The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2002, Volume 13

by Stephen Jones

  Paul chose the bed farthest from the snorer to dump his pack. Something he’d seen earlier, in the reception room, worried at the back of his mind. Something he’d noticed, and he couldn’t put a name to it.

  He was too tired, and exhaustion was playing tricks on him.

  He backtracked to the bathroom, a cavernous cold place, to change into dry clothes for sleeping, and brushed his teeth under a bulb that made his face look sickly and orange. So complete was the quiet and sense of isolation that he jumped when the door swung inward and a yellow-haired boy strode past to the urinal.

  Paul heard voices in the passageway as he gathered up his shaving kit. They were still hanging around outside the dormitory room when he stepped into the hallway. Four of them, two girls and two younger-looking guys, their voices loud and edgy and frayed by alcohol and cigarettes. Paul found that all at once he didn’t feel sociable any longer. Another moment and they were joined by the yellow-haired boy. Paul pushed past them and they gave him the indifferent glances of a well-established travellers’ clique.

  Another body had occupied the lower bunk opposite Paul’s, a small form entirely hidden under the comforter save for some ginger curls strewn across the pillows. Paul rummaged in his backpack for one of the paperbacks he’d picked up in Dublin.

  But the book bored him. He let it slide to the floor and rolled over, shutting his eyes against the glaring light overhead. He thought of home; it was like swallowing bile. Things would look better in the morning. As sleep overtook him, the something unremembered worried at the edges of his mind. Something he’d seen when he first came in, and only now had begun to realize the significance of. Sleep claimed him before he could sort it out.

  He was awakened by the sound of a child crying. He opened his eyes to a room gone dark, and lifted his head before he realized the sound was that of the wind. He got up quietly, taking care not to irritate the vocal springs of the sagging bunk bed as the slow breath of sleepers rose and fell around him. There seemed too many of them, from the sound of it; only eight bunk beds and not all of them filled, but so many different breaths. A recollection of waking earlier, too, stirred in him, a memory of someone clambering onto the top bunk above him, but the bunk was empty, its bedding smooth. Stealing over to the window Paul saw that the rain had stopped and the sky had partially cleared; the wind blew heavy, fast-moving clouds across a moonlit sky. Under the sound of the wind the sea crashed, closer to the hostel than he’d realized. His own breathing fell into a rhythm with it. His eyes adjusted – indeed, the sea lay just beyond, moonlight glinting off the water. Paul leaned closer, pressed his face against the glass as if that might aid his vision. Surely he imagined the tiny boat on the water, manned by several figures, mere silhouettes in the moonlight. A rowboat. And somewhere out to sea, a distant glow, as if a lighthouse on some long-deserted island kept its covenant to beam would-be sailors to safety. Yet no one would dare that cold wild sea, even in daylight, in such a craft. A second possibility occurred to him: perhaps they were in trouble, perhaps there’d been some accident at sea and their vessel had sunk, and Paul was the only person in the world who could rescue them now. His gaze roamed wildly round the room as though he might find help there, wishing he’d never awakened, wishing someone else had spied the boat. He must have mistaken some trick of the moonlight. He would have to go outside, get closer, to be certain.

  He felt his way along the wall till he found the door that had sat ajar earlier in the evening. He pulled hard on it, but it did not budge. Paul ran a hand over the knob, looking for some lock to be twisted, and above it in search of a deadbolt. Nothing. The surface of the knob and door were utterly smooth, yet as he tugged on the handle he felt not the slightest give.

  Panic settled over him like a dream. Back to the window. He must alert someone. But who? Would he wake someone in the room, race to the reception telephone and phone the local police?

  But he no longer spied the boat. A trick of the light, indeed. He scanned the surface of the water, uncertain of what he was looking for. Sometimes, when he was very tired, dreams lingered like afterimages. Surely that had happened tonight.

  The stillness closed round him again. Something in the hostel was not waiting, not waiting for anything at all. He returned to his bed where sleep came much later, and troubled.

  The next sound that awoke him was that of the heavy boy gasping his way through a round of calisthenics. In the harsher morning light – for the day dawned like slate – he saw that the boy was more of a man, at least in his late twenties or early thirties. The boy-man wore the clothes of someone even older, clothes Paul associated with the middle-aged or elderly – white under-shirt, boxers, black socks pulled up to his knees. The man was trying to touch his toes. He bent at the waist and bobbed up and down. Paul closed his eyes again. His watching might be intrusive. When he opened them again, the man stood over him, sweating.

  ‘Name’s David,’ he said, sticking out a fat, sweaty palm for Paul to handle. ‘Welcome to the Seagull. Did you just come from Dublin?’ He was English.

  ‘Paul,’ Paul said, though he didn’t offer his own hand in return.

  David remained undaunted. ‘On holiday, are you? From America?’

  Paul looked past him for the group from the previous night, or the German couple. But he and David were alone. It must be later than he realized. He was very tired. He’d been travelling so much lately. It might be good to stay another day or two and rest.

  ‘Never really had any interest in going to America,’ David said. ‘Like it here.’ He depressed Paul in some unaccountable way. ‘You at university?’

  ‘Yes,’ Paul said. He started to offer more, but offering more led to conversation. Paul did not want to converse with David.

  When he was able to escape, he located Mrs Ryan and told her he’d be staying another night. He was shocked to see by the clock behind her that it was almost noon. Mrs Ryan looked irritated, as if in waiting she’d had to turn away a bevy of travellers clamouring for his bed.

  He showered and took a walk out the back of the hostel and down near the water. He found the coastline here forbidding. The green treeless landscape led right up to the edge of the sea, a sheer drop; to the south climbed a rocky cliff. Cold sea spray stung his face. He thought he saw two figures through the fog, clambering up the cliff. Perhaps the German girl and her boyfriend. He shouted after them. After all, they were staying there together, and it was perfectly permissible, expected even, to strike up a conversation under such circumstances. But they either ignored him or didn’t hear, though the girl did turn once and stare at him, hair whipping about her face, before turning back to follow her boyfriend farther up and out of sight.

  The beacon he recalled from the night before managed to penetrate the mist with a soft yellow glow. A lighthouse, perhaps, on some rocky, craggy island off the coast here? He would ask Mrs Ryan about it later. If the light he’d seen was real, had the boat been as well? The dinghy caught his eye then, drawn up to the shore below though he could see no way of getting down to it. Seeing it there surprised him; he’d have imagined that at some point high tide would obliterate the narrow stretch of beach, making it a gamble to leave anything there. And the choppy sea seemed hardly an ideal waterway for the poor craft. Paul shivered against the chill, and in the next moment recalled his dream of the night before. And certainly it had been a dream. Otherwise, the people he’d seen in the boat had been lost at sea, their tiny boat washed ashore. And it would have been his fault. He tried to imagine it, adrift on that icy ocean, perhaps for days; perhaps worried that to come too close to the rocky cliffs dotting the shorelines there would break the boat up entirely, smash it against the rocks.

  His imagination was getting away from him again.

  Later today he’d trek into town and pick up a few things to eat and see about bus connections to Tralee and Limerick, anyplace east of here. He’d had enough of the countryside, enough of the coast, and this was seeming less like a restful way sta
tion and more like a place where weary travellers went to die. Something crawled down his spine at the thought, surprising him. Something just walked over my grave. Paul stuffed his hands in his pockets and turned his back to the sea, but the chill still stung at the tips of his ears, the back of his neck, needling his skin.

  ‘That’s Alyssa’s scarf!’

  Paul didn’t think he’d meant to speak out loud. He’d been watching television in the lobby, wrapped in his jacket against the chill he hadn’t noticed when he’d arrived the night before. But the thing that had bothered him the previous night dawned on him now; it was the soft grey woolen muffler snug against Mrs Ryan’s throat. How many times had he seen Alyssa wrap it round her own beautiful neck?

  ‘What, love?’ Mrs Ryan, propped with a magazine, before a tiny space heater looked over at him.

  Paul recognized it as though it were a beloved article of clothing belonging to him, the black threads woven throughout the grey in a checkered pattern, the edges frayed because the scarf was old and Alyssa had loved it too much to throw it out.

  ‘Did someone leave that here?’ he asked. ‘The scarf, I mean?’

  Mrs Ryan looked confused. ‘My scarf?’

  ‘Yes, I think it belongs to a friend of mine.’ Impatient. Alyssa might be somewhere close by. She might have left only just before he arrived. She might have said where she was going. What he would say to her if he caught up to her, he would not think about.

  ‘Why, no, that’s impossible. My husband, God rest his soul, gave me this one Christmas – oh, six, seven years gone now it is. Keeps me warm as can be.’

  ‘Did a girl named Alyssa stay here in the last week or so?’ Paul demanded. Angry now, he tried to control his tone. She was lying. ‘It’s— I need to get in touch with her. It’s very important to me to know if she’s been here.’

  ‘You’re the first new guest I’ve had in a while,’ Mrs Ryan told him placidly. He could hardly accuse her of anything, could he? He could hardly tell her outright that he knew she was a liar. Paul’s hands curled into fists and he shoved them deep in his jacket pockets. Cheap old bitch. Wouldn’t heat the place properly and stole from the guests. And he hadn’t made it into town to check on bus connections after all. Well, tomorrow he’d just leave. He’d get up early and go and sometime during the day he was bound to catch either a bus or a lift out of town.

  Paul pushed himself up from the chair and without another word to Mrs Ryan stalked down the hallway to the dormitory. The group he’d encountered the night before were apparently out again, as was the German couple. The form on the bed opposite his was still there, but this time the covers were thrown back to reveal a small face beneath the ringlets. Paul noticed a bottle of vodka peeking out from the girl’s backpack.

  Perhaps he’d try walking into town now. The night had cleared, and it wouldn’t be such a bad walk as long as it stayed that way. He might even talk to someone about bus schedules. He asked David about a good pub.

  ‘Try O’Flaherty’s,’ David suggested, and Paul realized with a sort of horror that David was preparing to accompany him. The thought of the pub immediately lost its appeal, and he began fumbling over excuses as to why he wasn’t really interested in going tonight, especially. David, undaunted, took off for town, wearing a heavy overcoat and good boots. Soon Paul began to wish that he’d accompanied him after all. He had no wish to return to the reception room to watch television with Mrs Ryan, and the German couple returned but spoke in low voices with one another. Paul didn’t remember falling asleep atop his covers with all his clothes on, and he didn’t wake again before morning.

  The rain started again soon after he got up, and he couldn’t see heading out to hitchhike or wait for a bus in that weather. Anyway, he’d overslept again.

  He boiled instant coffee in a deserted kitchen and later made his way out back once more to the sea. He looked for his fellow travellers again, perhaps on the cliffs, but saw no one. He smoked the cigarettes he’d bummed from David and threw the butts into the ocean. A bitter wind blew across the water, and somewhere through the mist the beacon shined for someone. He thought of the fishermen who made their living from this sea, of the thousands upon thousands dead because of blighted potatoes, years of famine scarring this green harsh land, and he thought of America. The more he thought of it the more it seemed to him to exist someplace very far away. He wondered if it would be there any longer if he crossed this sea. He wondered if he cared.

  He strode to the edge, where he’d seen the dinghy below. The strip of shoreline remained, but the dinghy was gone.

  It crossed his mind that perhaps it had broken free from its moorings somewhere, drifted up on the tide here and then back out again, but that hardly seemed likely. There had been a deliberateness about its placing on the shore below, as though someone had pulled it in from the water and carefully placed the oars crossways inside of it.

  He asked Mrs Ryan about it that night in the reception room, but she shook her head. ‘Oh, love, it might be anybody’s. Still some fishermen in these parts, you know. We’re not all in the business of providing warm beds for tourists.’ But who would row a dinghy on that wild sea? And there were no lighthouses offshore around here, she assured him, she was certain of that. As she spoke Paul couldn’t keep his eyes off that muffler round her neck. He was wild to get hold of it. He’d remembered how to be sure: something he’d teased Alyssa about. She’d written her name on the tags of all her clothes like a child going away to summer camp: Alyssa Meiers. It was an oddly homey and endearing move from the usually elusive, too-beautiful-to-be-true girl. Not the kind of girl who usually fell for Paul. Not the kind of girl he could expect to wait for him to catch up now. And the two of them, together, would have always been that way: Alyssa, far ahead, and Paul, lagging behind, trying to reach her.

  In the kitchen he cooked up some packaged noodles and ate them in front of the television. The ginger-haired girl made an appearance outside of her bed at last. She said her name was Rosie and she was from Melbourne. He wondered why she kept getting up and leaving the room until he realized she was refilling her Pepsi can with alcohol. Her speech became slurred and she stumbled once across the rug at the threshold, and she tried to laugh it off but she looked like she was crying. Then she left the room again and didn’t come back. Paul was glad. He waited until he was pretty sure she’d gone to sleep, or passed out, and made his way in there as well.

  In the morning another girl kneeling beside Rosie, trying to wake her, roused him from sleep instead. ‘Ah, Rosie, did you have too much to drink again?’ the girl was saying, her voice a pleasing Irish cadence, and Paul caught sight of Rosie’s face, screwed up tight against the morning like a little girl’s, fists rubbing shut eyes. He rolled over and tried to sleep again.

  But, ‘I don’t want to go,’ Rosie whined, ‘the others have gone and I don’t want to go after them.’

  ‘There, shhh,’ the Irish girl whispered as though she were soothing a small child. ‘No need to fret about it.’ Later, Paul found the girl in the reception area. This was Mrs Ryan’s Laura, then. She was checking in the first new guest Paul had seen since he arrived, a tall, heavy-set blonde girl.

  ‘Did a girl named Alyssa Meiers stay here before I came?’ Paul asked Laura, hoping she’d be more receptive than her mother.

  ‘Oh, I’m sure she didn’t. I’ve a good memory for names,’ Laura assured him. He watched her as she spoke, looking for deception beneath her cheerful ease.

  The blonde girl said, ‘You looking for somebody? She’ll turn up sooner or later. That’s what happens, you know, you think you’ve said goodbye to somebody forever and you run into them three or four more times over the next couple months.’ She had the accentless voice Paul had come to associate with Americans from the West Coast, and sure enough, she hailed from California.

  ‘I’ve been traveling eighteen months,’ she told him as they shared a cigarette in the kitchen. ‘My friend was with me for a while, but she was raped in S
pain. Hitchhiking. She went home after that. Before that we went all over Thailand, Malaysia, Nepal . . . you been to Southeast Asia?’

  Paul said he hadn’t.

  ‘Man, that is a trip. Like, you wouldn’t believe the drugs you can get there. And cheap! We stayed there a really long time, cause everything was cheap. Ireland costs too damn much.’

  Paul was taking a dislike to the girl, her coarse and abrasive manner, her bulky body. ‘When are you going home?’ he asked, because somehow he felt the question might hurt her and he wanted to do just that.

  She stopped, drew in a long drag of smoke and shrugged. ‘Dunno. Why would I want to do that?’

  And so it went. ‘How long have you been staying here?’ Paul asked Rosie once, and she just shook her head again and wouldn’t talk to him anymore, just stared at the television as though mesmerized by the opening credits of a variety show. He dug through his address book but couldn’t find the slip of paper where he’d written down the name of the place the night it had first been suggested. Perhaps it had been the Seashell, or the Albatross, in which case he was here under false pretenses. He said it to himself as a joke and didn’t feel like laughing afterwards. If he wanted to stay in the area, it wasn’t as though he had to remain here. He could ask around in town, perhaps get to the bottom of it, find the other, more pleasant hostel that he must have mistaken this one for. Surely no one would recommend this place to anybody.

  For a long time no one arrived or left; and he eventually decided that the five travellers he’d encountered the first night were long gone, for he never saw them again. The German girl and boy spoke only to one another, even avoiding eye contact so it was impossible to strike up a conversation naturally. Late one morning he caught sight of them climbing the cliffs again. He could catch up to them; perhaps they’d been here long enough to remember Alyssa. They could hardly avoid him when it was only the three of them in that deserted landscape. And he was lonely. The other visitors depressed him.