The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2002, Volume 13

by Stephen Jones

  The cliffs were slick and dangerous, sprayed with sea water. The couple were far more sure-footed than he. He clambered across the rocks, ignoring caution, curiosity rendering him careless, and still kept them barely in sight. At last they seemed to slow a bit, so he was able to pick his way more carefully. A glorious view awaited him. Even in the gloom, or perhaps because of it, the seascape spread before him bespoke a beautiful desolation. It was in one of those moments, gazing about him, that he nearly lost them again.

  They had turned down a track, though, a path down the cliff. The way looked even more treacherous than the one he’d taken here. Paul might be able to follow them down, but he couldn’t imagine making his way back up again. For a long moment he stood watching them, helplessly. He realized that if they continued as they were going they might reach the stretch of shore-line, if indeed it were possible to reach it at all.

  Surely that wasn’t safe. The tides came in swiftly. They might be trapped, cut off; but his concern was not great enough to send him after them. Cowardice, he supposed. He winced as he thought the word, however accurate it might be. It was a trait he’d been able to conceal from Alyssa in the short time they’d known each other. It was just as well he’d lost her; she’d have found him out anyway.

  Paul waited until the couple re-emerged on a narrow rocky spit of shoreline farther to his left. Until now, he had not noticed the dinghy drawn up on the dry land there. The two of them shoved it off into the water, and the boy clambered in first, then helped the girl in. They both began to row, out to sea. Away toward the light that beamed feebly but steadily somewhere in the mist.

  Eventually he lost track altogether of how many days he’d been at the hostel, and he approached Mrs Ryan with some bills again. She took some of them, and pushed back some change, which he pocketed. A thick haze had settled over everything, and Paul sensed October closing in on November: dank winter would soon overcome the Emerald Isle. Now he woke shivering in the night. The comforter provided by the Seagull was insufficient against the chill of the unheated room. David began to have nightmares. Sometimes he would cry out in his sleep and thrash about. He still went out some evenings, always asking Paul to go along, but Paul had the feeling David wasn’t going to the pub at all. He saw him in town on a trip he made in himself, to purchase some supplies. David walked across the square with his overcoat flapping down around his ankles, and Paul called out to him, but David either didn’t hear or ignored him.

  There were only the four of them left there: he and David Rosie and the American girl. He’d not noticed when the girls from Cork went away but he had not seen them in a very long time. It no longer seemed curious to him that they rarely interacted, moving through the days as though each had erected an invisible but impenetrable barrier against the others.

  One day Paul found himself sitting on his bunk composing a letter to his sister. He broke down crying. He wanted to go home. He paced up and down the room, cursing this grey inhospitable place, these people who flitted like ghosts here. He felt frantic to phone the airlines, to go screaming across the Atlantic and home again. He became panicked. Some nights before he’d dreamed of a mushroom cloud, and he wept, imagining this the last place left in all the world, and them the only people. He finished his letter to Robin, assuring her he’d be home soon, he just needed to make arrangements. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he concluded optimistically, ‘you’ll probably already have heard from me by phone by the time you get this!’

  The words would be a talisman. He gave the letter to Mrs Ryan for posting. Afterwards he thought better of it, but when he asked her about it she stared at him with stolid incomprehension and said, ‘Postman took it.’ She still wore that scarf twisted defiantly about her neck, and Paul realized he no longer needed to look at any sort of label on it to confirm that it belonged to Alyssa. And he’d lost so much time here there was no hope of ever catching up to her.

  ‘I’m heading back soon,’ he told David, who did his exercises faithfully this morning as every morning. David lifted his head to look at him, red-faced.

  ‘You’ll be leaving, then?’

  ‘Looks that way,’ Paul said. ‘Gotta get back to school. See my family again. My sister was pregnant, last I heard. Probably I’m an uncle now.’ It felt funny to say it.

  He walked into town and checked the bus schedules, arranged to take one into Tralee and from there to Limerick. The lazy appeal of hitchhiking had vanished. He thanked Mrs Ryan for her hospitality and informed her he’d be leaving early the next morning.

  The wind and the sea woke him in the night, just as they had the first night he’d spent here.

  This night, however, was moonless; no figures on the water to frighten him, no restless breathing in the room about him. But the sea was louder than ever before, the crashing of its waves palpably close, as though he could reach out through the window and dip his hand in those cold waters.

  Paul woke again at dawn, before the others, and slipped outside.

  He’d smoked his last cigarette the night before, and so he stood staring out at the water, nothing to do but gaze at the beam of light.

  He climbed up the cliffs, as the German girl and her boyfriend had done, and scrambled down the slick path to the shore.

  He found the dinghy waiting there for him. A solid, wooden vessel, splintery planks for seats. At one time he wouldn’t have trusted it to take him across a pond.

  But this was different.

  Paul zipped his coat tighter against the winds that blew in across the water, and pulled on gloves. Rowing was difficult when the cold numbed your hands, though he wasn’t really sure how much rowing he would have to do.

  He pushed the boat most of the way into the water. He tried to climb in, still standing on dry land, but the boat tipped sideways and threatened to spill him into the sea as soon as he transferred all his weight. He would have to wade in, up to his shins. He gasped as the icy waters lapped at his jeans and seeped through to his skin.

  Paul couldn’t remember having handled a boat at all before. After a couple of false starts, in which he merely bobbed on the water and went in circles, he got the hang of it. Strong, slow, steady strokes sent him gliding against the current, against the constant breaking of the waves in toward land.

  In the distance, he could see it, the beam of light, guiding his way. A chilling gust blew across him. Inside the jacket he was sweating, but his face, his lips and nose and ears, had gone numb in the cold.

  Travelling, he’d always tried to remain on the move.

  Paul kept rowing. The wind stung his eyes and extracted tears. Soon, his destination would become clear. The mist closed behind him and the land slipped away, and the glow beckoned him onward in the grey winter morn.

  GRAHAM JOYCE

  First, Catch Your Demon

  GRAHAM JOYCE IS A FOUR-TIMES WINNER of the British Fantasy Society’s August Derleth Award for Best Novel (for Dark Sister, Requiem, The Tooth Fairy and Indigo). His other books include Dreamside, House of Lost Dreams, The Stormwatcher, the young-adult science fiction novel Spiderbite, and the novella Leningrad Nights.

  In 2001, Subterranean Press published Joyce’s chapbook Black Dust, while his novel Smoking Poppy appeared from Gollancz in the UK and Pocket Books in America. His latest novel, The Facts of Life, is from the same publishers.

  ‘This story is set in the scorpion-infested house I lived in on the Greek island of Lesbos in 1988,’ the author remembers. ‘Before I knew about the scorpions in the house, I was awakened one night by a bad dream and the word “scorpion” on my lips. I lit the oil lamp and saw three of the creatures on the wall – just as described in this tale.’

  I MUST HAVE KNOWN THEY WERE there because some dark instinct jolted me awake. I sat upright in bed. The shutters were closed against the sirocco heat and there wasn’t even the light from a single star. Fumbling for the matches I kept at the side of the bed, I lit an oil lamp. Not until then did I feel confident enough to swing my legs out of the bed w
ithout stepping on one of the disgusting things.

  I lit two other oil lamps and the flame dancing behind each glass dispatched skittering shadows across the floor. Not helping at all. It was stifling. I opened the wooden shutters and the heat rolled over me. It was 4.00 a.m.

  I looked under the bed. I looked behind the cupboard. I lifted the mat at the door. I knew they were there somewhere because a voice in my dreams had warned me, and I tend to take these things seriously. I didn’t know whether to walk down to the water to throw myself in or to try to go back to sleep. Then I saw them.

  Three of them.

  My grandmother used to have three ceramic flying ducks on her living room wall. In the eighties, it was ironic-kitsch to display three Volkswagen Beetles, or three Supermen flying in strict formation. Such is our cleverness. But here in my beach house on the Greek island of Karpathos I’d managed to trump all that with three live scorpions. In ascending order: big, bigger, biggest. The largest not more than six inches away from where my dreaming head had slumbered moments earlier.

  We should trust our dreams. They are trying to help us.

  Well, I didn’t like them, the scorpions. I’d heard they like to get into shoes and other warm, moist places. Perhaps if I’d been less of a lout I would have behaved like a proper naturalist, making sketches of these beautiful creatures, taking scholarly notes about their habitat and behaviour. But I’m not and I didn’t. Plus I was thinking defensively about my own warm, moist places.

  I marched outside to my patio kitchen and reached for a heavy iron skillet. Aspro, a feral white cat living on scraps from my table, looked puzzled. I weighed the frying pan in my right hand, returned to the scorpions and hit Number One so hard that what didn’t stick to the underside of the skillet left a scorpion-shaped applique on the wall. Bang went Number Two, and fuck you all the way to hell thou slimy carapace, thou whoreson zed, thou mere cipher. I was saying all this and lining up for the hat-trick when Number Three, coming to its senses, dropped from the wall and scuttled toward my bare feet, sting cocked.

  I leapt on my bedside chair, tipping over the oil lamp. The glass smashed and the burning oil spilled on the stone floor, raising a small curtain of flame between me and the surviving scorpion. I have heard that a scorpion encircled by fire will sting itself to death. Nonsense. Undeterred by the conflagration in its path, the scorpion – almost casually – stepped through the fire and came to a swaggering halt at the foot of the chair. Its sting remained cocked. My six-foot height advantage notwithstanding, it raised its pincers at me like a species of dense English football hooligan, drunkenly beckoning me on.

  Then Aspro the cat appeared, and, properly challenged, the scorpion retreated to a crevice at the foot of the wall and was gone. I climbed down from my ridiculous perch and extinguished the small fire with a bedside glass of water. I examined the bottom of the skillet, where the crushed scorpions comprised no more than flimsy crisps of brown carapace and mucus. I let the cat have what it wanted, and anyway it saved me from having to clean the underside of the skillet. Aspro chewed thankfully and licked his paws.

  ‘Sometimes, Aspro, you disgust me.’

  The heat blanket made me sigh. Sweat ran in my eyes, down my back, trickled in my groin. There was no possibility of my going back to sleep. I decided to go and climb in the rowing boat, where at least I could sit with my feet in the water. I pulled on some shorts and Aspro followed me along the garden path to the boat.

  I pulled up short. Someone was sitting in my boat. I didn’t know who it could be. I had no friends and I discouraged all neighbours and strangers.

  The sea was still, like oil, bearing a dermis of moonlight, but suffocating under the sirocco heat. The small, silhouetted figure hunched over the prow of the small rowing boat, gazing into the water. I stood under the fig tree at the gate to my garden, contemplating what to do. Aspro looked up at me as if to say, what next?

  ‘You’re in my boat,’ I said rather fiercely.

  I don’t like visitors, invited or otherwise. I don’t like people bothering me. I expected the intruder to be startled, or to spin round, or to take fright in some way. But the figure continued to gaze into the water. ‘Yes.’

  It was a woman’s voice. I took a few steps closer, and I pulled up for a second time. There was a naked woman in my boat.

  ‘You’re in my boat,’ I repeated, stupidly.

  This time she turned languidly to face me. She sat with her knees drawn up together under her chin. ‘You don’t mind.’

  It wasn’t a question. It was a statement. Actually I did mind. I didn’t want anyone around my place. Least of all a woman. Least of all a naked woman. I had to make an effort to avert my eyes from her breasts and the plump curve of her legs. Her lustrous black hair was cut in a fashionable bob. Her dark eyes trawled me with sensual laziness. She made no effort to cover herself. Indeed, I couldn’t see any clothes with which she might.

  ‘Look, if it really upsets you I’ll get out of your boat,’ she said. She stood up. Her skin was slightly wet. The weak moonlight slithered along her flanks like phosphorescence and her pubic bush glimmered with droplets of sea water.

  I felt petty. ‘No, you don’t have to get out. I was just startled to see you there.’

  She sat down again. ‘I’ve been swimming. To get out of the heat.’

  ‘Alone? You shouldn’t swim at night alone. There are currents.’

  ‘You’re concerned for me? That’s nice. But I wasn’t alone. I went swimming with my two sisters. But when I turned around I couldn’t find them.’

  ‘Where? Where did you swim from?’

  She gestured vaguely in the direction of Mesahori, where the illumined, whitewashed church squatted on a freakish outcrop of rock. I doubted she’d swum that far, but I didn’t say anything. ‘Go get some wine from your house. Let’s drink together.’

  I was taken aback by her commanding tone. So much so that I found myself returning to my kitchen for a bottle and two beakers. I also found her a towel. ‘I don’t have a cooler,’ I said grumpily on returning to the boat. I tossed her the towel.

  ‘Does it bother you?’

  ‘Please just cover up.’

  ‘I meant does it bother you, living without electricity.’

  ‘Not at all. If you live without electricity you let other things into your life. Cheers.’

  ‘Cheers to you.’

  Her name was Sasha. When she told me she was a writer I felt my teeth grinding. The writers I have known have all been drunks, dreamers, deceivers and frauds. That was just the successful ones. I should know. I was an editor. I was the one who had to deal with these whining, self-centred, immature psychopaths for a living. Anyway, after divulging this piece of information she looked at me in anticipation of the usual questions. Perhaps she expected me to be interested, but I let it go.

  We smoked cigarettes and drank the wine. The moon’s image floated unbroken on the water. After a while Sasha produced a battered-looking reefer, and asked me for a light. She took a deep toke before passing it to me.

  There was something disturbing about Sasha, something sexually ambiguous. She was simultaneously attractive and repulsive. As I squinted at her through the smoke from the joint, she ran her tongue along her upper lip, chasing the diamond-like beads of sweat there. Meanwhile I inhaled the smoke deeply and held it back for a long time, trying to impress myself. The smoke itself had a peculiar taste and odour. That is, another odour beyond the obvious scent of the beneficial herb. I couldn’t put my finger on it.

  ‘If you swam here,’ it suddenly occurred to me to ask, ‘how did you keep the reefer dry?’

  She took the joint and inhaled passionately, holding my gaze until she blew out a plume of smoke. Then she winked.

  I was appalled. I got out of the boat and walked back up to the vine-covered patio of my house. I had a hammock slung there, and I slumped into it. When I opened my eyes she was sitting nearby in a wicker chair, with her knees drawn up under her chin. I do
n’t know why I’d bothered to give her the towel.

  I had an unpleasant thought. ‘You should be careful,’ I said. ‘This place is infested with scorpions.’

  ‘Excellent! Where? Show me.’

  I was a little taken aback by this response, though I lazily indicated that they were crawling all over the shop.

  ‘Got a jar?’ she said, springing to her feet. Without waiting for an answer she picked up a glass jam jar I used for burning candles outside. ‘If there’s one around, I’ll find it.’ She got down on her hands and knees, and, taking a draw on the joint, began blowing smoke into the cracks between the concrete floor and the external walls, moving methodically along the patio. I watched her do this for a few minutes and was about to speak when a medium-sized scorpion scuttled out of the crevices. She deftly trapped it under the jar. ‘Hand me a knife. A big one.’

  I swung out of the hammock and passed her a long-bladed kitchen knife. Lifting the jar half an inch, she manoeuvred the knife into place and expertly amputated the segmented abdominal tail from the creature. Satisfied, she lifted the jar, keeping her knife on the still-twitching tail. She picked up the disarmed scorpion, which was thrashing its lobster-like claws. ‘You can go now,’ she said, planting a kiss on its back. She set it down on the concrete. It would have scuttled away but Aspro the cat, having watched all these proceedings, pounced and ate it.

  This seemed to displease Sasha. Still on her knees, she hissed at the cat. Aspro, chewing heartily, jumped back into the shadows. Murmuring something about hating cats, Sasha went on to give me a lesson in scorpion anatomy. ‘The glands are at this end of the tail. You don’t want the venom sac.’

  ‘Don’t I?’