The Year's Best Horror Stories 14

by Karl Edward Wagner (Ed. )

  Don’t talk so much, too much, Colin always says you do that, you know you do: scurry of thought in Mariella. The German didn’t seem to have heard at all.

  Then his eye turned on her again, hawk stooping just as her heart had stopped accelerating and she was almost calm again, licensed watcher equally contemptuous of film stars godlike letting themselves be watched, and screeching adulation of fans watching: “So you have not been?” His voice far away and yet too close, like the echo effects you could get from the headland over there, where if you shouted at the right spot among rocks and clouded-blue butterflies and spiky growth, your voice resounded round all the alleys of the town piled up the hill and down their reflection into the bay like some sunken Avalon of Arthur’s spoiled for her though by Colin’s twittering and juggling trying to get it all in one photograph.

  She shook her head uncertainly as if first off she’d planned a nod: and he looked over at his sister, “We’re going ... we’ve got to go, haven’t we, Heidi, to make what must be right.” There was no question in his voice: the girl, dressed now in toweling suit denim-colored, sneered at him and went on scribbling in her diary as if taking notes of what was said for some future trial:

  But she did not contradict—and Mariella guessed, though unsurely, that her sneer was defiance to cover fear, perhaps not of her brother so much, but of something connected with him and his plans that loomed like a loop of Hammer Films fog, lasso about to snatch them all out of baking living daylight into some dark, some fear: and tried mentally to shake herself and get a grip, being fanciful like this was so unlike her usual self ... licensed to be an audience, that was her role in this, no more, it didn’t involve her ... And the cripple said, “You will come too ... you deserve it.”

  Mariella meant to ask what he meant, or refuse so oddly and rudely worded an invitation ... do something to assert her will ...

  Stupidly the thought of such a journey terrified and attracted her both, like childhood scrumping in an evil-looking old man’s garden, when what would happen if you were caught was subject of shapeless rumor, terrifying incomprehensible yet pleasurable as wetting yourself, involving sheds and hands and no one really knew what happened then ...

  No answer seemed to be necessary, which she was grateful for, feeling as weak as just after childbirth ... “Heidi will get our packed lunches from the hotel.”

  Sulkily the girl, without showing any sign of having heard, closed her black book, snapped top decisively on pen, got up, collected her things, walked up the steps toward the terrace.

  The hills, layer on layer, were blue torch paper over the water.

  No answer or advice there. No Colin to say yes or no: If he were here and said “No” at least she’d have something to fight against, some way to sharpen her mind on opposition and so achieve decision.

  The German ignored her now, leant back, offered a cigarette without a word, asked her for a light: but all as if in the presence of a mirror merely or a ghost, causing no ripple on his self-absorption.

  She realized the horrible thing was that the German fascinated her because in so many ways he seemed just like a younger Colin.

  She tried to take her mind off what was happening, peering at the freighter nearest to them, where some kind of loading of the blood-red alumina seemed finally to have begun. But it was just another toy, unreal, no clue to pattern, and even the reminder it gave her of her kids playing with boats in the bath merely made her feel guilty, obscurely dirty, as if she’d betrayed them in some way, so that her mind shied off that with relief back into blankness.

  Shout from the corner of the hotel by the chapel: a cry wordless as a gull’s.

  “All is ready. Time to go.”

  The German rose, favoring his leg: Mariella had felt a brief impulse to help him to his feet, like an injured child with knee in plaster: but was glad she had resisted. The thought of his face full of wrath at such a liberty was more than she could bear.

  She followed obedient as an Indian wife as he walked up the baking path.

  He turned once he was in the shade, “Your clothes, where are they? It will be all thorns there, you cannot walk like that.”

  Guiltily, upset as when teacher’d caught her out with unwashed knickers one day when, having no gymslip clean, she stripped to them for PT, she rushed back, put blouse top and summer trousers back on, then gathered her oddments, and, to assert independence, took them the long way round to leave at reception, shouting “Just a minute,” to the two Germans who stood under the tree like hungry statues waiting for the meal that would let them breathe.

  As soon as she was level with them they started to walk: for an instant she was left to tag behind like an unwanted playmate, not knowing whether to run and catch up or keep walking that step or two behind, feeling foolish.

  Neither said anything.

  She got the impression that Heidi resented her having been invited along: she walked along with a masked, unbetraying expression: but the lips seemed narrower than their usual sulky-sultry fullness, as if compressed together.

  She showed no signs of walking slow to allow for her brother’s limp, so Mariella, for the first time conscious of him as a cripple in that sense, rather than being merely someone powerful and fierce with an unusual badge of his nature, a driven leg for a lame king, daren’t slow her steps either.

  She was alongside them now, trying to match their pace exactly, as if in some unexplained way she’d be accepted if she did.

  They passed the first houses of Gradina to the left, as the loop of road became the wider cobbled space, half square except it ran the full length of the town, curving along the bay, half dockside or harbor wall, boats and nets everywhere.

  Mariella wanted to find some thing to say to the Germans, some comment to make on place or people, but every fragment of thought that crossed her mind seemed utterly banal. And anyway absence of conversation didn’t seem to bother them at all: they would never feel forced to make conversation if stuck with a stranger in a train compartment, she thought, and wished she knew the cripple’s name: but it would seem so idiotic to ask.

  And all along the waterfront, and right round the loop of road climbing back opposite to the headland that looked over to the hotel, her mind was far away from the mechanical actions of walking, and the scene all around her, worrying away at why she had so easily, submissively, agreed to come along with them at the slightest word of asking. It made no sense in terms of the person she thought she was, none.

  A light rain started, the sky gray and lowering now, as they climbed: the town round the harbor seeming slummy, threatening, a piece of home again.

  She pulled the lightweight anorak out of her bag and put it on, getting the sleeves tangled as she hurried to keep up on the rough stones as Heidi and her brother still without a word turned off the main road just at the point, where the sign illustrated falling rocks and steep gradient and Mariella would have liked to stop and look down at the hotel, partly to get her breath back, and partly just because the hotel somehow now seemed a place of safety and familiarity.

  The track the others moved up smoothly as water going uphill was overhung by brambles and branches of what looked like, but probably wasn’t, mountain ash and elder trees.

  It turned and twisted as it climbed: the harbor hid like a teasing child in ambush, more fragments seen through the branches.

  The rain grew steadily heavier, warm and wet and horrible like a rich man’s hand, thought Mariella—and then tried to chide herself: her imagination out of control again, and those two diminishing up the path ahead of her agile as mountain goats.

  She wanted to cry out, “Stop, wait for me,” but her pride was hurt enough that she couldn’t keep up even with a cripple, without being childish like that—or so she thought.

  To her disgust her voice spoke against her will, “Can’t we shelter till it stops?”

  Heidi turned and smiled: it was like spittle in the face. Mariella scrambled on.

  Just when sh
e thought she’d collapse, they came onto flat ground: and, past some wild thistles, even onto a road, stony but still well-made.

  “The road to the cemetery?”

  “Of course,” Heidi’s answer to her brother: it was as if they spoke English only to annoy Mariella, since nothing they said seemed to be directed at her, excluding her totally ... and then she realized that anyway those were the first words said since they’d left the hotel.

  To the left, the road they had joined dived away into a watery grayness like old war naval films on the telly: there, Mariella thought, it must somehow curve back down to Gradina, perhaps the way the mysterious bus came she’d seen once or twice on the holiday, that no one ever seemed to get on or get off.

  Perhaps it went to the dusty square where the market was, or the even more dried up walled off riverbed where the local kids played football with fishing nets for goals and Colin’s guidebook said had been the Naval Arsenal in the times when Gradina was a great harbor ... and cursed the little boys for disrespect in where they chose to play, when Mariella loved their ragged happiness, and tried to encourage her kids to go closer and perhaps get asked to join the game, till Colin harshly stopped her.

  To the right, the road curved away over a steep scrubland: the two Germans set off up it without a backward glance, leaving Mariella behind as, hoping against hope for a brief break, she juggled with her bag that already cut deep into her shoulder with its strap.

  Bag flopping, only half held on retightened buckle, she ran to catch up.

  Oh this is ridiculous, she thought. She grabbed at Heidi’s shoulder. The girl squirmed away as Mariella said “What do they call your brother, then?”

  “I thought you must be old friends.”

  A fellow woman, how could she be so horrible: surely they could have had such nice gossips together about all the other guests in the hotel, if they had only met earlier.

  “No, seriously.”

  “Emico, after the great Emicoof Leininger, you must know of him, surely, the famous medieval Jew-killer.”

  Mariella fell back, feeling as if she had been slapped for nothing. Bloody Germans: she wished they’d all been killed in the war ... Go back, that’d be the best thing, leave the horrible pair to it, that was what she ought to do.

  Just say a cheery farewell and run back down the road. In three-quarters of an hour, less maybe, she could be back in the hotel, safe from the rain, having a drink and reading her Maigret, at peace with everything.

  In a minute from now she’d do it, a minute, turn back:

  Oh look, her watch had stopped ... somehow she was grateful for the excuse to delay, knowing pride’d never let her change her mind once she turned her back on them. Somehow, today must make up for the failure all the rest of the holiday had been. Something must happen, something that would change everything.

  Only why were they so horrible to her, why?

  Suddenly she was grateful to the rain as to a surprise present, for it hid her tears.

  Presently, trudging along after them, she decided to assert herself. She must, she must!

  All along the roadside now curious blue-green thorn bushes, almost like Christmas trees flattened by hammers, anything from six inches to ten feet tall, and spiky, so spiky. She pressed alongside Emico; pointed at one, ran over and touched it till it scratched like a cat’s kiss, strangely familiar even in its newness, “What is it? What are they?”

  “You would not understand our name for them. In your tongue, Jerusalem Thorn.”

  “Why?”

  “In the story, the Romans used them to crucify women who asked too many questions.”

  Heidi laughed, a harsh dry laugh like desert wind.

  Mariella shrank back into herself, hunched into the rain as small as she could, wishing really it would lash down and make her blind or unconscious, anything to end her humiliation and embarrassment.

  The road curved on uphill. Now there was nothing to fasten the eye to: the sea and Gradina invisible, only rolling slopes of Jerusalem Thorn, occasional trees looming huge among such featurelessness.

  A roar, and out of the murk a blue and white bus hurtled by: they had a glimpse of it coming straight at them. Mariella leapt into the brush, scratching her legs. Emico and Heidi stood stock still, glaring at the scruffy, rain-blurred driver with contempt. Somehow it swerved and missed them. The only contents were three shapeless black lumps at the back, old women, doubtless, and something white beside them that could have been a bundle of chickens or a goat. Yet despite her fright, Mariella could have cried with relief at seeing something human. She kept her face straight, feeling an inch high to not have stuck it out like the others. They said nothing.

  A curve, a small horizon.

  Over it, a white wall, a small white building with brown roof, looking a little like an electricity sub-station. Around it, white stiff figures as if a frozen picnic of nudists. Two cypresses sheltered the space on the side where the sea must be: the cemetery.

  Still no human word from the two Germans.

  More apparently unending slope. Another small horizon.

  A dip: and far ahead, a cluster of houses half-hidden in trees, and across the next ridge a line of telephone poles or similar, marching to and from the village, whatever it was.

  Mariella hoped they’d pass through it. Even unfriendly natives’d be better than this endless silent trudge with people who obviously hated her, walking stiffly on either side of her now like guards: and perhaps, perhaps, there’d be a cafe where she could stop and have a drink of lemonade, or beer even if in a place like this they let women drink. She’d even spend the little money she had left on a taxi, just to get away from Gradina.

  From the village, a dog barked. Another joined in from a far patch of twisted trees to the left, another equally far off from a third cluster to the right. The rain had eased to a nasty wet-clamminess, like the feel of neck and back and underpits when she woke from an awful cold sweat nightmare: and of course always Colin slept through pig-comfortable in his own pit, the hollow nest well away from any contact with her that he always made of his half of the bed.

  And suddenly, the other two turned off, turning her with them like a hinge with a door, onto a dried up path through the thorn that angled off three-quarterwise into the thorn tangle. Which once entered, was nowhere dense as it looked.

  She tried to strengthen herself to say, “This is far enough for me: I’m turning back now. Goodbye.” But the words wouldn’t come. Her feet seemed to have a life of their own, torpid, painful, yet strong enough to overcome her conscious intelligence completely.

  They passed a half-built bungalow, square air-hole pierced blocks of cement rising like a deserted gun-emplacement from old war.

  Somehow, some geese had climbed onto the uncompleted roof, and gabbed ferociously from there.

  Otherwise, the landscape seemed deserted. Even the road seemed miles away now, and the telegraph poles were hidden by a swell of ground. The thorns grew higher, and the last roof was out of sight.

  To the right, the land fell away, but she could not even see the inland sea that at least would have given her thoughts a guide to something familiar, the hotel’s whereabouts.

  The far mountains of the coastal range were hidden in the gray drizzle.

  “Is this the shortest way to the castle?” She could keep silent no longer. The landscape was as cold and unwelcoming as home in late autumn November misery: she could not truly believe they were on the latitude of Florence, it all seemed a huge trick of Colin and the tour company and these Germans combined, to leave her, Mariella, helpless and miserable. For a minute she genuinely believed Colin had planned this all along, to leave her to the mercy of these Germans, and had she not asked to stay today, would have thought of some excuse to make her.

  Neither German answered. She felt even more like a snubbed child.

  Through the thorn toward them came a jangling, a harsh calling, somewhere between scream and guffaw.

  She w
as terrified.

  The violent beating of her heart did not stop even when several stout women appeared, two in the familiar black, one, kerchiefed, in a blue dress with gold and red embroidery.

  They chased, sticks in hand, after a black, vile-looking donkey that charged wildly through the brush, braying, haw hawing, insane with excitement, legs kicking like a chorus girl on pep pills. To its back clung a child and a pair of panniers—full of wood: all strapped on.

  Mariella came out with her laboriously learned word for good day, “Jindobry.” The women muttered something, rushing past. The Germans ignored them.

  Mariella was sure, as one woman stopped to stare, the kerchiefed one, and Mariella looked back as if to implore help, wordlessly, that the woman gestured to her a warning, “Go back.”

  “I wish I dare,” she muttered. Emico turned, looked at the woman. She made another gesture, this time two spread fingers of the left hand ... Mariella thought, “It can’t be that rudeness, not a woman ...” and half remembered something similar they’d shown on the telly against the Evil Eye.

  Then she was gone into the dry scrub and tangled bushes, some nameless mixture of gorse and broom and bramble, where the others had vanished in their fixed voiceless change. Soon even the donkey’s cackling was inaudible.

  More spiny bushes, more wind-twisted brush and bent-back gorse: the path winding, splitting sometimes like a river delta, joining and rejoining. Trees to the left, well-ahead, coming nearer and nearer: dry and small and oaklike. They came nearer, merged into a windbreak looming above a wall. The path followed them, then passed through at a jagged gap, went on between innumerable low walls of small stones piled together, and dry thorns wedged into barricades, creating a maze of tiny fields, some with stunted grapes in, knee high, hung with gray-purple bunches, diseased somehow in appearance, the vine-leaves a strange turquoisy deep blue-green.

  To the right a flattened conical hill loomed, bare save for scrub to the summit. Mariella was sure she’d seen nothing like that from the hotel window: yet their window opened in what must be this direction.