then abruptly, terrifyingly, the lights were gone.
For a moment Serena fumbled for her mother’s hand—a moment, that was all it was, a single moment of desperation, a single moment of wanting her mother to hold her and tell it would be okay.
“Jesus, Serena,” her mother had said at last, rolling her eyes, “the drivers do this all the time. They know the way.”
; Whatever.
She fucking hated it here.
The sun was lower now. The pillars cut jagged lines into it, brightness spilling out all around.
Boarding time, thank God. Serena waited by the boat. It bobbed up and down lazily. The sailors were moving around cargo containers. Two of them leaned against the rail, smoking a single cigarette between them that stank something fierce.
“Hey,” Serena called. That one looked up—the one that, maybe, no promises, she would like to fuck. He had the cigarette between his fingers. “Hey—can I?”
He shrugged. He smiled at her, and held up the cigarette.
“That’s right. Yes, a smoke. I can—good, okay.”
She walked up the ramp, and he caught her around the waist when she stumbled in the unstable rhythm. His grip was strong. It lingered. She didn’t shake herself free but instead casually plucked the cigarette out of his hand. The smell of it made her choke, but she liked the way the smoke curled in the air like a cat’s tail. She liked the way the sailor had held her around the waist.
“Well, Nameless,” she said, passing the cigarette back with a smile. “You seem alright.”
“Alright,” he intoned.
“Some English then?”
He shrugged, and smiled around a second cigarette.
“This is such a crock, isn’t it? Carcosa. Fuck.”
He sucked on the cigarette casually.
“They say the island is haunted.”
“Ah,” he said, “the island.” He shrugged. “Haunted?” Then gave a lazy wink.
“But you don’t believe that, do you? Ha, if you do.”
“Ha,” he said. The cigarette dangled precariously off his lower lip.
Just beyond them now a small crowd was forming on the pier. They all wore a look of irritable disappointment—not at leaving, but having ever arrived in the first place. In Athens, they had that look, in Venice, in Barcelona. In Paris, they had it too but they were all too afraid to show their true feelings: instead, everyone had exclaimed over the buttered croissants, the quality of the wine all the while doing their best to pretend the Seine hadn’t stunk with urine. They had snapped pictures. God, they loved taking pictures, even though they hated whatever they were looking at, even though it disappointed them so hugely. What were they snapping pictures of? A bunch of broken rocks? Whatever they thought they had captured, someone else had been there first. If there was anything Serena had learned, it was the endless disappointment of the already discovered. The great glories of the past—gods and poets, conquerors, angels, artists, all the filthy, dangerous romance of the world—had drained away like water through a sinkhole.
The crowd grumbled. Weary men, sunburnt and angry, their flab a glistening mound under their cotton shirts. Women fanned themselves with brochures, their faces still twisted into unnatural shapes from smiling into the sun.
Serena sniffed delicately, plugged away at the cigarette, as Nameless the sailor and the others began shuffling these cows onboard. They huddled together in little clots.
Where was her mother?
Nameless clicked a little tally with every tourist who stepped on board. Click, went the tally. Click, click, click. Each numbered and accounted for.
But where was her mother?
There was the German trio with their fingers thick as Bratwursts and their Kommandant scowls glowing in the guttering light.
“Hey,” Serena called to them. “You there.”
They bristled as a unit, and Serena flinched away.
“Hey,” Serena tried again—this time to Nameless. He was grinning happily at his tally as the others began to close the gate. “My mother’s still out there.”
“Mother?”
“Yes. She hasn’t come back yet onto the boat yet.”
“No,” he grinned. He pointed at the tally.
“We can’t leave yet.”
“We leave.” He pointed at the tally again.
“Jesus, I’m trying to tell you, she’s still out there. She hasn’t come on board yet.”
Serena hated his uncomprehending stare.
“We leave,” he insisted, “now.”
“You said—” she gritted her teeth “—no one stays on the island. My mother is on the island.”
It was ridiculous. Fully ridiculous. Of course, they couldn’t leave. She looked around for allies, but they had all turned against her. They had reservations for dinner, appointments, there were cocktails waiting for them in quiet cafés, and the afternoon’s exertions were over—they should be abandoned as quickly and efficiently as possible.
She felt a coldness slither down her spine, a sense of how alone she was at that moment and how utterly unprepared she was for it. Her mother kept their passports in her purse, had only given her enough cash for tips…
Nameless shrugged his shoulders comically, waggled his eyebrows at her, and for a moment Serena thought it had all been a joke. She smiled. The tight knot at the centre of her belly began to lose, and her relief was such that she felt a sudden urge to throw her arms around the Germans and kiss them on their sweaty, schnitzel faces.
Then Nameless pulled her in close again, so close she could smell the smoke on him and the salt and the sweat and something else, rancid, sweet as rotting meet. In that moment she was afraid, suddenly, that he was going to kiss her. Instead, he whispered into her ear—and the smell of him was so much worse, it was like smelling a dead animal—”I come back,” Nameless said, “an hour or two. No more. No one stays on the island, but you stay, for now, and I come back.”
And he gave her a small but deliberate push. Serena stumbled forward onto the gangway, her sandal catching awkwardly in the planking and nearly sending her for a nasty spill. She turned and stared at the sailor, all doe eyes and hurt, but he merely took his cigarette from his mouth with a flourish. Casually, he flicked the edge of it into the water.
The tourists smiled. It would be easier this way, for them, and she would be fine. Of course she was fine. After all, whatever the city was, it was in a guidebook now, and they all damn well knew that for a place such as this a guidebook was as good as a eulogy.
They left her on the shore, standing in the wavering sunlight, feeling naked and exposed as they watched her, each of them smiling, each of them with their fucking cameras, each of them grasping after one final, fatal shot of the shoreline.
Serena stumbled through the columns, calling, but she could not think where to look. Her mother had always wanted to go to Carcosa but that was it. There was no special part of Carcosa she had always wanted to see, as far as Serena could remember. It was just Carcosa. The entirety of it. It was a thing that could not be divided up. No piece would be enough.
Serena’s mother was not one to miss appointments. She had a pocketbook in which she kept everything in order. That pocketbook ruled her life: every hour perfectly accounted for, traffic snarls anticipated, emergency phone numbers recorded. Whatever was happening was clearly impossible.
That meant only one thing. Serena’s mother was dead.
Once the thought slipped around her like a noose she could not escape it. It was logical. It fit the facts. Serena seized up with shivers. She could not breathe.
Her mother was dead.
Her mother was dead.
Serena had never been one for sustained momentum. She was fickle, and she liked being fickle. Now she was tired. The rocks felt hot to the touch. It felt like she was running over fucking coals. Her skin was starting to burn even though evening had swept in already, she could feel it itching, that telltale sign she’d been out too long. She was thirsty. She was hungry. She was crying and that was a fucking waste of water, wasn’t it?
Serena sat on the shore and she stared up the sky. Hours had passed, how many she didn’t know. Her fear was like amnesia, but even that was starting to wear off. She dug her fingers into the sand. There were shells there. They had been left behind too, like she had been left behind. Something had crawled out of them, naked, and decided
that life would be better without any protection. The shells shattered against her fingertips. They would have made bad protection anyway.
The sky was black. The stars were black. It made the water black too, black and slick as blood in an unlit room. She was watching for lights now because she couldn’t watch for shapes anymore. She imagined the Germans wherever they were guzzling beer and staring up at the moon. She imagined them drunkenly stumbling back to their rooms to fuck. The wife would be too tired. She’d spent the day exploring Carcosa after all. It was too much to ask of one person: Carcosa and fucking.
Serena thought about the husband, sad and still horny. She thought about him standing in front of the toilet, his thick sausage fingers wrapped around his thick sausage penis.
But then Serena stopped thinking those things because the first body had drifted onto the shore.
It wasn’t one of the Germans, she would have recognised the Germans anywhere. But she was sure he had been with them, this fucking guy now with his hair tangled up in the seaweed, his face still fresh but his cheeks starting to bloat as if he’d been holding his breath. He bobbed gently in the water. There were air pockets hiking up the armpits of his brightly-coloured shirt. A camera tugged at his neck. It was an anchor now that he had found the sandy ridge of the beach. It held him in place.
There were two more not far behind him. A woman. She had a wedding ring, big and gaudy. She had bridal eyes, but they were frozen up, staring up at the black sky. Then a much fatter walrus of a woman just behind her.
Serena stepped into the water. Her feet slouched into the mud. There were more of them coming, bloated shapes that broke the pale gleam of the waves apart. She couldn’t see them properly, not in the darkness, but she knew they were out there, slowly drifting toward her. She rummaged through the pockets of the closest one for money, documentation, anything, then she realised what she was doing, rummaging through the slick and heavy pockets of dead people, and she stumbled away. Fell over backwards. Now she was lying half in the water, half out, damp cut-off jeans and the salt licking the sunscreen from her thighs.
Best New Horror 27 Page 14