by Neil Gaiman
Grampa Don spits out the window, and the car hops and rocks, having a spaz attack. The Kauai roads feel like the moon. There’s no one going out to Barking Sands but us. It’s getting late and the road is lonely.
It is the moon. Just on Earth.
The sky will be dead soon. I feel a little afraid but for no reason.
Kitty looks at me and smiles but sees my face and starts to cry. If I had a knife I’d slash his throat. I imagine his dead body lying face-up, in the casket, suddenly awake. Screaming and trying to get out but making no sound. Muted by the birth defect that gave him a busted speaker. I feel bad for him down there, trapped forever under the earth, stuck in his box, screaming. But he’ll never do anything with his life anyway.
Maybe it’s better to know where he is.
Grampa Don just cut one and all four windows are cranked down. A sweet and sour old-man cloud is sucked out. The blue ocean is starting to seem like a choking face. We’re far from the hotel where we’re staying and I hate Hawaii. Being here with them.
Last night we went to a Luau and I stared at the pig on the long table. He looked alive. But his eyes didn’t move and as I tried to figure out what he was thinking, a big smiling man, in a white apron, cut into the pig with a shiny knife and slid a section of the pig’s body right out, like one of those wooden ball puzzles that’s made of different sections of wood.
He dropped it on my plate and the pig kept staring forward, unable to fight hack. The man motioned me to move on with his bloody knife, and began to cut the pig into more pieces, erasing him.
I looked down at the piece of the pig and felt like throwing up. Later I brought the piece back and tried to put it where it had been on his body; reattaching his flesh. But by then, he was just bones and a head. The eyes were still facing forward and I pet him a little, seeing my own value as no higher than his, and hating people for what they’d done to him.
Then, Daddy came and dragged me through a bunch of tourists with greasy mouths, lining up to watch the torches and grass skirts. I looked back to see the pig being taken away, its bones passing above the crowd, on a tray, like some terrible crown.
‘Barking Sands.’ Mommy is pointing.
Grampa Don is already out of the car and looking for a place to dump garbage. But there isn’t one and he tosses it on the ground saying it will just rot and become a hotel lobby, over time, with enough rain and ‘fucking tourist money’.
He says all the dinosaur bones grew into roads and rental cars after millions of years. He’s had four cans of beer since we left the Coco Palms Hotel, where we’re staying, and he’s unzipped and hosing down a tree trunk.
His ancient nozzle sprays Corona on everything like some poison Daddy uses back in Los Angeles, to make snails’ heads explode.
Kitty points to a sign that says this is a holy burial ground. He likes words; their shape, worming together to form meaning he doesn’t understand. Grampa reads the sign and keeps sprinkling snail napalm like a punctured can.
‘This place is too fucking humid.’ Grampa Don is wiping his head, like those guys at the 76 station chiselling bugs off the windshield.
Daddy takes pictures even though the sign says no photography ’cause it’s a holy place and I guess that’s bad. Daddy doesn’t care. Mommy smiles and poses under the big cliffs that go up and up and up. Her dress looks like it belongs in a vase. Kitty is crawling on the sand, chasing our footprints like a rabid bloodhound that needs to be shot in the head. I wish I could get away from them all.
It’s very windy and sand blows, sticking us with pins you can’t see. I cover my eyes and we all lean into the wind. Mommy says we look like arctic explorers going up a snow slope. She wants a happy family. But we aren’t
I hate these trips. Being together.
Grampa Don takes Kitty’s hand. Daddy takes Mommy’s. A storm fills the sky with black sponges.
Grampa Don lags behind and we all get to the Toyota. It’s starting to rain. Daddy starts the car and the mud is turning into dirty, orange glue that grabs our wheels. They spin.
‘Zzzzzzzzzzzz.’ Kitty sounds like a trapped tire.
The car is a mad dog chained to a tree. Thunder shakes us. Lightning cuts up the sky. Something is wrong. The sky is not happy or pretty anymore. The air smells like dead things and angry wind makes all the plants and flowers look like they’re bending over to get sick.
There is warm fog. I can’t see the ocean anymore. It crashes, attacking.
‘What’s the fuckin’ problem?’ yells Grampa Don.
Mommy tells him not to talk like that and he curses at her. Daddy tells him to leave her alone. They start to argue.
I hate their guts.
Grampa Don rolls down his window to look at the tires. I notice something moving through the high sugarcane. He says he hates it here and yells at the mud and the sky and the big sand dunes that bark like wild dogs surrounding helpless animals.
The car tries harder to move. Grampa Don is getting all wet. Mommy tells him to close the window and suddenly he makes a weird noise. An arrow with red feathers is sticking through his neck, sideways. He turns and I see the sharp tip dripping blood on his tank-top. There is mud and blood on his face. He can’t breathe. There are wet bubbles in his neck.
Mommy screams.
I see feathers moving through sugarcane. Blue ones. Yellow ones. I see brown skin. Hands, eyes.
Grampa Don tries to scream and blood comes out of his mouth and sprays on everything. Kitty thinks Grampa Don is being funny and laughs, but makes no sound. Daddy screams at him to shut up and Kitty starts to cry. His face turns bright red.
Feathers.
We did something wrong. Something bad.
I am scared as they hide in the sugarcane. I know I’ll be dead in another minute. I know I can’t escape in this mud and rain. I look at my family. Mommy tries to help Grampa Don and Daddy keeps flooring the gas, too stupid to realise it doesn’t help. I say nothing as they ask me to help. I do nothing.
I hate them.
An old man and two people who just argue all the time. A retard brother someone should’ve cut into little pieces a long time ago.
The car is stuck. No matter what Daddy does. More arrows break the glass. We are bloody. We are dying. Rain is pounding harder, pinning us to the mud, and the tyres bury us deeper, spinning.
Digging us a grave.
As my family screams, I close my eyes and listen to the sand.
[small skull]
Richard Christian Matheson is an acclaimed author and screenwriter/producer for television and film. He has worked with Steven Spielberg, Bryan Singer, Richard Donner, Ivan Reitman, Stephen King, Roger Corman and many others and written, co-written and produced over 300 dramatic and comedy scripts for network and cable series, twenty pilots, and nine films. His suspense novel, Created By, was a Bram Stoker Nominee, and his short fiction has been collected in Scars And Other Distinguishing Marks, Dystopia and Zoopraxis. A surreal, Hollywood novella, The Ritual of Illusion, recently appeared from PS Publishing. About his story in this volume, Matheson says: ‘There are places untied from time. Ghostly cities, ancient cathedrals. Places in serene recess, where centuries drift unnoticed. And there are places more precious; rarest of all. Places that bear no sign of man’s signature, existing within their own exquisite privacy. When I first saw “Barking Sands” beach I was overcome by its beauty: endless, unearthly dunes, misted by miles of primordial waves; somehow dream-like. It was said the dunes barked; an anomaly of wind which allowed voice. I found it spiritual, oddly troubling. I walked the vastness, listening carefully, imagining what the sand might be saying; if it were invitation or warning. As with all things seductive, there were two answers.’
Destroyer of Worlds
GWYNETH JONES
I’M TRYING TO create in my mind the image of a little boy. He’s four years’ old, his hair is brown and not clipped short; it’s long enough to curl in the nape of his neck like a duck’s tail. He is wearing a blu
e jacket with green facings, green lining to the hood. Red mittens dangle on a woollen cord from the cuffs of his sleeves, his little hands are bare. I remember him clearly, but it isn’t enough. I want to see him. I’m walking around the park, called Delauney’s park, though who Delauney was no one has any idea. There’s a playground with squishy asphalt so the children won’t break their heads. There’s a gravel football pitch, there’s a shelter with toilets (always locked), and a space of turf, greenery, shrubberies, trees. The park is small, tired, urban. It was all the world to us. We used to come here, not every day but very often, right from the beginning. I remember playing hide and seek. It was a winter’s day, the winter before he started school, the rosehips bright red vase-shapes on the bare bushes. I saw him walk out from behind the shelter, having failed to find me, those little mittens hanging pitifully. Head down, so utterly lost and bereft, oh dear sweet child. I was hiding behind a tree.
I walk around and around, a woman alone, staring at toddlers. I’m not trying to control myself, I know that the expression on my face looks frightening but I have licence. I don’t have to make that slight constant effort we all make in public, maintain the barrier, don’t let your emotions leak out. Tell any one of these mothers-with-small-children, and even fathers-with-small-children, what has happened to me, and whatever I do, they will accept. If I lie down and kick my legs and scream and mash my face into the ground that will be fine. As if I was three years’ old.
He never did that. He was a sweet child.
And out of the tail of my eye I see him. He’s there, there he is. I turn my head, very very slowly. I can hold him in place, I can see him, the little boy standing by the corner of the shelter, looking to and fro, looking for me. I don’t have to concentrate, he’s there independently, no effort, I am really seeing him … It lasts only a fraction of a second, like the existence of a rare, fragile element in a scientific experiment. Then I’m fighting the whole weight of reality again. He’s there still but it’s an effort to hold the image, quivering like a stilled frame on a TV screen, and that’s no good. It was my imagination.
Up in the back of the park, furtherest from the road and the playground, there’s a certain bend in the path, a corner that is always in the shadow of tall laurel bushes. A place you think dogs wouldn’t pass, they’d crouch with hackles raised and back away. He was afraid of that spot. We used to tell each other maybe it was haunted. He liked to be frightened, children do like to be frightened, just a little. Really it was the deep shade he didn’t like, I’m sure; but a child’s uneasiness is convincing. You think they must know something they haven’t the words to tell. I’m walking around and around, mad woman staring. I come to the murky corner because I must, and I see him again. The little boy is there, completely without my volition.
I went home. My husband was curled in a foetal position on the couch in the living room, daytime TV on the screen. My mother had left the day before. She’d been wonderful, bearing up with a brave face, cooking meals for us and so on. I think we were both relieved to be alone again, although there is no relief when a thing like this has happened. But her departure means we have moved into the next phase. We’ve brought the baby home from the hospital, we’ve had the few days’ buffer state of importance and fuss, we’ve reached the point when we are on our own and the task opens up, limitless, this time our baby is his death. I’m trying to recapture this little boy: putting him to bed, his bath-time, his sweet little body, he’s giggling, running all wet and rosy from the towel that’s trying to catch him, minuscule little erection. I want him here, I want to see him here. ‘I saw him,’ I said. ‘In the playground. Eric, listen. I saw him. I really did.’
My husband said, ‘What’s the use in that? You didn’t lose him anywhere near the park.’
I sat down on the armchair, the old one with the leaf-pattern in black and white on the upholstery, the leaves he used to trace very seriously with baby fingers.
‘You think I’m mad.’
‘I think in your state of mind you can easily force yourself to see a ghost. I just don’t understand why you’re doing it.’
‘I want to know what happened to him. I want to see it.’
‘That’s disgusting,’ he said.
My child, called Christopher after his grandfather, went out with me to the shops. In the Post Office I looked around and he was gone. I ran out into the street. He was nowhere. And when I was sure he was gone, you can imagine. You can imagine how I ran up and down, calling his name, how I flung myself at passers-by, how I was shaking from head to foot, how terror possessed me. We always called him Fery, it was his own name for himself. He’s gone to the fairies, he’s gone. It’s eight days. He’s dead.
In cases like this, suspicion always falls on the family, especially on the man. The police were going to be suspicious of us as a matter of course. I think we made it worse for ourselves by being certain, straight away, that he was dead. I think I made it worse for us by my terror. But how could we believe anything else? The child is gone for an hour, for three hours, he’s been missing for a day and a night. How are we supposed to unknow what everyone else in the world knows about what happens to a child snatched away like that … just because it is our child, this time, not a story on the news? They told us not to give up hope. Children have funny whims, he might have wandered off, taken a bus, decided to run away from home. Paedophiles often are not violent, he might turn up safe in some sad bastard’s miserable bed-sit. Fools. We can’t give up hope, we will hope forever: but we know he’s dead. I think of him when we had the builders in before he was two years’ old. My baby goes up to the foreman and takes hold of the man’s big, plaster-ingrained hand, wants to show him a Lego house. It’s potty-training summer, the little boy is dressed merely in a blue T-shirt that leaves his round middle and his little bum bare. ‘You’ll have to watch him,’ says the builder-man to me, very seriously. ‘He’s too friendly.’
A child must not be friendly, that’s provocation. A child must not smile, must not take an adult’s hand, that’s flirtatious. I shake with fury. They’re saying it was his fault. They’re saying he brought it on himself. I try to imagine him here, giggling and wriggling among the cushions, very small. But all I see is something like a great sky folding into itself from horizon to horizon, bellying and billowing into a vast ochre mushroom cloud that rises and fills the universe. A million megatons of death, nothing can be saved, destroyer of worlds.
‘I’m going to go back to work,’ said Eric. ‘Do you want your sister down?’
By work, he means that he’ll return to his office at the back of our house, the room that overlooks the garden; where he teleworks on his computer. Projects, consultancies. I have no more idea of what he does, in detail, than if I was the child myself. He makes good money. I don’t have a job, which means I have nowhere to go. My sister has offered to take unpaid leave, desert her family, come and be with me. I don’t want her.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ll be fine.’
A policewoman comes to visit the house, with a uniformed constable, also a woman. They ask me if they can have a look around. Would I mind? They want to search our house, and I’m supposed to say well of course, please, step this way. My face serene, a little polite smile, as if they’ve come to read the gas meter. I am not supposed to resist, or question. I am not supposed to say, you think my husband killed our son. It’s such an insane charade, dealing with the police. The WPC in uniform sits there holding her mug of tea, (I offered: they accepted). She has her face arranged in a solemn look of sympathy. I think she’s really sorry, how could she not be sorry, but it’s like tissue paper. Any move I make, anything I say will tear it and reveal the police agenda. Any sign that I’ve ever read a tabloid report on a child’s disappearance, or watched the news, or seen a TV mystery drama where it was the father, of course it was the father, you can see the solution a mile off … It was the mother, you can see she’s disturbed … will be an admission of guilt. The superior officer se
arched the house. The WPC sat with me. Strange, I’d have thought it would be the other way round. Eric stayed in his office. When she came back the superior officer started to ask me a few questions.
I said, ‘How can you think my husband had anything to do with this? He’s desperate. He’s sitting up there out of his mind with grief. He doesn’t eat, he doesn’t sleep—’
‘Mrs Connors,’ she said. ‘Hazel … I’m still hoping Christopher will be found. Believe me, it does happen. Children are found, more often than not. But don’t you think a man who had killed his seven year old son would be distraught?’
It was as if she’d hit me. Seven years old. My image in the park was wrong, completely wrong. He doesn’t look like that any more. His ghost can’t look like that. Three years. I’d forgotten a whole three years. This is what happens to you when the Destroyer of Worlds has filled your mind. Your whole memory unravels, crumbles, you can’t hold it together. I stared at her, and the mug of tea in my hands dissolved. I couldn’t feel it any more, it fell to the floor and cooling tea spilled all over my feet.
She looked at the mess. I didn’t. I was thinking of how much work I had to do, getting him to appear to me not as a four-year-old but as he was the day I lost him. That’s the only way I’ll find out what happened. She took my hand, and I let her do that.
‘Hazel, why wasn’t Christopher in school that day?’
‘He had a cold. I kept him at home, but he seemed well enough to come out with me.’
‘But your husband was at home?’
‘He works at home. He does his share of looking after Fery, but he works office hours. Am I getting points for answering the same questions in the same words fifty times over?’
A pause, a look of reproof. I’m tearing the tissue paper.
‘Christopher’s seven years’ old. Did you ever think of having other children?’