The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New Horror

by Stephen Jones

  When, fifteen minutes later, Gran and Grandad came to join him, Danny had almost finished breakfast. He wondered if he should have waited and eaten with them, but Gran said nothing about that. Perhaps she hadn’t noticed. She had a preoccupied, anxious look on her face that Danny was getting used to seeing there. She kept half an eye on Grandad all the time, was aware of every move he made, and turned to give him her full attention whenever he spoke. Something about the way she treated her husband made Danny feel quite grown up, as though he and Grandad had changed places.

  The room filled up with old people. Danny looked out for anyone his age, but there was only one girl, a couple of years older and four inches taller than him, who pulled a tight face when he smiled at her, and didn’t look up from her plate again.

  When Grandad had finished eating he asked Gran what day it was. She told him Sunday, but a little later he asked the same question and, when she tried to get him to remember the answer she had given him earlier, he said he hadn’t asked her before, and if she didn’t know what day it was, why didn’t she just admit it?

  Gran put her hand on his arm and, very quietly, said she had told him, and not long ago. Grandad insisted she hadn’t, in a high, strange voice, and Danny thought he looked worried, even frightened.

  A waitress came to clear the table and Grandad said to her, “My wife has forgotten what day it is. Perhaps you can enlighten her?”

  The girl arched her eyebrows, looked from Grandad to Gran and back, and tried to smile.

  Why is it nobody at this place can smile for more than a second? Danny thought, and for the first time began to wonder if he was going to enjoy the holiday.

  The girl looked unsure of how to respond to Grandad’s request for such basic information, hoping, but doubting, it was a joke. To avoid her embarrassment, Danny looked out of the window, towards the box on the jetty.

  A big bird was standing on top of it. As Danny, watched the bird started strutting backwards and forwards, half-opening and closing its long, slender wings. It was just some kind of gull, Danny supposed. It was that sort of shape, but he had no idea they could grow so big and he had never seen one that dark before. Perhaps it had been caught in an oil slick? Suddenly, it launched itself off the edge of the box and soared into the sky.

  Danny turned back to the table when the waitress said, “It’s Sunday, of course. All day.”

  Grandad said, “Thank you very much”, and gave Gran a silly, mocking shake of his head.

  Anger, embarrassment, and some other indefinable pain registered on Gran’s face. She got to her feet. As she did so, Grandad automatically rose from his chair, only more slowly, with less agility.

  Danny jumped up to help him. “What are we going to do today?” he said. “It’s raining. Do we have to stay in?”

  “We will,” Gran said, “for now. But you can go for a walk, to explore, if you want to.”

  “Definitely,” Danny said. “It’s dead boring here.”

  Gran gave him the first real smile he had received all day. “Don’t catch cold though, and ruin your holiday.”

  “No problem. I’ll be alright.”

  As Danny moved around the table to follow his grandparents, something moved out of the grey clouds beyond the window next to him, and descended towards him. The oversized gull he had seen landed on the balcony a yard from the window. It folded its wings with an air of deliberation and craned its neck. It turned sideways on awkward, stumbling feet, cocked its head at an angle, and stared at Danny down one side of its beak.

  The beak was grimy yellow, like a heavy smoker’s teeth. The bird stretched forward and screamed, as though announcing its presence, then stood motionless, watching him. It was at least four times as big as any gull Danny had seen before, and he thought he had been right about the oil slick, because its inky plumage had a glossy sheen, like the wet tarpaulin on the box it had been standing on when he had first noticed it.

  “Danny!”

  Gran’s voice. She and Grandad were waiting for him at the door. Everyone in the room turned towards him.

  They’re all so old, he thought.

  He knew Todley Bay was popular with elderly people, and owed its reputation to what it had to offer that age group. His mother had told him all that weeks ago, and explained that the holiday was intended as a break for Gran and Grandad, and that he had to be on his best behaviour all the time, and not give them any worries.

  So he knew the resort would be their sort of place, with probably not much going for kids, but he had not expected to see so many old people. Most of them looked really ancient. There was hardly anyone in the room under – what? He wildly guessed . . . seventy? Eighty?

  Except for the waitresses, and the girl he had noticed, he was the only young person present. He looked for the girl again, and saw she was watching him, like the others. She gave him a withering look that actually made him shudder. There was something about her, he decided, which set her among the old people. She looked used up, done in, worn out. Then he realized she was probably very ill, and felt sorry for her at once.

  He hurried to the door, but looked back before stepping out. The gull hadn’t moved. It was still there, glaring in through the window.

  Danny was keen to get spending. He’d been saving up his pocket money for weeks and couldn’t wait to drop some of it into slot-machines, or buy sticks of his favourite pineapple rock and things to play with on the beach.

  But the shops were disappointing. They were dingy and dark, with a lot of old stock that no one would ever buy, and the proprietors watched him all the time, as though they thought he were a thief. In one store down near the beach the rock and other sweets were covered in grey dust, and looked shrivelled-up inside their wrappers. Danny bought a stick, because he had to buy something, but it tasted worse than the pencils he was in the habit of chewing at school, so he threw it in a bin.

  He wandered into the town, that sprawled almost perpendicularly up the hill behind the bay, in search of anything interesting, but soon got bored with endless rows of cream painted houses advertising BED & BREAKFAST or offering themselves as RESIDENTIAL HOMES FOR THE AGED. He passed a church that was open, with the bell ringing, but nobody went in or out. A gaunt and gloomy vicar with a lead-grey face was standing at the door, stiff as a waxwork, waiting to shake someone’s hand.

  It got tiring, climbing up the steep streets, so Danny turned back. His feet wanted to run down the sharp incline towards the beach, so he let them. The soles of his trainers slapped like clapping hands on the wet, empty streets, and he began to feel exhilarated, the way you should feel on holiday.

  The tide was on its way out and he ran without stopping right down the beach to the water’s edge. It was cold down there, and a wind driving off the sea carried a miserable, almost invisible mist with it, but Danny tried not to let that bother him. He threw some pebbles at a jellyfish, played tag with the waves, then trotted along until he was suddenly brought up short by the jetty, half of which still stretched out into the sea. It was about ten feet high, but there were steps up the side, which he climbed without thinking.

  As he reached the top, and looked across the harbour beyond, something called out to his right, towards the town. It sounded like the voice of a demented woman screeching his name. He turned and saw, five yards away, the box, and, hovering above it, with its feet stretching down, about to land, the enormous gull. It called again, almost dancing on the tarpaulin with the tips of its claws as it carved at the air with it wings to keep itself just in flight, then settled and became motionless and silent, like a stuffed bird in a museum.

  It was staring straight at Danny. There was something threatening about the creature’s posture – it looked tense, as though it was ready to burst into furious action any second. Cautiously, Danny took a few paces towards it. It side-stepped once, adjusting its position slightly in a gust of buffeting wind, but showed no fear of him, or any sign that it was about to fly away. Its position on the box put it slightly
higher than Danny’s head, so its beak was just above his eyes.

  The beak resembled a scaled-down sword from a fantasy film. It was at least eight inches long, and the upper section curved sharply down in a cruel, hard, hooked point. Danny thought the bird would have no trouble opening up his skull with a weapon like that on its head.

  When he was a few feet away, and still beyond the gull’s reach, Danny stopped, worried about his eyes, that suddenly seemed very vulnerable. He saw that the bird had a cold and crazy look in its eyes, which reminded him of snakes and alligators.

  Danny blew air out through his pursed lips, and shook his head. He realized he was afraid, and not just of the gull. There was more to it than that. The air around him felt charged and dangerous. Beyond the jetty, the town itself seemed to be watching him, poised and ready to tumble forward on top of him in a huge avalanche if he did the wrong thing. Something, he sensed, was in the balance.

  For the first time he took a close look at the box. It was made of wood, bound with strips of greenish metal that could have been brass, and its unpainted surface was mottled with patches of dank, dark-emerald growth. Probably some kind of marine weed. It stood in a puddle of its own making. The wood was waterlogged, which partly explained why the man he had seen pushing it had found the task such heavy going. The lid, if it had a lid, was under the flapping tarpaulin cover, but something about the box gave Danny the impression it was locked up very tight. It looked impenetrable! Briefly he wondered what, if anything, was inside it, then hastily closed his mind to the ugly images that were trying to crawl up out of his imagination.

  All at once, Danny wanted to get back into the town. The jetty was narrow, but the box took up less than half its width. He could slip past it easily, but in doing so, he would put himself well within the reach of the gull. If it attacked him, he might fall off the jetty. It was a long way down to the beach, and there were flint rocks sticking out of the sand below. He took another look at the creature’s beak. The gull glared back and nodded curtly once, as if to confirm his apprehensions.

  “Look,” Danny said, without having any idea why, “I don’t want anything to do with this. I’m just here on holiday.” Then he added, “I’m sorry,” in a tone more of confusion than apology, and turned and fled back down the steps.

  He didn’t stop running when he felt the sand of the beach under his feet, but continued right up to the hotel. When he had almost reached it, just as he was trotting up the drive, the sun slid out from behind the clouds above him and its light blazed down on all the town like a laser beam.

  The rest of the day was showery, so the three of them didn’t stray far from the TV in the Hotel lounge. When he went to bed Danny thought he could hear the box being pushed along the jetty again, but he was so tired, even though he had done nothing much all day, he fell asleep almost at once.

  Next morning, when the girl came into his room, threw back the curtains to reveal a blue, cloudless sky, and came towards him with a cup of tea, he jumped up in bed at once, so she wouldn’t have any excuse to touch him. Even so, she put one hand on his head and poked about in his hair while he sipped his drink, as though she was gently feeling for lumps.

  It seemed to Danny that her fingertips were like cold, hard marbles rolling about on his scalp. He assumed it was a gesture of affection – he couldn’t think what else it could be, and resisted the urge to duck away. But, when she sat down next to him, he jumped out of bed, ran to the sink, and started washing.

  In the morning he spent an hour in a drab little seafront cafe with his grandparents drinking banana milkshakes. After lunch the three of them went down to the beach. Grandad, in a boyish mood, led the way. He looked as though he was wearing someone else’s clothes, because he had lost so much weight in the last year, but Danny recognized the fawn trousers the old man had worn on the last three of their previous holidays together.

  Gran, Danny noticed, seemed more anxious than ever about Grandad when he was at all boisterous, as though she was scared his behaviour might get out of hand. As soon as Grandad had put his cap on backwards, and his face had taken on the now all-too-familiar clown’s witless smile that had come to haunt it recently, Gran’s features had responded by setting into a rigid, pained expression. She looked as though she had a bad headache.

  Grandad had wandered away from her twice, and the second time it had taken her half an hour to locate him. He had been with two men who were leading him away, or seemed to be. They had not spoken to her when she had reclaimed her husband, and she hadn’t liked the look of them. They looked like muggers, she said.

  Danny, feeling sympathy for both his grandparents, took care to be on his best behaviour when he was with them, but he wished they’d loosen up. He was now definitely beginning to wonder what kind of holiday it was going to be!

  Gran decided it was too windy to sit on the beach, so she steered Grandad into a shelter on the promenade from where they could watch Danny doing the things children do on such occasions. He made a cake-like sandcastle without much enthusiasm, because he was beginning to wonder if he was too old for such activities, then stripped down to his trunks and sped towards the sea, now quite a long way out.

  In places the surface of the sand had been formed into hard ridges by the action of the out-going tide. They ran along the whole length of the beach. They hurt the soles of his bare feet if he ran, and forced him to slow down and walk carefully. To Danny, it looked as though hundreds of endless fat worms lay paralysed just below the surface.

  Old Man Sand’s got wrinkles, he said to himself, and laughed at the thought, though there was something not-very-nice about the idea that he found alarming and tried to shove to the back of his mind.

  After paddling for a while in the shallow sea, that was starting to warm in the sun, and taking a short, leisurely swim, he noticed he felt constrained and uneasy. Something was missing! Except for the sound of waves breaking on the shore, and the occasional scream of gulls (ordinary sized gulls, that was), the beach was strangely quiet. Conspicuous by its absence, he realized, was hubbub, pandemonium. He missed the voices of children yelling and shouting in excitement to each other, and telling their parents about what they were up to at the tops of their voices. The whole beach, the entire Bay even, though now more populated, was muffled, silent, and somehow static. Like a painting. Danny looked about him at his fellow bathers.

  There were not many. Within twenty yards of him half a dozen elderly people, their trousers and skirts rolled or hitched up, wandered about ankle-deep at the water’s edge.

  A beefy man with bulging eyes and purple skin, looking as though his whole body had been beaten into one huge bruise, occasionally hurled himself into deeper water further out and swam a few stiff, furious strokes.

  A woman in a lime-green costume, standing in the sea close to Danny, suddenly stooped, lowered herself to her knees, sat on her heels and bowed her head in a praying attitude. Her flesh oozed out around the edges of her costume like viscous liquid when she moved. Her skin was crinkled, like the monkey’s brain in a bottle in the biology lab at Danny’s school. She seemed uncomfortable in the position she had adopted and wriggled around so she could lay back on the sand.

  A wave breaking over her created the illusion that she was sliding feet first into the sea. Seconds later, when it withdrew, Danny imagined he saw something in the water, clasped around her ankles, tugging her away from the beach.

  This impression was so strong he walked closer to get a better look at her. The next wave was bigger, however, and submerged her completely. She did not, as Danny expected, start up when the water covered her face, but her body yawed slightly in the drag of the tide. Her eyes were shut and her mouth was open wide. She could have been shouting, laughing or even yawning.

  Baffled and alarmed, Danny thought he ought to try to help the woman, though she gave no indication that she was at all distressed. He wondered if he should ask one of the other old people for their assessment of the situation, then saw t
hat two of them were now also kneeling down. The red-skinned man who had been swimming had vanished, but Danny was sure he had not passed him on his way back to the beach. The last time he had seen him, the man had been in the act of lunging forward in a clumsy dive.

  Out in the area where the man had been standing, Danny noticed, for the first time, what looked like dark shadows under the waves. They appeared to be moving. He thought they must be weed-covered rocks, just visible at the bottom of the grey-green water.

  One of the two people who were kneeling lay back in the water.

  Danny suddenly looked down at his feet. He thought something had touched his right ankle. The sand next to it was disturbed, as though some fast-moving object had hurriedly dug down into it. He turned and ran a few yards out of the water, stood on the nearly dry sand, and looked back. The tide must be coming in fast, he thought, as there was no sign of the woman in the green costume. He could no longer see some of the other people who had been paddling, but a handful more had stumbled forward off the beach into the sea. He realized that none of them had nodded to him, or given him so much as a glance.

  He shrugged, and jogged back to where Gran and Grandad were sitting in the shelter. Gran looked more relaxed, perhaps because Grandad was asleep. She held a finger to her lips to warn Danny to keep his voice down, and asked him if he was enjoying himself. Danny didn’t want to upset her by telling the truth about how he did feel at that moment, which in any case would be difficult to explain, so he just nodded. He asked for money for an ice cream.

  As Gran fumbled in her purse, Danny noticed a man sitting on the bench on the other side of Grandad was watching him. He was heavily built, with a bald head and heavy jowls and was dressed in old, dark, working clothes. He could have been a fisherman. He had one arm along the bench behind Grandad’s head. Two fingers of his hand rested on Grandad’s shoulder. As Danny looked back at him, he lifted the fingers and curled them back towards his palm.