The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 20

by Stephen Jones (ed. )

  Camping was always at the core of these odd happenings. Holidays of any kind are prime times to loose, damage or forget things, even if they don’t involve laying out all your belongings in some windy field. So it was always especially hard when we were camping to tell exactly how much of what went wrong involved any external assistance. You didn’t need Dad to discover a frog in your sleeping bag, or dead beetles in the bottom of your plastic beaker of Fanta. Or perhaps you did. Where did it start? Where, beyond all the humming and Mum’s sad groans and getting ridiculously lost on the way to the site and then finding that the holiday pack of cards had got themselves smeared with dogshit, did being a camping Wainwright end and ordinary life begin? In our tent the cold, mustily playful fingers of those vicious outdoor gods were always threatening, demanding some small new sacrifice or abasement. There was no escape.

  The journey to Wales for the last holiday all four of us camping Wainwrights ever took together was just like every other journey. We got lost to Mum’s directions along B roads as Dad hummed and banged the dashboard and sang along to Perry Como. Hope you’ve got your passports, he shouted as we crossed the border. Can’t you even try to repeat that Welsh phrase I told you, our Terry? He was as happy as I’d ever seen him, and revved the Volvo’s engine into cheery clouds of fumes as Helen crouched coughing and retching at the roadside. His only disappointment came when the old woman he pulled up beside didn’t understand his version of Welsh. And it started raining. Of course it started raining; on Wainwright camping holidays, it always rained. When we finally reached our site, which was too wreathed in wet cloud for us to have any idea of its surroundings, Dad climbed out and stopped humming for long enough to sniff the air loudly and proclaim, Good, fresh, Welsh precipitation! just as he had praised the rain of the Lake District, Cornwall, the Scottish Highlands and other portions of Wales on previous holidays. We, the tent and all our belongings were soaked by the time everything had been transferred and erected.

  Opening out my bag that evening in the wan light of the dripping tent, I discovered that several of the cassettes of current hits which I had carefully taped off the radio on my portable player had unravelled themselves into balls of shining brown ribbon. I didn’t feel particularly shocked as my fingers slid through them. In fact, this was far too petty, too trivial . . .

  “Problem there, our Terry?”

  I looked up. Stupidly I’d left my inner tent hanging open and Dad’s long face, smiling as ever, was looking in on me.

  “Just this . . .” I remembered the hours I’d spent with my finger hovering over press the record and stop buttons. But I wasn’t going to let him see me cry.

  “Those tapes, eh? Well, never mind. Must have got jolted loose in the car. I’ve told you before that every cassette really needs to be kept neatly in its case.”

  “That’s impossible,” I said. “You did it.”

  Dad’s smile scarcely changed. “Like I say, Terry. These things happen—”

  “No they don’t!”

  “But there’s the evidence right in front of you.” He gazed down at the balled-up mess of ruined cassettes.

  I drew back. I could tell that he longed to touch and inspect them.

  “I suppose it’s no great loss,” he mock-sighed. “After all, there’s nothing to beat the old crooners, the classics.”

  “Just leave me alone! It’s like all the other stuff – everything in our lives that’s ever been wrecked or ruined or broken!”

  “Now, Terry . . .” For a moment, there was a change at the corners of Dad’s smile, and those bright points of pink which always flushed his cheeks on holiday darkened. “. . . you really think I did all of those things?” There was something else in his gaze. Something which I had never seen. It could have been denial, or wonder, or a sort of anger, or a kind of sorrow, even. Then he retreated, leaving me shivering.

  Despite the drum of rain, such conversations in a tent are never private, and its chilly echo lingered as we ate dinner off plastic plates. The food was semi-cold: Dad had delegated to Mum the task of replacing the gas canister this year, and the thing now turned out to be empty. Maybe you just picked up the old one by accident . . . You are sure you actually went . . .? Of course, it could have leaked. This modern so-called workmanship . . . We’d heard the same or similar explanations a million times and Mum, in particular, seemed frail and hollow-eyed at the start of this holiday – far older and wearier than her forty-something years. Iller, too, although almost everyone looks unwell in the greenish light of canvas. Apart from Dad, that is. I kept glancing at him as he ate, hating the pink spots which had returned to his cheeks, the open-mouthed way in which he chewed and how he rested his plate on his bald, bared knees and drummed his fingers on the arms of his folding chair to the beat of the rain. That night, I lay in bed listening to the continuing rain, re-acquainted with that feeling both of stifling confinement and empty exposure which you only ever experience in a tent. Dad’s face loomed. I cowered, drowning in canvas. The drenching clouds swept by, and I dreamed of sacrifices to the gods of a windswept earth until I was awoken in the still dark by the absence of the rain and the soft, nearby sound of something mewling. A mouse, I thought at first, being slowly dismembered by a fox or a cat in a nearby hedgerow; the sound was that high, that hopeless. Then it was punctuated by a characteristic series of soft “ohs” and I realized that it was Mum. And I knew that this had nothing to do with anything resembling love. She was simply crying.

  Something extraordinary happened next morning; we awakened to find the Welsh hills bathed in sunlight, and what looked like the whole blue Atlantic glinting beckoningly beyond a low fence. The breeze was warm and mild – barely enough to flutter the sides of the tent as Dad, hands stuffed deep into the pockets of his shorts, strode around it, muttering about the forecast being wildly wrong; how he’d been expecting, had planned for far harsher weather. The day, which had started deliciously warm, soon grew warmer. By noon, even the deep pools of mud outside the shower block had started to shrink.

  For the first part of our holiday, everything basked in incredible heat, and everyone on the site bore a dazedly cheerful expression. This, after all, wasn’t how camping holidays anywhere in Britain were supposed to be – especially in Wales. There was a small village nearby with a whitewashed pub, giddy cliff walks, and steps which led down to a vast, rock-strewn, beach. I remember the clean smell of the salt as I splashed in and out of the tepid shallows in the swimming costume I normally only wore on the afternoons when we escaped into some municipal swimming pool from the rain. Mum and Helen lounged on towels on and read doorstop novels. We all got mildly sunburnt. This was nothing like a usual Wainwright holiday. This, in fact, was almost like those brochures that I’d once smuggled home from the travel agents. Dad, for whom camping was all about battling storm and tempest, did his best to hide his disappointment. He wandered resentfully in his holiday sandals, boring the neighbours with his endless stories, scowling at the blazing sky and joining in the kids’ football match which had decamped itself to the beach near to a place where Mum and Helen sunbathing. Unsurprisingly, and although I don’t think it was Dad who actually kicked it, the ball once hit Mum in the face.

  At night, lying in the clean dryness of my inner tent and feeling the pinprick itch of my sunburn, I wondered at all these new sensations. Was this how other families lived their lives, had their holidays? Was this what it meant to be actually happy? But I knew it couldn’t last. When I climbed out of our tent on Saturday morning the sun was still blazing, but already there was a different tang to the air. Dad was walking briskly up the grassy slope from his trip to the camp shop with a bag full of sausages and bacon and his copy of the Daily Telegraph rolled like a baton. His shorts flapped in the breeze. I’d never seen him grinning so broadly.

  “Haven’t you heard, our Terry? I’d make the best of today if I were you – your pretend-swims. And better tell that lazy sister and mother of yours to wake up and start getting things ships
hape.” Cheeks redly gleaming, he scanned the Welsh horizons, then let out a shout – a yelp – of sheer joy loud enough to set the seagulls screaming. “There’s a big storm coming. Good job I managed to find a gas canister to replace the one your Mum forget to get fixed. We’ll need something warm inside us this evening . . .”

  Already, people were packing up. Tent poles tinked and car engines revved as cheery voices called farewell to holiday acquaintances they knew they would never see again. Not going yet, then? someone called. We shook our heads. After all, we were the camping Wainwrights, and Dad loved a big storm. Just like that Carpenters song which, despite its relative modernity, he was humming and singing in odd barks as he organized things, he was on top of the world.

  By noon, the sky had clouded over and the site was already near-deserted. Those few other hardy beings who were planning on staying were tautening canvas, knocking blocks under the wheels of their caravans, hammering in more tent pegs. Grass shivered, briars creaked, clumps of hawthorn waved their limbs, and there was a sense of siege as I hung my sodden trunks to flap from the guyropes after what I knew would be my last pretend-swim. All those recent happy days of warmth and sunlight already seemed like a dream. Even now, the tent was starting to give off its characteristic odour of soured canvas. The old, capricious gods of wet earth, of drumming rain, and of endless small destructions and sacrifices, were returning . . .

  Then a loud gasp came from within the tent. I ducked inside, and saw Mum crouched beside Helen in her inner tent. They were both looking down into my sister’s clothes bag, and what seemed for a moment like blood was smeared over their hands.

  “This is everything I’ve got left to wear,” Helen muttered, gazing at the inky mess where the two or three of her girlishly multi-coloured biros had seemingly leaked simultaneously across most of her clothes. “God knows how we’re going to get them clean.”

  “Isn’t there a washing machine in the block by the office?” I asked hopefully.

  “For what good that will do.” In this bilious light, Mum’s eyes were black. Her face, as if lit like a Hallowe’en lantern, had a waxy, greenish glare. She pulled out a tissue from her pocket and began to wipe her fingers. “I suppose I’d better get started before the storm kicks in. I mean . . .” She balled the tissue hard inside her fist so hard I heard it squeak. “I mean, it could be worse . . .” She trailed off. The sides of the tent bellied as the wind moaned. “I mean, it could be . . .” She trailed off again. I heard something in her throat click. “It’s like that bloody gas canister. It’s like – we can’t go on like this, can we? We’ve got to—”

  She stopped as the sound of Dad’s humming and the tramp of his sandaled feet grew close across the grass outside. We heard the jingle his keys as he shoved his hands into his shorts. He was standing right beside us now, a dark shape looming just beyond the canvas. He let out an abrupt shout.

  “Talk of a bit of rain, and look what happens,” he called. “Half the campsite disappears. But we’ll show them, eh? Us Wainwrights’ll have the time of our lives, eh? Eh?”

  In the late afternoon, the site owners drove their beaten-up Land-rover around the field, offering the shelter of a mouldy caravan which lay at the edge of the site. Dad, legs apart, stripped down to nothing but his shorts, fists planted on his bony hips as he stood in front of our tent, the absolute epitome of Wainwright resilience, smilingly shook his head. By now, huge, boiling banks of cloud, the far-flung arm of some tropic tempest which had reached all the way to us from across the Atlantic, were massing. There was a second leave-taking as most of the remaining campers decided against braving the elements on this exposed Welsh field. The sun gave a final bloody glare as it poked through the mountainous horizon, and I rechecked the guyropes and the pegs and the rubber hoops and the tent-ties and the metal poppers which held the frame together. I was looking for the flaw, the fault, the strain or rip or tear or twist or breakage, which I was sure lay hidden somewhere amid all Dad’s cheery preparations. But I couldn’t find anything – and that absence, as the tent’s canvas began to throb whilst Mum set about boiling up a meal of Vesta curry beneath the dripping remains of Helen’s stained clothing, was the wrongest thing of all.

  Mum, Helen and I ate stoically. Dad, though, was taut as a guyrope, and humming, smiling, jiggling. In its way, it was exciting to be here inside our tent as it began to bow and creak when the first heavy drops of rain started to thud against it. Then the heavens opened, and we just sat there wishing the hours away, for this was far too much, despite our many wet nights us camping Wainwrights had experienced. Normally, we’d have played cards, but the hissing, flapping roar of the storm as it beat against the tent was all-absorbing. Shining runnels of water pooled. The frame leaned and creaked in each roaring hammer-blow, dimming our dangling gas lantern. Even in raincoat and plastic trousers, I was instantly drenched on my last trip to the toilet. There was a moment of blind panic on the way back when I slipped in the mud and found my torch illuminating nothing but streaming rain. I was sure I’d lost our tent. But there it was: inner-lit, standing out against the pouring dark, it really did look almost safe; nearly welcoming.

  “Bit of a breeze out there?” Dad shouted in his typically yo-ho-me-hearties way as I wrestled to zip the flap back up. “You lot can all just go to bed. I’ll keep watch for all us Wainwrights, make sure everything stays absolutely shipshape . . .” Pulling off my Wellingtons and plastic overthings, too tired to bother with anything else, I crawled into my sodden sleeping bag and curled up there. Sleep, I told myself in the moment before I tumbled headlong into it, was impossible.

  And I dreamed. Although the sun was so bright I could barely see, I knew that we all us Wainwrights were here, and I stumbled in search of Mum’s and Dad’s and Helen’s holiday-happy voices. Slowly, I realized that the gleamingly painful light came from the gloss of the pages of the brochures into which I had fallen, with their bright poolside bars and plasticky palm trees. And, being mere pictures, the whole thing was flat; a disappointing wasteland. Come on, our Terry! Dad’s voice remained typically hearty. Could do with some help here . . . But I was still faltering, trying to work out exactly where on earth here was. My feet skidded and my hands slid. My fingers tore at the paper in my anger and frustration, which clumped and grew damp. Everything was sodden and filthy now, wet and reeking of soil and canvas as it closed over me, weighing down my flailing arms, wrapping my face and blocking my mouth in a filthy, turfy, earthy, musty reek. I fought against it. I couldn’t move, scream, breathe—

  Could do with some help here, Terry, Dad was still saying as I rose out from my dream to find that I was still choking, wrestling with flapping sheets. His torch danced amid the storm, showing streaming turf, blurring rain, a glimpse of his bare white knees. Dad, who was still wearing only his canvas shorts, was battling to secure my corner of the tent before the wind lifted the whole thing away.

  “Well done, our Terry! Are you awake in there, Mum? Helen – you as well! Could really do with a little more help out here . . .”

  His voice came and went over the thwack of the tent and the wild roar of the wind. Half-buried in mud and canvas, batting away flailing bits of rope, I struggled against the wet grip of my sleeping bag until I finally managed to scramble my way out. The noise was tremendous. Your feet slid. Your legs buckled. The air was sucked from your lungs. Dad’s torch played across his face. He was smeared in grass and mud, and the rain streamed off him, but still he was grinning – and that he was humming, singing, letting out those bizarre shouts.