The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18

by Stephen Jones (ed. )

  THEY ONLY BRUSHED his cheek for a second or two, but her lips were fucking freezing.

  “Christ, Carol,” he said. “Do you want my coat?”

  She laughed. “What for?” she asked.

  “Because it’s one in the morning,” he said. “And you’re cold.”

  “It’s summer,” she pointed out, which was undeniably true but wasn’t really the issue. “Are you going to walk me home then?”

  Michael had left the others about forty minutes earlier. Kirk had apparently copped off with the girl from Woolworth’s that they’d met inside the pub so Michael and Terry had tactfully peeled away before the bus stop and started walking the long way home around Sefton Park. He could’ve split a taxi fare with Terry but, given that they were still in the middle of their ongoing argument about the relative merits of T. Rex and Pink Floyd and that it was still a good six months before they’d find Roxy Music to agree on, they’d parted by unspoken consent and Michael had opted to cut across the park alone.

  Carol had been standing on the path beside the huge park’s large boating lake. He’d practically shit himself when he first saw the shadowed figure there, assuming the worst – a midnight skinhead parked on watch ready to whistle his mates out of hiding to give this handy glam-rock faggot a good kicking – but Carol had been doing nothing more threatening than staring out at the center of the lake and the motionless full moon reflected there.

  “All right, Michael,” she’d said, before he’d quite recognised her in the moonlight, and had kissed his cheek lightly in further greeting before he’d spoken her name. Now, he fell into step beside her and they began to walk the long slow curve around the lake.

  “God, Carol. Where’ve you been?” he asked. “Nobody’s seen you for months.”

  It was true. Her mum had remarried just before last Christmas and they’d moved. Not far away, still in the same city, but far enough for sixteen-year-olds to lose touch.

  “I went to America,” Carol said.

  Michael turned his head to see if she was kidding. “You went to America?” he said. “What d’you mean, you went to America? When? Who with?”

  Her eyes narrowed for a moment as if she were re-checking her facts or her memory. “I think it was America,” she said.

  “You think it was America?”

  “It might have been an imaginary America,” she said, her voice a little impatient. “Do you want to hear the fucking story or not?”

  Oh. Michael didn’t smile nor attempt to kiss her, but he felt like doing both. Telling stories – real, imagined, or some happy collision of the two – had been one of the bonds between them, one of the things he’d loved about her. Not the only thing of course. It’s not like he hadn’t shared Kirk and Terry’s enthusiastic affection for her astonishingly perfect breasts and for the teasingly challenging way she had about her that managed to suggest two things simultaneously: that, were circumstances to somehow become magically right, she might, you know, actually do it with you; and that you were probably and permanently incapable of ever conjuring such circumstances. But her stories, and her delight in telling them, were what he’d loved most and what, he now realised, he’d most missed. So yes, he said, he wanted to hear the story.

  There was some quick confusion about whether she’d got there by plane or by ship – Carol had never been a big fan of preamble – but apparently what mattered was that, after a few days, she found herself in a roadside diner with a bunch of people she hardly knew.

  They were on a road trip and had stopped for lunch in this back-of-beyond and unpretentious diner – a place which, while perfectly clean and respectable, looked like it hadn’t been painted or refurbished since about 1952. They were in a booth, eating pie and drinking coffee. Her companions were about her age – but could, you know, drive and everything. Turned out boys in America could be just as fucking rude as in Liverpool. One of them – Tommy, she thought his name was – was giving shit to the waitress. Hoisting his empty coffee mug, he was leaning out of the booth and looking pointedly down the length of the room.

  “Yo! Still need a refill here!” he shouted to the counter.

  Carol stood up and, announcing she was going to the ladies’ room, slid her way out of the booth. Halfway down the room, she crossed paths with the waitress, who was hurrying toward their booth with a coffee pot. The woman’s name tag said Cindi, a spelling Carol had never seen before and hoped could possibly be short for Cinderella because that’d be, you know, great. Carol spoke softly to her, nodding back towards Tommy, who was impatiently shaking his empty coffee mug in the air.

  “Don’t mind him, love,” Carol said. “He’s a bit of a prick, but I’ll make sure he leaves a nice tip.”

  Cindi, who was harried-looking and appeared to be at least 30, gave her a quick smile of gratitude. “Little girls’ room’s out back, sweetheart,” she said.

  Carol exited the main building of the diner and saw that a separate structure, little more than a shack really, housed the bathrooms. She started across the gravelled parking lot, surrounded by scrub-grass that was discoloured and overgrown, looking down the all-but-deserted country road – the type of road, she’d been informed by her new friends, which was known as a two-lane blacktop. The diner and its shithouse annex were the only buildings for as far as her eye could see, apart from a hulking grain silo a hundred yards or so down the road. As Carol looked in that desolate direction, a cloud drifted over the sun, dimming the summer daylight and shifting the atmosphere into a kind of pre-storm dreariness. Carol shivered and wondered, not without a certain pleasure in the mystery, just where the hell she was.

  Done peeing and alone in the bathroom, Carol washed her hands and splashed her face at the pretty crappy single sink that was all the place had to offer. The sound of the ancient cistern laboriously and noisily re-filling after her flush played in the background. Carol turned off the tap and looked for a moment at her reflection in the pitted and stained mirror above the sink. As the cistern finally creaked and whistled to a halt, the mirror suddenly cracked noisily across its width as if it was just too tired to keep trying.

  “Fuckin’ ’ell!” said Carol, because it had made her jump and because she didn’t like the newly mismatched halves of her reflected face. She turned around, ready to walk out of the bathroom, and discovered she was no longer alone.

  A little girl – what, six, seven years old? – was standing, silent and perfectly still, outside one of the stall doors, looking up at her. Oddly, the little girl was holding the palm of one hand over her right eye.

  “Oh, shit,” said Carol, remembering that she’d just said fucking hell in front of a kid. “I didn’t know you were –” She paused, smiled, started over. “Hello, pet. D’you live around here?”

  The little girl just kept looking at her.

  “What’s your name?” Carol asked her, still smiling but still getting no response. Registering the hand-over-the-eye thing, she tried a new tack. “Oh,” she said. “Are we playing a game and nobody told me the rules? All right then, here we go.”

  Raising her hand, Carol covered her own right eye with her palm. The little girl remained still and silent. Carol lowered her hand from her face. “Peek-a-boo,” she said.

  Finally, the little girl smiled shyly and lowered her own hand. She had no right eye at all, just a smooth indented bank of flesh.

  Carol was really good. She hardly jumped at all and her gasp was as short-lived as could reasonably be expected.

  The little girl’s voice was very matter-of-fact. “Momma lost my eye-patch,” she said.

  “Oh. That’s a shame,” said Carol, trying to keep her own voice as equally everyday.

  “She’s gonna get me another one. When she goes to town.”

  “Oh, well, that’s good. Will she get a nice colour? Do you have a favourite colour?”

  The little girl shrugged. “What are you, retarded?” she said. “It’s an eye-patch. Who cares what colour it is?”

  Carol didn
’t know whether to laugh or slap her.

  “You can go now, if you like,” said the little girl. “I have to make water.”

  “Oh. All right. Sure. Well, look after yourself,” Carol said and, raising her hand in a slightly awkward wave of farewell, headed for the exit door. The little girl called after her.

  “You take care in those woods now, Carol,” she said.

  “I hadn’t told her my name,” said Carol.

  “Well, that was weird,” Michael said.

  Carol smiled, pleased. “That wasn’t weird,” she said. “It got weird. Later. After I got lost in the woods.”

  “You got lost in the woods?”

  Carol nodded.

  “Why’d they let you go wandering off on your own?”

  “Who?”

  “Your new American friends. The people you were in the café with.”

  “Ha. Café. Diner, stupid. We were in America.”

  “Whatever. How could they let you get lost?”

  “Oh, yeah.” She thought about it for a second, looking out to their side at the boating lake and its ghost moon. “Well, p’raps they weren’t there to begin with. Doesn’t matter. Listen.”

  Turned out Carol did get lost in the woods. Quite deep in the woods, actually. Heart of the forest, Hansel and Gretel shit, where the sunlight, through the thickening trees, was dappled and spotty and where the reassuring blue sky of what was left of the afternoon could be glimpsed only occasionally through the increasingly oppressive canopy of high leafy branches.

  Carol was tramping her way among the trees and the undergrowth on the mossy and leaf-strewn ground when she heard the sound for the first time. Faint and plaintive and too distant to be truly identifiable, it was nevertheless suggestive of something, something that Carol couldn’t quite put her finger on. Only when it came again, a few moments later, did she place it. It was the sound of a lonely ship’s horn in a midnight ocean, melancholy and eerie. Not quite as eerie, though, as the fact that once the horn had sounded this second time, all the other sounds stopped, all the other sounds of which Carol hadn’t even been consciously aware until they disappeared: birdsong; the footsteps of unseen animals moving through the woods; the sigh of the breeze as it whistled through the branches.

  The only sounds now were those she made herself: the rustle and sway of the living branches she was pushing her way through and the crackle and snap of the dead ones she was breaking beneath her. Carol began to wonder if moving on in the same direction she’d been going was that great of an idea. She turned around and started heading back and, within a few yards, stepping out from between two particularly close trees, she found herself in a small grove-like clearing that she didn’t remember passing through earlier.

  There was a downed and decaying tree-trunk lying in the leafy undergrowth that momentarily and ridiculously put Carol in mind of a park bench. But she really wasn’t in the mood to sit and relax and it wasn’t like there was, you know, a boating lake to look at the moon in or anything. So she kept moving, across the clearing, past the downed trunk, and stopped only when the voice spoke from behind her.

  “What’s your rush, sweetheart?”

  Carol turned back. Sitting perched on the bench-like trunk was a sailor. He was dressed in a square-neck deck-shirt and bell-bottomed pants and Carol might have taken a moment to wonder if sailors still dressed like that if she hadn’t been too busy being surprised just to see him at all. He was sitting in profile to her, one leg on the ground, the other arched up on the trunk and he didn’t turn to face her fully, perhaps because he was concentrating on rolling a cigarette.

  “Ready-mades are easier,” the sailor said. “But I like the ritual – opening the paper, laying in the tobacco, rolling it up. Know what I mean?”

  “I don’t smoke,” said Carol, which wasn’t strictly true, but who the fuck was he to deserve the truth.

  “You chew?” he asked.

  “Chew what?”

  “Tobacco.”

  “Eugh. No.”

  The sailor chanted something rhythmic in response, like he was singing her a song but knew his limitations when it came to carrying a tune:

  “Down in Nagasaki,

  Where the fellas chew tobaccy

  And the women wicky-wacky-woo.”

  Carol stared at him. Confused. Not necessarily nervous. Not yet. She gestured out at the woods. “Where’d you come from?” she said.

  “Dahlonega, Georgia. Little town northeast of Atlanta. Foot of the Appalachians.”

  That wasn’t what she’d meant and she started to tell him so, but he interrupted.

  “Ever been to Nagasaki, honeybun?”

  “No.”

  “How about Shanghai?”

  The sailor was still sitting in profile to her. Talking to her, but staring straight ahead into the woods and beyond. He didn’t wait for a reply. “Docked there once,” he said. “Didn’t get shore-leave. Fellas who did told me I missed something, boy. Said there were whores there could practically tie themselves in knots. Real limber. Mmm. A man likes that. Likes ’em limber.”

  Carol was very careful not to say anything at all. Not to move. Not to breathe.

  “Clean, too,” said the sailor. “That’s important to me. Well, who knows? Maybe I’ll get back there one of these days. ’Course, once they get a good look at me, I might have to pay extra.” He turned finally to face her. “Whaddaya think?”

  Half of his face was bone-pale and bloated, as if it had drowned years ago and been underwater ever since. His hair hung dank like seaweed and something pearl-like glinted in the moist dripping blackness of what used to be an eye-socket.

  “Jesus Christ!” Carol said, frozen in shock, watching helplessly as the sailor put his cigarette in his half-ruined mouth, lit it, and inhaled.

  “Calling on the Lord for salvation,” he said. “Good for you. Might help.” Smoke oozed out from the pulpy white flesh that barely clung to the bone beneath his dead face. “Might not.”

  He rose to his feet and grinned at her. “Useta chase pigs through the Georgia pines, sweet thing,” he said, flinging his cigarette aside. “Let’s see if you’re faster than them little squealers.”

  And then he came for her.

  “I was a lot faster, though,” said Carol. “But it still took me ten minutes to lose him.”

  “Fuck, Carol,” said Michael. “That wasn’t funny.”

  “I didn’t say it was funny. I said it was weird. Remember?”

  Michael turned to look at her and she tilted her face to look up at his, dark eyes glinting, adorably proud of herself. They’d walked nearly a full circuit of the lake now, neither of them even thinking to branch off in the direction of the park’s northern gate and the way home.

  “Well, it was weird, all right,” Michael said. “Creepy ghost sailor. Pretty good.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Turns out there was a ship went down there in the Second World War. All hands lost.”

  “Went down in the woods. That was a good trick.”

  “It wasn’t the woods. Didn’t I tell you that? It was the beach. That’s where it all happened.”

  “Was it Redondo?”

  “The fuck’s Redondo?” she said, genuinely puzzled.

  “It’s a beach. In America. I’ve heard of it. It’s on that Patti Smith album.”

  “Oh, yeah. No. This wasn’t in America. It was in Cornwall.” She thought about it for a moment. “Yeah. Had to be Cornwall because of the rock pool.”

  “You didn’t say anything about a rock pool.”

  “I haven’t told you yet,” she said, exasperated. “God, you’re rubbish.”

  Michael laughed, even though something else had just hit him. He was walking on a moonlit night alone with a beautiful girl and it apparently wasn’t occurring to him to try anything. He hadn’t even put his arm around her, for Christ’s sake. Terry and Kirk would give him such shit for this when he told them. He wondered for the first time if that was something Carol knew
, if that was what had always been behind her stories, why she found them, why she told them, like some instinctive Scheherazade keeping would-be lovers at bay with narrative strategies. He felt something forming in him, a kind of sadness that he couldn’t name and didn’t understand.

  “Is everything all right, Carol?” he asked, though he couldn’t say why.

  “Well, it is now,” she said, deaf to the half-born subtext in his question. “I got away. I escaped. But that spoils the story, dickhead. You’ve got to hear what happened first.”

  The park was silver-grey in the light from the moon. He wondered what time it was. “The rock pool,” he said.

  “Exactly,” she said, pleased that he was paying attention.

  She hadn’t seen it at first. Had kept moving along the deserted beach until the sandy shore gave way to rocky cave-strewn outcrops from the cliffs above the coastline. It was only when she clambered over an algae- and seaweed-coated rock wall that she found it. Orphaned from the sea and held within a natural basin formation, the pool was placid and still and ringed by several large boulders about its rim. It was about twenty feet across and looked to be fairly deep.

  On one of the boulders, laid out as if waiting for their owner, were some items of clothing. A dress, a pair of stockings, some underwear. Carol looked from them out to the cool inviting water of the pool. A head broke surface as she looked, and a woman started swimming toward the rock where her clothes were. Catching sight of Carol, she stopped and trod water, looking at her suspiciously. “What are you doing?” she said. “Are you spying?” She was older than Carol, about her mum’s age maybe, a good-looking thirty-five.

  “No, I’m not,” Carol said. “Why would I be spying?”

  “You might be one of them,” the woman said.

  “One of who?”

  The woman narrowed her eyes and looked at Carol appraisingly. “You know who,” she said.

  “No, I don’t,” Carol said. “And I’m not one of anybody. I was with some friends. We went to France. Just got back. The boat’s down there on the beach.”

  “They’ve all got stories,” the woman said. “That’s how they get you.”