“When I woke,” Mrs Marchant murmured, “there was sunlight. I didn’t wait to make sense of what I was seeing. I didn’t think about what I’d find. I didn’t wake Charlie’s father, but he came roaring after me as I sprinted from the house.
“We didn’t even know if our rowboat would float. We made straight for it anyway. I didn’t look at the sandbar. Do you find that strange? I didn’t want to see. Not yet. I looked at the dunes, and they were gold, Mr Selkirk. Even with the blown grass and seaweed strewn all over them, they looked newly born.
“The rowboat had landed on its side. The wood had begun to split all down one side, but Charlie’s father thought it would hold. Anyway, it was all we had, our last chance. Without a word, we righted it and dragged it to the water, which was like glass. Absolutely flat, barely rolling over to touch the beach. Charlie’s father wasn’t waiting for me. He’d already got into the boat and begun to pull. But when I caught the back and dragged myself in, he held position just long enough, still not saying a single thing. Then he started rowing for all he was worth.
“For a few seconds longer, I kept my head down. I wanted to pray, but I couldn’t. My mother was a Catholic, and we’d worked for the nuns. But somehow, making the dolls had turned God doll-like, for me. Does that make sense? I found it impossible to have faith in anything that took the face we made for it. I wanted some other face than the one I knew, then. So I closed my eyes and listened to the seagulls squealing around, skimming the surface for dead fish. Nothing came to me, except how badly I wanted Charlie back. Finally, I lifted my head.
“I didn’t gasp, or cry out. I don’t think I even felt anything.
“First off, there were only two of them. The highest was Charlie. He’d climbed almost to the very top of the main mast, which had tilted over so far that it couldn’t have been more than twenty-five feet above the water. Even with that overcoat engulfing him and the hat pulled all the way down over his ears, I could tell by the arms and legs snarled in the rigging that it was him.
“’Is he moving, girl?’ Charlie’s father asked, and I realized he hadn’t been able to bring himself to look, either. We lurched closer.
“Then I did gasp, Mr Selkirk. Just once. Because he was moving. Or I thought he was. He seemed to be settling . . . resettling . . . I can’t explain it. He was winding his arms and legs through the ropes, like a child trying to fit into a hiding place as you come for him. As if he’d just come back there. Or maybe the movement was wind. Even now, I don’t know.
“Charlie’s father swore at me and snarled his question again. When I didn’t answer, he turned around. ‘Lord Jesus,’ I heard him say. After that, he just put his head down and rowed. And I kept my eyes on Charlie, and the empty blue sky beyond him. Anywhere but down the mast, where the other Kendall boy hung.
“By his ankles, Mr Selkirk. His ankles, and nothing more. God only knows what held him there. The wind had torn his clothes right off him. He had his eyes and his mouth open. He looked so pale, so thin, nothing like he had in life. His body had red slashes all over it, as though the storm had literally tried to rip him open. Just a boy, Mr Selkirk. His fingertips all but dancing on the water.
“Charlie’s father gave one last heave, and our little boat knocked against the last showing bit of the Kendalls’ ship’s hull. The masts above us groaned, and I thought the whole thing was going to crash down on top of us. Charlie’s father tried to wedge an oar in the wood, get us in close, and finally he just rowed around the ship and ran us aground on the sandbar. I leapt out after him, thinking I should be the one to climb the mast. I was lighter, less likely to sink the whole thing once and for all. Our home, our lighthouse, was so close it seemed I could have waded over and grabbed it. I probably could have. I leaned back, looked up again, and this time I was certain I saw Charlie move.
“His father saw it, too, and he started screaming. He wasn’t even making words, but I was. I had my arms wide open, and I was calling my husband. ‘Come down. Come home, my love.’ I saw his arms disentangle themselves, his legs slide free. The ship sagged beneath him. If he so much as touched that water, I thought, it would be too much. The cold would have him at the last. He halted, and his father stopped screaming, and I went silent. He hung there so long I thought he’d died after all, now that he’d heard our voices one last time. Then, hand over hand, so painfully slowly, like a spider crawling down a web, he began to edge upside-down over the ropes. He reached the Kendall boy’s poor, naked body and bumped it with his hip. It swung out and back, out and back. Charlie never even looked, and he didn’t slow or alter his path. He kept coming.
“I don’t even remember how he got over the rail. As he reached the deck, he disappeared a moment from our sight. We were trying to figure how to get up there to him. Then he just climbed over the edge and fell to the sand at our feet. The momentum from his body gave the wreck a final push, and it slid off the sandbar into the water and sank, taking the Kendall boy’s body with it.
“The effort of getting down had taken everything Charlie had. His eyes were closed. His breaths were shallow, and he didn’t respond when we shook him. So Charlie’s father lifted him and dropped him in the rowboat. I hopped in the bow with my back to the shore, and Charlie’s father began to pull desperately for the mainland. I was sitting calf-deep in water, cradling my husband’s head facedown in my lap. I stroked his cheeks, and they were so cold. Impossibly cold, and bristly, and hard. Like rock. All my thoughts, all my energy, all the heat I had I was willing into my fingers, and I was cooing like a dove. Charlie’s father had his back to us, pulling for everything he was worth. He never turned around. And so he didn’t . . .”
Once more, Mrs Marchant’s voice trailed away. Out the filthy windows, in the grey that had definitely darkened into full-blown dusk now, Selkirk could see a single trail of yellow-red, right at the horizon, like the glimpse of eye underneath a cat’s closed lid. Tomorrow the weather would clear. And he would be gone, on his way home. Maybe he would stay there this time. Find somebody he didn’t have to pay to keep him company.
“It’s a brave thing you’ve done, Mrs Marchant,” he said, and before he could think about what he was doing, he slid forward and took her chilly hand in his. He meant nothing by it but comfort, and was surprised to discover the sweet, transitory sadness of another person’s fingers curled in his. A devil’s smile of a feeling, if ever there was one. “He was a good man, your husband. You have mourned him properly and well.”
“Just a boy,” she whispered.
“A good boy, then. And he loved you. You have paid him the tribute he deserved, and more. And now it’s time to do him the honour of living again. Come back to town. I’ll see you somewhere safe and warm. I’ll see you there myself, if you’ll let me.”
Very slowly, without removing her fingers, Mrs Marchant raised her eyes to his, and her mouth came open. “You . . . you silly man. You think . . . But you said you knew the story.”
Confused, Selkirk squeezed her hand. “I know it now.”
“You believe I have stayed here, cut off from all that is good in the world, shut up with my nuns all these years like an abbess, for love? For grief?”
Now Selkirk let go, watching as Mrs Marchant’s hand fluttered before settling in her lap like a blown leaf. “There’s no crime in that, surely. But now—”
“I’ve always wondered how the rowboat flipped,” she said, in a completely new, expressionless tone devoid of all her half-sung tones, as he stuttered to silence. “All the times I’ve gone through it and over it, and I can’t get it straight. I can’t see how it happened.”
Unsure what to do with his hands, Selkirk finally settled them on his knees. “The rowboat?”
“Dead calm. No ghost wave this time. We were twenty yards from shore. Less. We could have hopped out and walked. I was still cooing. Still stroking my husband’s cheeks. But I knew already. And I think his father knew, too. Charlie had died before we even got him in the boat. He wasn’t breathing.
Wasn’t moving. He hadn’t during the whole, silent trip back to shore. I turned toward land to see exactly how close we were. And just like that I was in the water.
“If you had three men and were trying, you couldn’t flip a boat that quickly. One of the oars banged me on the head. I don’t know if it was that or the cold that stunned me. But I couldn’t think. For a second, I had no idea which way was up, even in three feet of water, and then my feet found bottom, and I stood and staggered toward shore. The oar had caught me right on the scalp, and a stream of blood kept pouring into my eyes. I wasn’t thinking about Charlie. I wasn’t thinking anything except that I needed to be out of the cold before I became it. I could feel it in my bloodstream. I got to the beach, collapsed in the sun, remembered where I was and what I’d been doing, and spun around.
“There was the boat, floating right-side up, as though it hadn’t flipped it all. Oars neatly shipped, like arms folded across a chest. Water still as a lagoon beneath it. And neither my husband nor his father anywhere.
“I almost laughed. It was impossible. Ridiculous. So cruel. I didn’t scream. I waited, scanning the water, ready to lunge in and save Charlie’s dad if I could only see him. But there was nothing. No trace. I sat down and stared at the horizon and didn’t weep. It seemed perfectly possible that I might freeze to death right there, complete the event. I even opened the throat of my dress, thinking of the Kendall boys shedding their coats that first day. That’s what I was doing when Charlie crawled out of the water.”
Selkirk stood up. “But you said—”
“He’d lost his hat. And his coat had come open. He crawled right up the beach, sidewise, like a crab. Just the way he had down the rigging. Of course, my arms opened to him, and the cold dove down my dress. I was laughing, Mr Selkirk. Weeping and laughing and cooing, and his head swung up, and I saw.”
With a single, determined wriggle of her shoulders, Mrs Marchant went completely still. She didn’t speak again for several minutes. Helpless, Selkirk sat back down.
“The only question I had in the end, Mr Selkirk, was when it had happened.”
For no reason he could name, Selkirk experienced a flash of Amalia’s cruel, haunted face, and tried for the thousandth time to imagine where she’d gone. Then he thought of the dead town behind him, the debris disappearing piece by piece and bone by bone into the dunes, his aunt’s silent death. His uncle. He’d never made any effort to determine what had happened to his uncle after Amalia vanished.
“I still think about those boys, you know,” Mrs Marchant murmured. “Every day. The one suspended in the ropes, exposed like that, all torn up. And the one that disappeared. Do you think he jumped to get away, Mr Selkirk? I think he might have. I would have.”
“What on earth are you—”
“Even the dead’s eyes reflect light,” she said, turning her bright and living ones on him. “Did you know that? But Charlie’s eyes . . . Of course, it wasn’t really Charlie, but . . .”
Selkirk almost leapt to his feet again, wanted to, wished he could hurtle downstairs, flee into the dusk. And simultaneously he found that he couldn’t.
“What do you mean?”
For answer, Mrs Marchant cocked her head at him, and the ghost of her smile hovered over her mouth and evaporated. “What do I mean? How do I know? Was it a ghost? Do you know how many hundreds of sailors have died within five miles of this point? Surely one or two of them might have been angry about it.”
“Are you actually saying—”
“Or maybe that’s silly. Maybe ghosts are like gods, no? Familiar faces we have clamped on what comes for us? Maybe it was the sea. I can’t tell you. What I can tell you is that there was no Charlie in the face before me, Mr Selkirk. None. I had no doubt. No question. My only hope was that whatever it was had come for him after he was gone, the way a hermit crab climbs inside a shell. Please God, whatever that is, let it be the wind and the cold that took him.”
Staggering upright, Selkirk shook his head. “You said he was dead.”
“So he was.”
“You were mistaken.”
“It killed the Kendall boy, Mr Selkirk. It crawled down and tore him to shreds. I’m fairly certain it killed its own father as well. Charlie’s father, I mean. Luis took one look at him and vanished into the dunes. I never saw the dog again.”
“Of course it was him. You’re not yourself, Mrs Marchant. All these years alone . . . It spared you, didn’t it? Didn’t he?”
Mrs Marchant smiled one more time and broke down weeping, silently. “It had just eaten,” she whispered. “Or whatever it is it does. Or maybe I had just lost my last loved ones, and stank of the sea, and appeared as dead to it as it did to me.”
“Listen to me,” Selkirk said, and on impulse he dropped to one knee and took her hands once more. God, but they were cold. So many years in this cold, with this weight on her shoulders. “That day was so full of tragedy. Whatever you think you . . .”
Very slowly, Selkirk stopped. His mind retreated down the stairs, out the lighthouse door to the mainland, over the disappearing path he’d walked between the dunes, and all the way back into Winsett. He saw anew the shuttered boarding houses and empty taverns, the grim smile of the stable-boy. He saw the street where his uncle’s cabin had been. What had happened to his uncle? His aunt? Amália? Where had they all gone? Just how long had it taken Winsett to die? His mind scrambled farther, out of town, up the track he had taken, between the discarded pots and decaying whale-bones toward the other silent, deserted towns all along this blasted section of the Cape.
“Mrs Marchant,” he whispered, his hands tightening around hers, having finally understood why she had stayed. “Mrs Marchant, please. Where is Charlie now?”
She stood, then, and twined one gentle finger through the tops of his curls as she wiped at her tears. The gesture felt dispassionate, almost maternal, something a mother might do to a son who has just awoken. He looked up and found her gazing again not out to sea but over the dunes at the dark streaming inland.
“It’s going to get even colder,” she said. “I’ll put the kettle on.”
2007
The Church on the Island
Simon Kurt Unsworth
AFTER THE PROBLEMS with the foil cover on volume eighteen, my publishers decided they wanted to take the look of the series in a new direction. I had no problem with them trying something different with the design, although I had obviously been more than happy with the way the books had looked when Michael Marshall Smith and I produced the covers.
What I was not expecting was a figure with his chest exploding and the authors’ names spilling out in gouts of gore! When I complained that this kind of image did not actually represent the content of the book, I was told that the new American publisher, Running Press, had actually increased its order on the basis of it. During uncertain publishing times, that is the kind of argument you simply cannot disagree with.
After my disappointment at how some people in our field responded to protests at the IHG Award’s decision to exclude anthologies from the previous year’s nominations, I was even more taken aback at the vitriol that greeted my involvement in moving the 2007 World Horror Convention outside the United States for the first time. Held in Toronto, Canada, certain members of one particular online message board decided to wage a hate campaign against the event when they decided that the organizers were being too “professional”. Although the convention was an unqualified success, it was not an example of one of the genre’s finest moments.
Although the Introduction covered eighty pages and the Necrology dropped to fifty-one, this edition was up to over 600 pages again. This was because the book contained twenty-six stories, including a long novella by Kim Newman (the World Fantasy Award-nominated “Cold Snap”).
The anthology once again won The British Fantasy Award, and along with plenty of familiar names, the Contents page included newcomers Gary McMahon, Simon Strantzas, Marc Lecard and Joel Knight for the first time.
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Also making his debut in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Volume Nineteen was British writer Simon Kurt Unsworth. As I said earlier, one of the most rewarding elements of this job is discovering new talent. Whatever some people might think, editors are always looking out for new writers who they can nurture and develop. Otherwise any genre will stagnate and, eventually, die.
However, what was even more remarkable about the World Fantasy Award-nominated “The Church on the Island” was that it was Simon’s first published story, although you would never guess it from the following . . .
CHARLOTTE PULLED HERSELF onto the beach and pushed her hair back off her face in a cascade of water. She took a couple of deep breaths, quietly pleased by the fact that she was not more affected by her swim. As she let her heart rate and breathing settle, she untied the string from around her waist and freed her plastic sandals; they had spent the swim bobbing along at her side, gently tapping her thighs every now and again as if to remind her of their existence. Now, she let them fall to the floor and slid her feet into them. Water squeezed under her feet and around her toes, spilling out onto the wet sand. Then, walking away from the sea, she let her eyes rise to the object of her visit: the little blue and white church.
Charlotte had seen the church the first time she had looked out from her hotel room window. Perhaps half a mile out from shore, nestling into the vibrant blue sea, was a tiny island. It seemed to be little more than an upthrust of grey rock from the ocean, its flanks covered in scrubby green foliage. Its lower slopes looked gentle, but there was a central outcrop of rock that appeared almost cubic, as though cut by some giant hand with a dull knife. This mass was settled on to the centre of the island as though the same hand that had cut it had placed it down, forcing it into the earth like a cake decoration into icing. Its sides were almost vertical and striated with dark fissures and it looked to be fifty or sixty feet tall, although Charlotte found it hard to judge this accurately and changed her mind every time she gazed at it.
The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New Horror Page 83