The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 22

by Stephen Jones

  When she saw what had been done to Jason’s face, Tess screamed. She screamed and screamed, the sound echoing off the walls. Forever afterwards she would see the image in her mind. She would see black dirt spilling from the gaping cavern of Jason’s mouth and tumbling from his empty eye sockets like thick dark tears.

  SIMON KURT

  UNSWORTH

  The Lemon in the Pool

  SIMON KURT UNSWORTH WRITES when he’s not working, spending time with his family, cooking, walking the dogs, watching suspect movies, eating pizza or lazing about.

  His stories have appeared in the Ash-Tree Press anthologies At Ease with the Dead, Exotic Gothic 3 and Shades of Darkness, as well as in Lovecraft Unbound, Gaslight Grotesque, The Sixth Black Book of Horror, Never Again and Black Static magazine. His story “The Church on the Island” was nominated for a World Fantasy Award, and was reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Volume Nineteen and The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New Horror.

  His first collection, Lost Places, was published by Ash-Tree in 2010, and his collections Quiet Houses and Strange Gateways are due from Dark Continents and PS Publishing, respectively.

  “In the summer of 2009, I went on holiday with my family – the extended version. As well as my wife and son, Wendy and Ben, there were my parents, my sister and her husband, and my mother-in-law all sharing a villa in Moreira, Spain.

  “One of the delights of the holiday was having a private pool, and seeing Ben enjoy himself in the water, where over the course of seven days he learned to swim. Perhaps even more fun was seeing his joy when things started to appear in the pool on a daily basis – a tomato, a lemon, two courgettes, three green chillies.

  “I have no idea where they came from, but I suspect that children in a neighbouring villa were playing a joke on us and Ben loved it. It got to be one of the most exciting things about the holiday, waiting to see what would appear that day. After the appearance of the courgettes, my sister said, ‘This’ll find its way into one of Simon’s stories,’ and everyone laughed and someone (I think my mum) said, ‘Even he couldn’t write a story about this.’

  “Mum, if it was you that said that, this story is entirely your fault.”

  ON THE THIRD AFTERNOON, it was a lemon.

  The first day, it had been a tomato, half-battered and sunk to the bottom of the pool, and on the second a courgette which floated and bobbed merrily on the wavelets by the filter intake, and Helen had laughed. The tomato, she first assumed, had been dropped by a bird; it was small and the damage to it could have been caused by the fall but the courgette was flawless, its green skin mottled and undamaged.

  Thinking about it then, she reasoned that it must be an odd sort of joke. Oblique and impenetrable unless you were its perpetrator, certainly, and not something that she understood, it was the kind of joke that children carried out, young children like the ones from the villa up the hill. By the time the lemon appeared, also floating like a reflection of the sun at noon, she was sure of it.

  Helen’s rented villa was built into the side of a hill. Below her, if she peered over the wall at the end of the garden, she could see the roofs of the shops that lined the road around the base of the hill, and to either side were villas inhabited by retired couples. Neither had grandchildren that visited as far as she knew, which only left the villa behind her, up the slope.

  Standing by her pool, holding the lemon (still warm from bobbing at the surface of the water in the afternoon’s heat), she looked up at it. Her back wall was high, over fifteen feet, and it obscured most of the villa’s lower floor, but she could still see the upper storey. No one moved on the balconies or behind the windows, and she could not hear the children playing.

  She put the lemon in the kitchen, next to the courgette. It was full and bright, and Helen thought she might cut it into slices for her evening gin and tonic. She hadn’t thrown either of them away because it seemed a shame to waste them and, although she didn’t find the mysterious appearance of fruit and vegetables particularly funny, she was slightly touched by the effort the children were going to.

  Every day for three days now, they must have waited until she went in for her siesta and then thrown things into her pool. Or, if they weren’t throwing them, they were sneaking in and placing them in the water. Either way, it showed a strange commitment that she liked. It was, she thought, nice to be the focus of someone’s attention again, however gentle and odd that attention might be.

  On the fourth day it was green peppers, large and emerald, the type she had thought were overlarge chillies when she first arrived in Spain. She fished them out and turned to the villa up the hill, waving at it even though she could see no one. She hoped she might hear the laughter of hidden children, and intended for her wave to show that she was enjoying the joke, but she received no response. The villa’s white walls and glittering windows reflected the afternoon sunlight back at her, sending glints across the pool’s surface and catching the splashes on the tiled poolside. Shielding her eyes helped block the brightness; she kept looking at the villa, tracing around its whitewashed walls and shaded verandas with vision that was bleached by the glare, but still she saw no movement. The building remained blank and stolid.

  Helen put the peppers with the courgette and lemon, still untouched in her kitchen. She hadn’t wanted to slice the fruit in the end, partly because she felt that cutting it up would be in some way rude or dismissive of the joke that the children were taking such care over, and partly because of the way it felt. Mostly because of the way it felt, actually. When she picked up the lemon the previous evening, it hadn’t felt very right, not at all. It was still bright, its yellow skin gleaming and slightly waxy, but it was soft and pulpy when she squeezed it and she wondered if its time in the pool had affected it in some way. It felt mushy, somehow. Rotten inside. In the end, she found another lemon and used that, having a couple of drinks on her veranda and enjoying the cooling day’s end as the pool chuckled to itself in the slight breeze.

  On the fifth day, the joke started to wear a little thin. Helen came out after her afternoon rest (Siesta, she told herself, it’s a siesta and everyone does it) to find that the pool was covered with a floating scum of redcurrants, a myriad little spheres dancing in the splintering gleam of the sun. Like the courgette, lemon and peppers, the redcurrants were undamaged and looked juicily ripe, but there were so many of them. They covered most of the surface, a slick that tinged the pool a deep and lustrous pink as the light glittered off them and down into the water.

  It took Helen almost half an hour to clear them all, scooping them out with the net she usually used to clear dead insects and leaves from the surface of the water before they were drawn into the filter. By the time she finished, she had filled a large metal bucket with the fruit and it was almost too heavy to lift, so that she had to tug it to make it move and then drag it tilted onto its lower rim, shrieking and leaving a white track behind it. Hauling it across to the kitchen so that she could put the fruit into bags, she looked once more at the villa up the hill, hoping that the children would see her, see that her face no longer showed amusement. Apart from anything, it was a waste of fruit because she couldn’t possibly eat all these redcurrants, and she had left her jam-making days behind her when she left the grey drear of England and moved to Moreira.

  Day six, and the joke collapsed in on itself completely.

  Emerging from the cool shade of the villa when the sun had moved around far enough to lose some of its glaring power, Helen found two large fruit floating in the pool. They were the size of melons, but it was impossible to tell what they actually were; they were disintegrating and rotten. Strings of yellowing, slimy flesh trailed from the fruit, whose dark skin was mottled green and brown. The water around the two floating things was hazy and opaque, coloured like stale urine with the fruits’ juices. Even as Helen watched, tendrils of pulpy flesh drifted from two globes, along with things that looked like seeds, performing somnambulant spirals as they sank to
the pool’s bottom. Once there, they joined more of the yellowing tendrils, like shed snake-skin, all of them drifting in currents that made them dip and rise in a low harmony. It looked like they were dancing.

  Helen tried to fish the large pieces of fruit out with the net but they broke apart as she pulled them to the side, the green skin flapping like a torn flag and the insides escaping and floating back towards the centre of the pool, spreading in the eddies created by the net’s movement and the breeze that tickled at the water’s surface.

  “Shit,” muttered Helen. There was no way that she could get it all out with the net; it was dissolving as she watched, breaking into tiny fibrous pieces and giving the surrounding water a pale yellow corona as though it were haloed by corruption. It smelled too, a sharp, scraping odour that itched in her nose. The whole of the pool was fouled with it, and she needed to run a full backwash filter cycle before she could use it again.

  As Helen went to the pool controls, she looked up at the hillside villa and glared, wondering if the children could see her and tell how angry she was. She only ever had to run a full filter cycle once every few weeks normally; apart from bugs and a floating layer of sun cream, the pool stayed generally clean and she could freshen it by hand and with a little water turbulence from the jets once a day. Between the net and the pool’s own filter, she had little to do to maintain the water and could, instead, just enjoy it. She had only run the full cycle 6 days ago, and now she had to do it again, and it annoyed her. It wasn’t funny.

  As the jets circulated the water in the pool, pushing the debris towards the filters, Helen fished out the larger pieces as best she could. Most of it had sunk and she had to reach deep with the net to catch it, and it was hard work; the water was heavy against the mesh, pushing the pieces into a swirling dance around the pole and making her arms ache as she dug and chased. She couldn’t reach the middle of the pool very easily from the side, but she didn’t want to get into the water. It might have made things easier, but the smell of the fruit hovered, viscous and unpleasant, and if that was how it smelled, it would surely feel worse. She didn’t like the idea that, unseen, tiny particles of it would be brushing against her, clammy against her skin, worming their way below her costume, tangling themselves in her pubic hair, getting inside her, into her mouth, her throat, her nose. Her stomach. No, whatever this rotten fruit was, she wanted as little contact with it as possible.

  The last thing Helen had to do was clean the filters themselves; she had removed all of the larger pieces from the water and had regulated the level of chlorine, testing and adding until the water was back to something approaching normal and safe. In the hours that it had taken her, the water in the pool had been cycled through the filtration system, which meant she now had to remove and clean the meshes themselves. It was never a particularly pleasant job, cleaning away the broken bodies of insects and scraping off the scum of dirt and grease that collected across the fine nylon netting but today it was awful. The filters were clogged with torn and pulpy flesh and with a thick, clinging slime that stank. Seeds clustered in the slime, nestling against dead insects whose bodies looked wrong somehow, half-formed and dissolving as though the slime was corrosive. Helen didn’t want to touch it.

  She found a pair of old rubber gloves in the kitchen, and a wooden spoon that she no longer used, and began to scrape the filters clean. Each time she dragged the spoon through the muck, she uncovered new things, little treasures given up like dinosaur bones from tar pits. A large grasshopper, its wings almost gone and its face weirdly distorted; a clump of leaves, soaked down to a dark blob like melting toffee; a single cranberry, ripe and apparently unmarked but softer than it should have been, shifting between her fingers like jelly as Helen squeezed it; a larger piece of fruit that smelled like fermenting star fruit. She put it all into the bucket along with the pieces she had managed to strain from the pool, where it settled in viscid puddles. The smell from the bucket as it baked in the heat was overpowering, like ammonia or bleach.

  By the time Helen finished, the bucket was full and heavy and getting it to the villa was difficult. She didn’t want to slop its contents on her as she walked, so she ended up dragging it, stretched out, her back aching and her muscles singing in protest. This wasn’t what she had thought she’d be doing when she retired, she reflected, looking again at the villa up the hill. All those years of drudgery in the office, all the meetings and reports and filing, all the late nights in the office completing the work for bosses, and the lonely nights at home, all the insincere greetings and hollow works’ parties, they were the bedrock on which her villa was built. Somewhere hot and private, where she could rest, read and never, ever be at anyone else’s beck and call again, that was the plan. Not this.

  “Shit,” she muttered again, and carried on dragging the bucket towards the bin.

  The next day, it was meat.

  One of the pieces looked like a haunch; the other was a ragged mess of redly-gleaming flesh and white bone that she couldn’t identify. Furious, she swung at them with her net, watching in dismay as both chunks broke into smaller pieces even as she drew them from the pool, watching as the water tinged pink around them and knowing that she would have to run a full filter cycle again. Like the fruit, the meat smelled, a corrupted, sour scent of bile and decay, and as it dried in the heat its surface mottled to a patched and bruised grey. It had looked fresh in the water, certainly, but the way the flesh sloughed off the bone as it lay in her net convinced Helen that it was old, kitchen waste or something scavenged from the bins behind the supermarket.

  Using the net to keep the meat away from her, she went to the gate, intending to go to the villa up the hill and complain, but she stopped before going out onto the road. She had no proof, only suspicions, and besides, even if she was right, the likelihood was she would be dismissed as a foolish, raving woman, going senile in the heat. Meat? they would say. Our children? No, not our children. You must be mistaken.

  As the filter cycle ran, Helen sat in the shade drinking juice and wondering about her options. The sound of the pumps was calming, like hearing the distant hum of bees. She could go to the villa in person, she thought. Not carrying a net of meat and not in her swimming costume, definitely, but still go, explain politely and rationally that it had been amusing at first but that it wasn’t amusing now, that it was a waste of her time having to keep cleaning her pool. The problem was, she knew, she had no proof. She had never seen the children throw anything, never seen them looking at her over their wall or heard them laughing. And besides, she thought, how likely is it that this is the work of young children? The fruit, maybe, but meat? No. It didn’t seem likely.

  Then what? Tell the police? Again, no. Moreira was a tourist town, so she wouldn’t be dismissed entirely because they relied on tourism and had to make sure they listened when tourists complained, but they wouldn’t take her seriously. It wasn’t exactly a major crime. “Excuse me, officer,” said Helen quietly to herself, “someone appears to have thrown a courgette into my pool, and then a lemon, and then redcurrants and then some meat. No, I don’t want it stopped, I just wondered if you could find out who it was and ask them for an onion and rice and some pastry as well. I was hoping to make a risotto and then a fruit pie to follow.” She sighed and sipped her drink. It was so stupid.

  The filters were clogged with meat, greying and semi-liquid, and Helen wore the gloves again to clean them. There were more pieces of fruit in the mesh as well, tiny fragments of something that looked like it might once have been orange segments and more of the yellowing slimy residue that wrapped itself around her gloved fingers and stank like raw shit. At the bottom edge of one of the filter screens she tugged loose a long, thin piece of meat. It stretched out before snapping free and she had the impression that it was covered in tiny suckers like an octopus’ tentacle. It curled around itself in the palm of her hand, disintegrating as she tried to unwrap it so that she could look more closely and releasing an oily, bitter smell. Finally sh
e dropped it in the bucket with the other pieces of flesh and slime; whoever it was was dropping pieces of octopus in her pool now. Fine. Brilliant. Fucking wonderful. And Helen, kneeling by her pool in the day’s dying sun began, very quietly and calmly, to weep.

  The next day, Helen didn’t go inside for her usual siesta. Instead, she set herself up at a table in the shade, where she could read and keep an eye on the pool. She brought a huge jug of juice, clinking with ice cubes, several magazines and a book she had been intending to start for a while. Let them, whoever them was, try to throw things into her pool now. Perhaps, if she did this for several days and stopped them having their fun, they would grow bored. Helen no longer thought it was the children in the villa; the addition of meat had made it feel nastier, one of the pranks of youth rather than childhood. Expats were, she knew, not always popular and she was particularly vulnerable. Older, female and on her own, she must have seemed like a perfect target.

  “Well, fuck you,” she said loudly, pouring herself her first glass of juice, using the language she would never have used back home but which she had secretly always loved. “Fuck you all.”

  Even though she sat and read through the hottest part of the day, the sweat gathering in a thin slather across her skin despite the shade, Helen saw nothing. Several times, she rose and walked to the edge of the pool, peering into its blue waters in case she had missed something falling or being thrown in, but the water remained clear and clean. She managed to read her magazines, but the book proved too dense for her to cope with when she came up against the impenetrable wall of unbroken black text and heat and sun and her mind moving far more slowly than she would have liked it to. Instead, she finished the juice, the ice cubes long since melted into nothing, and was almost dozing when she heard the noise.