The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2003, Volume 14

by Stephen Jones

“You’re going to be staying here, boy,” Charles removed a chisel from his satchel, set its edge against the lock, raised the hammer, then paused. Always he judged before he struck. Was the chisel set correctly? Would the hammer do its job? There could never be a strike without the pause for judgment, where a mistake could be saved. The metal’s sharp report reverberated off the rocks. Another blow broke the lock, then Charles pulled the door open; it screeched against the stiffness in its hinges. He’d never seen a mine entrance like the Crossroad’s. The floor looked worn smooth, as if thousands of feet had marched on it through the years. How had the miners done that?

  “Don’t you love me, Papa?” the boy said again.

  Charles didn’t look at him. From his satchel he removed a blanket, candles, a small bundle of food and a water bottle. “I’ll be back tomorrow.”

  “You must not be my Papa.” He didn’t sound insincere this time. “My Papa loves me. He’ll find me, my Papa.”

  “Just get in!”

  Through his tears, Charles could barely see the new lock that he put on the door.

  Behind the iron gate, he heard the boy move, a large sound, as if what stirred in the tunnel had suddenly grown huge. He fell back. Impossibly, the door stirred in its iron frame, and for a second Charles thought the inch-thick bolts might pull from the rock. He scuttled away. Even at the edge of the granite arena, when Charles looked at the mine entrance, he could hear the boy behind the gate, breathing loud, his heart throbbing. The sky grew dark and the air thick. A noxious cloud seeped around the door’s edges, filled the stone chamber, its tendrils crawling on the floor toward Charles. The boy said, his voice full of old mining timbers and cold, wet stone a thousand feet deep, “Papa?”

  Charles fled.

  West Yellow Dog had been dynamited. All that remained of its entrance was twisted ore cart track. Ron searched the cliff base to both sides. A niche three hundred yards to the right might have been where they stored powder, but it was only ten feet deep and didn’t have a door. Below the mine, partially hidden behind scrubby pine growing between the rocks, he found a small tunnel barely tall enough for him to enter on his hands and knees, but twigs and dirt blocked the way a few feet in and it smelled of marmot. Ron sat on his haunches outside the hole and closed his eyes against the sun.

  He’d know if Levi had died, wouldn’t he? A father and son had a bond, he’d told the detective.

  Within his view, visible only because the sun cast long shadows, several foundations rose from the grass in the clearing below the slope. There must have been a small community here, or they might have been part of the mining operation. At the Gilpin County Courthouse, Ron had looked at pictures of the town from the 1880s, and beside them were modern shots taken from the same spot. The buildings changed. Trees changed. But the rocks and mountains stayed the same. He trembled. To the mountain, time didn’t exist; all times were interchangeable. He glanced at his watch. To a little boy dying in a mine, every second stretched like skin on fire.

  He pushed himself upright.

  The New Baltimore had a park-service gate on it. Ron slowed as he approached. Covered in dust, the remains of a broken lock lay on the ground. He rubbed the scratches in the metal. No rust. Someone had been here this summer.

  “Levi!” His voice sounded hollow and out of place.

  The gate gave reluctantly, its base dragging over the rock as he pulled it open. Moisture seeped from the walls a few feet in. Resting one hand on the black-slime ceiling just above his head, he shone his flashlight on indistinct footprints on the muddy floor. Back in the depths, a watery plink-plink-plink broke the silence. The tunnel split. To the right, a pile of rock and broken timbers blocked the way. To the left, the passage sloped downward for another twenty feet before ending at a pool of water. The footprints led here. Ron played the quivering light across the surface, penetrating to the bottom. Rocks. More timber. Metal so heavily rusted that he couldn’t tell what its original shape had been. No wrapped bundle. No horror-story patch of white that resolved itself into a face.

  He released a pent-up breath. Why had someone broken into the mine? Turning, he studied the walls and ceiling. A slippery, unhealthy-looking fungus covered the surfaces, and the stagnant air smelled rotted and mildewed. Near the ceiling to the left of the pool, a patch of rock peered through the growth, as if it had been brushed clean, and above it, a crack wider than his fist swallowed the light. Ron reached in, touched plastic. He found four bags in the crack, about a pound each. A whiff of the first one showed that he’d uncovered someone’s stash.

  Ron left the bags on the floor. Ten minutes wasted.

  According to his map, all that remained was the Crossroad. It took a half-hour of backtracking across the gulch’s east side before he found a faint trail that led to a gap around a rock wall.

  He spotted the lock on the door on the other side of the stone arena as soon as he rounded the corner – a brand new, brass padlock, like one of those in the row on top of Sims’s dresser. He ran without thinking about it. Old metal door, not park service. Ron ripped off his backpack, fumbled for the bolt cutter, gripped the handles and squeezed. The lock snapped.

  Was now the moment when he would know? Ron had dreamed of finding Levi in a thousand ways. Bad dreams, in some, where Levi was dead. Either dead over a month or, even worse, dead a few days. He’d be starved or dead from thirst or exposure. In some dreams he was alive but sick, damaged from exposure or the time spent alone. In one dream Levi didn’t know him, his mind gone. What could be worse than an eight-year-old driven insane by abuse and fear? In that dream, Ron loved his son back to sanity. No evil could be so bad that love could not change it to something good.

  Ron tore the lock from the hasp, jammed his fingertips into the gap between the door and the frame. Pulled.

  In the good dreams, Levi waited. “Daddy!” he would cry. He always called Ron “Daddy”, like it was a blessing.

  The door swung open.

  Charles didn’t even try to get to sleep. Sitting at the table in his cabin, the tiny slice of moon providing the only light again, he thought about the locked gate and the boy behind it. His intention was to never return.

  He thought, What’s the greater evil? Every time he closed his eyes, he saw dead children, a fingerprint on their foreheads; he also saw the boy at the Crossroad, staring at a candle, maybe, or sleeping. What kind of dreams would a bringer of death like him have? But Charles was evil too. The boy, no matter what else he was, was his son. A father should take care of his own. One time when Charles was young he locked a storage shed on his father’s farm. A week later his father sent him to fetch some tools. The storage shed stank, a solid wall of putridness rolling out when Charles opened the door. A cat had been locked in, its mouth gaping open, dry as dust; its stomach had burst. If he had known, wouldn’t it have been merciful to have killed the cat a week earlier?

  Charles looked through the darkness to his own bed. He couldn’t imagine sleeping again. The boy behind the gate moved in his mind. The room was so black, Charles could almost see the boy without closing his eyes. Like the cat, the boy was locked in. But the cat wasn’t the devil. No, not by a long shot. Maybe a creature like the boy thrived on the black air behind the gate. Could such a thing be killed by an act as simple as being shut into a mine? What if it could do some magic to save itself?

  In a sudden vision, Charles saw himself as an older man walking down a street. A beautiful carriage clattered by, the horses’ hooves loud on the bricks. In the vision, Charles glanced up. Sitting in the carriage was his son, grown now, and the look he gave from the carriage was full of hate.

  Charles made a fist on the table, alone in his cabin in the midst of the night and moaned. The boy was behind the gate. “I’m cursed,” Charles said to the four walls. Already he felt the guilt like a blood-soaked blanket settling over his head, suffocating him.

  He’s a boy dying slowly, my son, Charles thought. He’s a monster who can save himself in some evil way.


  Like the New Baltimore, the Crossroad was wet. Footprints showed clearly in the mud. Little prints. A child’s shoes.

  “Levi!” Ron’s eyes strained to see into the mine, pulse throbbing huge in his chest. “Are you there, son?”

  He took a few steps down the tunnel. Where was Levi? Ron turned on his flashlight. The powerful beam cut into the air, showing the path curving away ahead of him. His feet slipped on the muddy floor as slick as polished marble, and suddenly he felt scared, as scared as he’d ever been in his life. His breath puffed out in a plume in front of him. Every instinct told him to run. The mine didn’t feel right. The air clung to his arms like icy cockle-burs, and he had to brace himself with a hand against the wall. Then the floor shook, but it wasn’t just the floor: everything jolted or quivered. Every cell in his body flinched. He wasn’t sure if he had turned around and was heading out. He thought, The world has shifted.

  He stepped forward again. Where am I? Where am I going? A voice came from the tunnel before him, a little boy’s voice.

  “Papa?” it called.

  Ron rushed forward, his fear forgotten. He would greet him with love like he’d never known.

  “Papa?”

  His son was coming home.

  Charles stood at the Crossroad gate. He’d pulled it open, but he wouldn’t step inside. No, he was too frightened for that. He couldn’t see the boy, or all would be lost. He had one chance to make it right, and only one.

  “Boy?” he yelled into the mine.

  For a long time there was no sound. Then Charles felt a peculiar twitch, like the mountain had shrugged. The air itself contracted, and his ears popped.

  He shook his head. Whatever else was going on, he could not be swayed.

  “Boy?” he shouted again.

  A voice came from far back in the mine. “Daddy?” it cried. “Is that you, Daddy?”

  Small feet splashed through the mud, growing louder.

  “I knew you’d come, Daddy,” the voice exclaimed, very close now.

  Charles stood by the door out of sight, his hammer raised high, paused above him. When the boy stepped out, he would bring it down. Oh yes, he would. He would end it here.

  And all would be right.

  CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN

  Nor the Demons

  Down Under the Sea

  CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN LIVES in Atlanta, Georgia. Her short fiction has been collected in Tales of Pain and Wonder, From Weird and Distant Shores, and Wrong Things (with Poppy Z. Brite). Her fourth collection, To Charles Fort, With Love, will be released late in 2003 by Subterranean Press. The author’s story “Onion” received the 2002 International Horror Guild Award, and her fiction has appeared regularly in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror.

  Kiernan’s novels include the award-winning Silk and Threshold. Her third novel, Low Red Moon, will be published by Roc in November 2003. Other forthcoming publications include the chapbooks Waycross and Trilobite: The Writing of Threshold, and her “lost” novel The Five of Cups, all from Subterranean Press. She also scripted The Dreaming for DC Comics/Vertigo, as well as the miniseries The Girl Who Would Be Death and Bast: Eternity Game.

  As she reveals: “ ‘Nor the Demons Down Under the Sea’ was written in July and August of 2000, for John Pelan’s The Children of Cthulhu. It’s the middle story of a trilogy, following ‘Andromeda Among the Stones’ and preceding ‘A Redress for Andromeda’. I did it during a period when I was experimenting with stories set in the 1950s. ‘Spindleshanks (New Orleans, 1956)’ is another story I did around the same time.

  “I think I originally intended for this piece to be an actual Mythos tale, as per the anthology’s guidelines, but it came out merely ‘Lovecraftian’, at best. In hindsight, that was probably not a bad thing. I wanted to speak softly in this story, keeping it relatively quiet and impressionistic, essentially a ghost story revolving around a difficult relationship between two women. ‘Nor the Demons Down Under the Sea’ takes very seriously my belief that dark fiction dealing with the inexplicable should, itself, present to the reader a certain inexplicability. It’s not about resolution nor understanding, but that brief, disturbing contact that usually characterizes actual paranormal encounters.”

  (1957)

  THE LATE SUMMER MORNING like a shattering bluewhite gem, crashing, liquid seams of fluorite and topaz thrown against the jaggedrough shale and sandstone breakers, roiling calcite foam beneath the cloudless sky specked with gulls and ravens. And Julia behind the wheel of the big, green Bel Air, chasing the coast road north, the top down so that the Pacific wind roars wild through her hair. Salt smell to fill her head, intoxicating and delicious scent to drown her citydulled senses and Anna’s alone in the back seat, ignoring her again, silent, reading one of her textbooks or monographs on malacology. Hardly a word from her since they left the motel in Anchor Bay more than an hour ago, hardly a word at breakfast for that matter, and her silence is starting to annoy Julia.

  “It was a bad dream, that’s all,” Anna said, the two of them alone in the diner next door to the motel, sitting across from one another in a naugahyde booth with a view of the bay, Haven’s Anchorage dotted with the bobbing hulls of fishing boats.

  “You know that I don’t like to talk about my dreams.” And then Anna pushed her uneaten grapefruit aside and lit a cigarette. “God knows I’ve told you enough times.”

  “We don’t have to go on to the house,” Julia said hopefully. “We could always see it another time and we could go back to the city today, instead.”

  Anna only shrugged her shoulders and stared through the glass at the water, took another drag off her cigarette and exhaled smoke the color of the horizon.

  “If you’re afraid to go to the house, just say so.”

  Julia steals a glance at her in the rear-view mirror, wind-rumpled girl with shiny, sunburned cheeks, cheeks like ripening plums and her short, blonde hair twisted into a bun and tied up in a scarf. And Julia’s own reflection stares back at her from the glass, reproachful, desperate, almost fifteen years older than Anna, so close to thirty-five now that it frightens her; her drab hazel eyes hidden safely behind dark sunglasses that also conceal nascent crow’s feet, and the wind whips unhindered through her own hair, hair that would be mouse brown if she didn’t use peroxide. The first, tentative wrinkles beginning to show at the corners of her mouth, and she notices that her lipstick is smudged, then, licks the tip of one index finger and wipes the candypink stain off her skin.

  “You really should come up for air,” Julia shouts, shouting just to be heard above the wind, and Anna looks slowly up from her book. She squints and blinks at the back of Julia’s head, an irritated, uncomprehending sort of expression and a frown that draws creases across her forehead.

  “You’re missing all the scenery, dear.”

  Anna sits up, sighs loud and stares out at a narrow, deserted stretch of beach rushing past, the ocean beyond, and “Scenery’s for the tourists,” she says. “I’m not a tourist.” And she slumps down into the seat again, turns a page and goes back to reading.

  “You could at least tell me what I’ve done,” Julia says, trying hard not to sound angry or impatient, sounding only a little bit confused, instead, but this time Anna doesn’t reply, pretending not to hear or maybe just choosing to ignore her altogether.

  “Well, then, whenever you’re ready to talk about it,” Julia says, but that isn’t what she wants to say; wants to tell Anna she’s getting sick of her pouting about like a high-school girl, sick of these long, brooding silences and more than sick of always feeling guilty because she doesn’t ever know what to say to make things better. Always feeling like it’s her fault, somehow, and if she weren’t a coward, she would never have become involved with a girl like Anna Foley in the first place.

  But you are a coward, Julia reminds herself, the father-cruel voice crouched somewhere behind her sunglasses, behind her eyes. Don’t ever forget that, not even for a second, and she
almost misses her exit, the turn-off that would carry them east to Boonville if she stayed on the main road. Julia takes the exit, following the crude map Anna drew for her on a paper napkin; the road dips and curves sharply away from the shoreline, and the ocean is suddenly lost behind a dense wall of redwoods and blooming rhododendrons, the morning sun traded for the rapid flicker of forest shadows. Only a few hundred yards from the highway there’s another, unpaved road, unnamed road leading deeper into the trees, and she slows down and the Chevrolet bounces off the blacktop onto the rutted, pockmarked logging trail.

  The drive up the coast from San Francisco to Anchor Bay was Anna’s idea, even though they both knew it was a poor choice for summertime shelling. But a chance to get out of the laboratory, she said, to get away from the city, from the heat and all the people, and Julia knew what she really meant. A chance to be alone, away from suspicious, disapproving eyes, and besides, there had been an interesting limpet collected very near there a decade or so ago, a single, unusually large shell cataloged and tucked away in the vast Berkeley collections and then all but forgotten. The new species, Diodora thespesius, was described by one of Julia Winter’s male predecessors in the department and a second specimen would surely be a small feather in her cap.

  So, the last two days spent picking their way meticulously over the boulders, kelp- and algae-slick rocks and shallow tide pools constantly buried and unburied by the shifting sand flats; hardly an ideal place for limpets, or much of anything else, to take hold. Thick-soled rubber boots and aluminum pails, sun hats and gloves, knives to pry mollusks from the rocks, and nothing much for their troubles but scallops and mussels. A few nice sea urchins and sand dollars, Strongylocentrotus purpuratus and Dendraster excentricus, and the second afternoon Anna had spotted a baby octopus but it had gotten away from them.

  “If we only had more time,” Anna said, “I’m sure we would have found it if we had more time.” She was sitting on a boulder, smoking, and her dungarees soaked through to the thighs, staring north and west towards the headland and the dark silhouette of Fish Rocks jutting up from the sea like the scabby backs of twin leviathans.