Best New Horror 27

by Stephen Jones

  And the sea is terrible in other ways, haunted as well—by millennia of drowned sailors. By pirates and their prey. By captains and their passengers and their crew, by mercenaries and soldiers and lost explorers, by unwary fishermen and swimmers and beachcombers and people who did not notice the tide drawing in. The sea is heaving with corpses and dead souls. It is a stew of old bones and rotten flesh.

  It is my single consolation: that wherever they are out there, my children are not alone.

  But still they need their mother. All children need their mother, do they not?

  I know what you are thinking. That they are going to be horrors when they come in from the sea. That the loving embraces I imagine will be grips of death. That they will be foul, decayed, mad creatures, that they will fall on me with salt-puckered eyes and mouths and suck the life out of me.

  Or that I am mad myself: old, and mad, delusional, that I ought to have been put into a home long ago, and that I need help. Help you, hang you, burn you. You are ugly, female, and old: three strikes and you’re out, but you are worse, you are alone, you are reclusive, you are not kind and grandmotherly and comforting. Your eyes do not twinkle. We are too enlightened to call you a witch but we will steal your life away from you anyway and lock you away and feed you drugs and call it a mercy.

  So, you see, this is a risk I am willing to take. And what mother would not willingly give up her own life for her children’s?

  I would have, you know. What happened to them was not my fault. I couldn’t have saved them. No matter what anyone says. I loved them and I lost them but I did not kill my babies.

  IV

  They say that you never really know a person, and they are correct. Case in point: my Bernard. I thought him incapable of passion, save for his love of the sea. I thought the children and I were little more than props in his dull life. I even thought he might be the kind of man to turn a blind eye to the fact that his wife had a lover. What did he care? He didn’t seem to want me.

  I was wrong. Bernard found out about us, not in a dramatic fashion. He didn’t stumble upon the two of us in bed together or anything so crass. He saw a look here, a touch there, noticed an absence or two that could not be explained. He is an accountant, after all, and he added it all up, and he knew.

  He need not have done anything. Ours was a business arrangement, I had explained to Clive, but a business arrangement with children involved, and as such, I couldn’t think of leaving him, at least not until little Joann was off to college. It wasn’t fair to either Bernard or me or to the children, who adored their father.

  Why could that not have been enough for Bernard? Why could he not have allowed us to go on living with a small lie within the much larger lie that we were all living, the one that said we were a happy, contented family?

  Even now, I do not believe what Bernard discovered inside himself was a passion for me, or for his family. There is a certain type of man who has a passion for the things he believes to be his. His own feelings for the things are not the issue; his ownership of the things is.

  I do not know how long he was aware before he took action, but he did not give me any indication that he had noticed anything. One late-spring day, I went to pick up the children at school, only to find that none of them were there. Their father had come and taken them out of class in the middle of the day.

  From the moment they told me, an icy lump of fear settled in my belly. He knows. I told myself it was something else, something innocent, but I knew better. And yet even then, the worst-case scenario that I could imagine was that he would divorce me and be able to keep the children, because what judge would leave children with an adulterous mother? And then Clive would abandon me as well, and there I would be, middle-aged, alone, unskilled, unemployed, a pariah among all who knew me and with no resources to seek out a new community. My parents were dead, and I had no family left. Where would I go? How would I live? Why would I live? What would be the point of anything at all?

  I phoned Bernard’s office; his secretary told me he was not in. I couldn’t bring myself to speak to Clive. It was as though if I did not say anything to anyone, whatever was happening would not be happening, would not be true.

  I sat there in our home and I waited. I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t eat or drink anything. I didn’t read, or watch television. I couldn’t. I smoked, compulsively, one cigarette after another. It grew dark. And then I heard the sound of Bernard’s car in the driveway, the doors slamming—and the children’s voices. I almost sobbed with relief. I had half-convinced myself I would never see them again.

  They came tumbling in ahead of him, and immediately it was clear to me that they knew nothing was amiss; moreover, they’d had a fantastic day. All of them were sunburned and windswept, having spent the day on their father’s boat, a rare treat, and they were all talking to me at once, and I started to think that perhaps I had been wrong. Perhaps Bernard had had a single unpredictable moment out of his entire life and decided that he and the children would enjoy spending a day sailing, with no ulterior motives or secret knowledge behind it all.

  Then he walked in, and I looked at him, and I knew.

  He said quietly, “Joann, Kevin, Deborah—go brush your teeth and go to bed. Your mother and I need to talk.”

  They all stopped short at the sound of his voice, and I remember thinking how much like wild animals children are. Their emotions are one with their bodies, and they had been so excited as they all jabbered to be heard above the others that they were contorting themselves, jumping up and down, making hilarious faces, all long brown limbs and sun-bleached hair and laughter. But at the moment their father spoke, everything changed. They were suddenly as wary and watchful as a deer who has sensed a hunter in a nearby stand. They froze; their eyes twitched; their mouths closed. They knew that of all the moments there had ever been, this was not one to argue.

  They hugged and kissed me in a perfunctory way and left the room. At any other time, I’d have scolded Bernard for speaking to them so sharply and cutting off their joy. But I had no speech left in me. I had nothing in me.

  Or so I thought. Until Bernard spoke, and of all the terrible things I had imagined in the hours leading up to this moment, I never imagined anything as terrible as what he said to me:

  “I took the children sailing today so that I could murder them.”

  He let that sentence hang between us for a few moments before he continued. And as he did so, I thought some part of him was loving this. Meek, inadequate Bernard had the floor in a way he’d never had before in his life, in a way he’d never dreamed. I was as captive an audience as anyone could ever hope for.

  “I thought it would be the best way to hurt you most. And it’s still what I want to do to you—hurt you, as badly as I can, in as many ways as I can. I was going to go through with it, and I actually had Joann in my arms, ready to toss her over the side, and do you know what stopped me? It wasn’t love of the children. I don’t love them and have never loved them, and I want you to be very, very certain of that, because one of the things I want you to know is that your beloved children are going to grow up with a man who does not love them at all. I know how much that is going to hurt you. I think it might hurt you even more than if they were dead, knowing I am going to bring them up, poison them with lies against you, and loathe them because they are the spawn of such a filthy, deceptive creature as you.”

  He went on in that vein for a very long time. I do not remember for how long, or what all the things he said were, because it was impossible for me to move past that first point. He was going to kill the children. He was going to kill the children. And he had not done it today, but what was there to stop him changing his mind in the morning, or in a week or a month or a year? And what was this reservoir of pain and anger and hate that I had never seen in Bernard, who had never so much as raised his voice to any of us? Who was the man I had married?

  Looking back, I suppose he was thinking something similar about me.<
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  He kept on like that, haranguing me, and sometimes he would require me to respond, and I would, as best I could. I remember thinking that I had to keep him there, keep him talking, and morning would come and he would have to go to work—because surely he would not allow his routine to be disrupted for a second day in a row—and then I could do something. I didn’t know what, but I had to do something. He didn’t shout at me; didn’t raise a hand to me; in a way he was still my mild-mannered, soft-spoken Bernard, and that was what made it all the more terrible.

  Even the most awful things come to an end, and that night did at last as well. Bernard went to shower and dress for work and I went to wake the children for school. Their tired, drawn faces, so different from the elated ones that had greeted me when they burst into the house the previous night, told me all I needed to know about how much they may have overheard and understood.

  V

  My plan—I did not have a plan, or not much of one. I told the children we were taking a vacation and that Daddy would be joining us later. I do not think they believed me, but they knew something was wrong and they were too frightened to put up a fuss although Joann did timidly ask me once if I was going to tell her teacher why she had missed school. She was only in first grade, and was still very excited about it all. I snapped at her, which I will always regret, and she retreated miserably into herself.

  I left Deborah to oversee their packing while I went to the bank. I was terrified that Bernard would make or had made this stop before me, and so as soon as possible after they opened I was there to draw as much money as I could out of our joint account. I remember how troubled the teller, a lady named Mrs. Cook, looked as she counted bills out to me, like she knew that something was wrong. Of course it was; married ladies did not turn up alone and make enormous withdrawals like that without some cause.

  I do not like to include this part, but I am trying to be as honest as possible here—I knew there was a chance that shortly after I visited the bank, Bernard might stop in as well, in the interest of vigilance, and find out what I had done. For all I knew, they might phone him and tell him themselves. And I knew that if such a thing happened, he would immediately go home, and all would be lost. This was my one chance, the only chance I would ever have for a decent escape.

  And so when I returned home, the first thing I did was to make sure that Bernard’s car was nowhere in sight; the second thing I did was park my own some blocks away, and walk home from there. And the third thing I did was position myself near the window while the children finished gathering their things so that if Bernard did come home, I would have some warning; I would be able to flee, I would be out the back door and away up the street to my own car before he even realised I was there. I would make my getaway, alone. It was not what I wanted, but it was what I would do if it came to that.

  I told myself this was the next best thing. I told myself this was better than being trapped here with the children, that the children would be fine without me, so what if they were taught to hate me, that my presence would make him more volatile and they’d be safer with him and they would be okay. They would grow up okay. They would never know how he felt, or didn’t feel, about them. These are the lies I told myself to make it okay for me to abandon my children with their insane father if it came down to it, a choice between them or me.

  Other women are not like this, are they? It’s documented—it’s why women stay in terrible marriages, in deadly situations, in order to protect their young or just to avoid being separated from them. I loved my children more than anything in the world; I loved them so much I found that love almost unbearable; and yet surely there is something wrong with me, that I could do this cold mental arithmetic that would permit me to leave them behind if I had to. But I am not a monster. I said it forty years ago and I say it here, again, I did not hurt my children. I would never hurt my children.

  It was the sea; the ghosts; the dead things. The seventh wave.

  VI

  I didn’t know what to do, so I just drove. The children were subdued. They knew everything I’d told them was lies. There was no vacation, there was no Daddy joining us later, and something was terribly, terribly wrong.

  That first day, I was so afraid that I drove for eighteen hours straight, keeping on back roads. I was sure that he would have reported us missing and that law enforcement everywhere would be combing the highways in search of a car of my description with my license plate number. But I was so exhausted that I began hallucinating—imagining people stepping out in front of us on the road—and I finally pulled off and paid cash for a motel room, pulled the car round the back, and piled us all inside where we slept.

  We lived like that for a week or more—me, driving until I couldn’t any longer and then a motel. I kept heading west. Isn’t that where people go to reinvent themselves? I’d never been west of Texas or north of the Mason-Dixon line. I imagined the entire West Coast as a glittering paradise where we would be safe.

  I bought spray paint to inexpertly disguise the colour of our car, and somewhere out in the desert, at one of the many low-end, no-questions-asked types of places where we’d spend a night or two to rest up, I asked a shifty-looking desk clerk if there was some way I could get a different license plate for my car. I could barely get the words out; it was such an alien thing for me to do, but he reacted as though customers asked him for things like that all the time, and they probably did. He told me he’d have something for me when I checked out in the morning. After that I relaxed a lot more. Not only were we thousands of miles away from Bernard, but we could not be casually identified either.

  Yet I still didn’t feel safe. We got to southern California and I couldn’t stop; it was as though movement had become a compulsion. I turned north, and we went up through the state and then crossed into Oregon and the Cascade Range. And then we were out of the mountains and by the coast, and it was a sea like I had never seen before. The sea I was used to was on the edge of hot white sands, and it was warm for swimming. This sea was icy, washing up on pebbled beaches or crashing against rocks and cliffs. It was grey and roiling. In comparison to the sea I was accustomed to, it felt wild and untamed.

  And I finally felt safe.

  Those days were such a blur that I don’t know how long we were on the run for. Ten days, two weeks, three weeks? I have never known. But I thought, we can do this, we have done this, I have done this. We can disappear. We have disappeared. And I think for the first time ever in my adult life I felt a sense of exhilaration and possibility, that the life that had been written for me was not the one I had to live.

  True; the children were disoriented and traumatised; they missed their father, and cried for him and for their lost home. But children are resilient. I would find us a place to live, get them enrolled in school in the fall, and things would be better. I still wasn’t sure how I would find work or support us, but I had enough cash to at least buy myself a few weeks, and surely in one of these resort towns on the coast I could at worst get a job cleaning hotel rooms.

  It was in that exhilarated spirit that we’d had an evening picnic on the beach. It had been windy, and a little on the cool side for our Southern bones, but the sun sinking into the ocean had been beautiful, and the children seemed almost happy for the first time since that evening they had come in from sailing with their father. They had begun to run about and play on the rocks jutting up from the water. The tide was actually on its way out, and the waves were choppy but not nearly of a size to alarm.

  I didn’t actually see the moment it happened. I had turned away and was tidying up the remnants of our picnic, was thinking idly rather than in a panicky way for a change about what I would do the following day, that I would start to look for work, when I heard a piercing shriek—

  And all of my children were in the water, and were being carried out to sea.

  I ran in after them. I tried to save them.

  You must believe me.

  They must believe me.


  VII

  People tell a story in these parts about the seventh wave. It is not something I ever heard of in my childhood growing up along the south-east coast. The dangerous sneaker waves that snatch people to their death here do not exist where I come from.

  Here, though, the ocean is crueller. These waves come out of nowhere, out of a placid sea. They say that every seventh wave is the one to watch out for, that it is the unexpectedly large and dangerous one.

  I read about the seventh wave, all those years ago. I even called an oceanographer at a university here and talked to him about it. I was so distraught for so many years, and I felt that if I could only understand why it had happened, it would lessen my pain. What I learned was that science and superstition do converge, that patterns do exist in which roughly the seventh wave or thereabouts will be the largest. But sneaker waves lie statistically outside even this estimation. They cannot be explained. No one can say when one will rise like a great hand out of the sea and pluck people from dry land and drown them. No one can say why.

  I do not know when, but I understand why. The gods and the demons and the ghosts that live in the sea demand human sacrifices. What could be lonelier than being dead? And down there in the ocean depths where pale eyeless things swim, beasts that are nothing but tubes and mouths lurk, where monsters that have thrived since the planet was young and all of evolution’s nightmares converge under cover of darkness and deep, deep water, down, down, down they dragged my three babies, creatures of sun and light.

  It is so late here. It is as late as the ocean is deep, as dark as the depths of the ocean and the blackness of space.