The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2003, Volume 14

by Stephen Jones

  “Well, it hasn’t been a total loss, has it?” Julia asked and smiled, remembering the long night before, Anna in her arms, Anna whispering things that had kept Julia awake until almost dawn. “It wasn’t a complete waste.”

  And Anna Foley turned and watched her from her seat on the boulder, sloe-eyed girl, slate-grey irises to hide more than they would ever give away; She’s taunting me, Julia thought, feeling ashamed of herself for thinking such a thing, but thinking it anyway. It’s all some kind of a game to her, playing naughty games with Dr Winter and she’s sitting there watching me squirm.

  “You want to see a haunted house?” Anna said, finally, and whatever Julia had expected her to say, it certainly wasn’t that.

  “Excuse me?”

  “A haunted house. A real haunted house,” and Anna raised an arm and pointed north-east, inland, past the shoreline. “It isn’t very far from here. We could drive up tomorrow morning.”

  This is a challenge, Julia thought. She’s trying to challenge me, some new convolution in the game meant to throw me off balance.

  “I’m sorry, Anna. That doesn’t really sound like my cup of tea,” she said, tired and just wanting to climb back up the bluff to the motel for a hot shower and an early dinner.

  “No, really. I’m serious. I read about this place last month in Argosy. It was built in 1890 by a man named Machen Dandridge who supposedly worshipped Poseidon—”

  “Since when do you read Argosy?”

  “I read everything, Julia,” Anna said. “It’s what I do,” and she turned her head to watch a ragged flock of seagulls flying by, ash and charcoal wings skimming just above the surface of the water.

  “And an article in Argosy magazine said this house was really haunted?” Julia asked skeptically, watching Anna watch the gulls as they rose and wheeled high over the Anchorage.

  “Yes, it did. It was written by Dr Johnathan Montague, an anthropologist, I think. He studies haunted houses.”

  “Anthropologists aren’t generally in the business of ghost-hunting, dear,” Julia said, smiling, and Anna glared at her from her rock, her stormcloud eyes narrowing the slightest bit.

  “Well, this one seems to be, dear.”

  And then neither of them said anything for a few minutes, no sound but the wind and the surf and the raucous gulls, all the soothing, lonely ocean noises. Finally the incongruent, mechanical rumble of a truck up on the highway to break the spell, the taut, wordless space between them, and “I think we should be heading back now,” Julia said. “The tide will be coming in soon.”

  “You go on ahead,” Anna whispered and chewed at her lower lip. “I’ll catch up.”

  Julia hesitated, glanced down at the cold salt water lapping against the boulders, each breaking and withdrawing wave tumbling the pebbles imperceptibly smoother. Waves to wash the greenbrown mats of seaweed one inch forward and one inch back; Like the hair of drowned women, she thought and then pushed the thought away.

  “I’ll wait for you at the top, then,” she said. “In case you need help.”

  “Sure, Dr Winter. You do that.” And Anna turned away again and flicked the butt of her cigarette at the sea.

  Almost an hour of hairpin curves and this road getting narrower and narrower still, strangling dirt road with no place to turn around, before Julia finally comes to the edge of the forest and the fern thickets and giant redwoods release her to rolling, open fields. Tall, yellowbrown pampas grass that sways gentle in the breeze, air that smells like sun and salt again, and she takes a deep breath. A relief to breathe air like this after the stifling closeness of the forest, all those old trees with their shaggy, shrouding limbs, and this clear blue sky is better, she thinks.

  “There,” Anna says and Julia gazes past the dazzling green hood of the Chevy, across the restless grass and there’s something, dark and far away, silhouetted against the western sky.

  “That’s it,” Anna says, “Yeah, that must be it,” and she’s sounding like a kid on Christmas morning, little-girl-at-an amusement-park excitement; she climbs over the seat and sits down close to Julia.

  I could always turn back now, Julia thinks, her hands so tight around the steering wheel that her knuckles have gone a waxy white. I could turn this car right around and go back to the highway. We could be home in a few hours. We could be home before dark.

  “What are you waiting for?” Anna asks anxiously and she points at the squat, rectangular smudge in the distance. “That’s it. We’ve found it.”

  “I’m beginning to think this is what you wanted all along,” Julia says, speaking low: she can hardly hear herself over the Bel Air’s idling engine. “Anchor Bay, spending time together – that was all just a trick to get me to bring you out here, wasn’t it?”

  And Anna looks reluctantly away from the house, and “No,” she says, “That’s not true. I only remembered the house later, when we were on the beach.”

  Julia looks towards the distant house again, if it is a house. It might be almost anything, sitting out there in the tall grass, waiting. It might be almost anything at all.

  “You’re the one who’s always telling me to get my nose out of books,” and Anna’s starting to sound angry, cultivated indignation gathering itself protectively around her like a caul and she slides away from Julia, slides across the vinyl car seat until she’s pressed against the passenger door.

  “I don’t think this was what I had in mind.”

  Anna begins kicking lightly at the floorboard then, the toe of a sneaker tapping out the rhythm of her impatience like a Morse code signal, and “Jesus,” she says, “It’s only an old house. What the hell are you so afraid of, anyway?”

  “I never said I was afraid, Anna. I never said anything of the sort.”

  “You’re acting like it, though. You’re acting like you’re scared to death.”

  “Well, I’m not going to sit here and argue with you,” Julia says and tells herself that just this once it doesn’t matter if she sounds more like Anna’s mother than her lover. “It’s my car and we never should have driven all the way out here alone. I would have turned around half an hour ago, if there’d been enough room.” And she puts the Bel Air into reverse and backs off the dirt road, raising an alarmed and fluttering cloud of grasshoppers, frantic insect wings beating all about them as she shifts into drive and cuts the wheel sharply in the direction of the trees.

  “I thought you’d understand,” Anna says, “I thought you were different,” and she’s out of the car before Julia can try to stop her, slams her door shut and walks quickly away, following the path that leads between the high and whispering grass towards the house.

  Julia sits in the Chevy and watches her go, watches helplessly as Anna seems to grows smaller with every step, the grass and the brilliant day swallowing her alive, wrapping her up tight in golden stalks and sunbeam teeth. And she imagines driving away alone, simply taking her foot off the brake pedal and retracing that twisting, treeshadowed path to the safety of paved roads. How easy that would be, how perfectly satisfying, and then Julia watches Anna for a few more minutes before she turns the car to face the house and tries to pretend that she never had any choice at all.

  The house like a grim and untimely joke, like something better off in a Charles Addams cartoon than perched on the high, sheer cliffs at the end of the road. This ramshackle grotesquerie of boards gone the silvergrey of old oyster shells, the splinterskin walls with their broken windows and crooked shutters, steep gables and turrets missing half their slate shingles and there are places where the roof beams and struts show straight through the house’s weathered hide. One black lightning rod still standing guard against the sky, a rusting garland of wrought-iron filigree along the eaves, and the uppermost part of the chimney has collapsed in a redgreen scatter of bricks gnawed back to soft clay by moss and the corrosive sea air. Thick weeds where there might once have been a yard and flower beds, and the way the entire structure has begun to list perceptibly leaves Julia with the disco
ncerting impression that the house is cringing, or that it has actually begun to pull itself free of the earth and crawl, inch by crumbling inch, away from the ocean.

  “Anna, wait.” But she’s already halfway up the steps to the wide front porch and Julia’s still sitting behind the wheel of the Chevy. She closes her eyes for a moment, better to sit listening to the wind and the waves crashing against the cliffs, the smaller, hollow sound of Anna’s feet on the porch, than to let the house think that she can’t look away. Some dim instinct to tell her that’s how this works, the sight of it to leave you dumbstruck, vulnerable, and My God, it’s only an ugly old house, she thinks, An ugly old house that no one wants anymore, and then she laughs out loud, like it can hear.

  After she caught up with Anna and made her get back into the car, and after Julia agreed to drive her the rest of the way out to the house, Anna Foley started talking about Dr Montague’s article in Argosy again, talked as though there’d never been an argument. The tension between them forgotten or discarded in a flood of words, words that came faster and faster as they neared the house, almost piling atop each other towards the end.

  “There were stories that Dandridge murdered his daughter as a sacrifice, sometime after his wife died in 1914. But no one ever actually found her body. No, she just vanished one day and no one ever saw her again. The daughter, I mean. The daughter vanished, not the wife. His wife is buried behind the house.”

  Only an ugly old house sitting forgotten beside the sea.

  “. . . To Poseidon, or maybe even Dagon, a sort of Mesopotamian corn king, half man and half fish. Dandridge traveled all over Iraq and Persia before he came back and settled in California. He had a fascination with Persian and Hindu antiquities.”

  Then open your eyes and get this over with. And she does open her eyes then, stares back at the house and relaxes her grip on the steering wheel. Anna’s standing on the porch now, standing on tiptoes and peering in through a small, shattered window near the door.

  “Anna, wait for me. I’m coming.” And Anna turns and smiles, waves to her, then goes back to staring into the house through the broken window.

  Julia leaves the keys dangling in the ignition and picks her way towards the house, past lupine and wild white roses and a patch of poppies the colour of tangerines, three or four orange-and-black monarch butterflies flitting from blossom to blossom, and there’s a line of stepping stones almost lost in the weeds. The stones lead straight to the house, though the weedy patch seems much wider than it did from the car. I should be there by now, she thinks, looking over her shoulder at the convertible and then ahead, at Anna standing on the porch, standing at the door of the Dandridge house, wrestling with the knob. I’m so anxious, it only seems that way, but five, seven, ten more steps and the porch seems almost as far away as it did when she got out of the car.

  “Wait for me,” she shouts at Anna, who doesn’t seem to have heard. Julia stops and wipes the sweat from her forehead before it runs down into her eyes. She glances up at the sun, directly overhead and hot against her face and bare arms, and she realizes that the wind has died. The blustery day grown suddenly so still and she can’t hear the breakers anymore, either. Only the faint and oddly muted cries of the gulls and grasshoppers.

  She turns towards the sea, and there’s a brittle noise from the sky that makes her think of eggshells cracking against the edge of a china mixing bowl, and on the porch Anna’s opening the door. And the shimmering, stickywet darkness that flows out and over and through Anna Foley makes another sound, and Julia shuts her eyes so she won’t have to watch whatever comes next.

  The angle of the light falling velvetsoft across the dusty floor, the angle and the honey colour of the sun, so she knows that it’s late afternoon and somehow she’s lost everything in between. That last moment in the yard before this place without even unconsciousness to bridge the gap, then and now, and she understands it’s as simple as that. Her head aches and her stomach rolls when she tries to sit up to get a better look at the room and Julia decides that maybe it’s best to lie still a little while longer. Just lie here and stare out that window at the blue sky framed in glass-jagged mouths, and there might have been someone there a moment ago, a scarecrow face looking in at her, watching, and there might have been nothing but the partitioned swatches of the fading day.

  She can hear the breakers again, now only slightly muffled by the walls, and the wind around the corners of the house; these sounds through air filled with the oily stench of rotting fish and the neglected smell of any very old and empty house. A barren, fishstinking room and a wall with one tall, arched window just a few feet away from her, sunbleached and peeling wallpaper strips, and she knows that it must be a western wall, the sunlight through the broken window panes proof enough of that.

  Unless it’s morning light, she thinks. Unless this is another day entirely and the sun is rising now instead of setting. Julia wonders why she ever assumed it was afternoon, how she can ever again assume anything. And there’s a sound, then, from somewhere behind her, inside the room with her or very close: the crisp sound of a ripe melon splitting open, scarlet flesh and black teardrop seeds, sweet red juice, and now the air smells even worse. Fish putrefying under a baking summer sun, beaches strewn with bloated fishsilver bodies as far as the eye can see, beaches littered with everything in the sea heaved up onto the shore, an inexplicable, abyssal vomit, and she closes her eyes again.

  “Are you here, Anna?” she says. “Can you hear me?”

  And something quivers at the edge of her vision, a fluttering darkness deeper than the long shadows in the room, and she ignores the pain and the nausea and rolls over onto her back to see it more clearly. But the thing on the ceiling sees her too and moves quickly towards the sanctuary of a corner; all feathered, trembling gills and swimmerets, and its jointed lobster carapace almost as pale as toadstools, chitin soft and pale and it scuttles backwards on raw and bleeding human hands. It drips and leaves a spattered trail of itself on the floor as it goes.

  She can see the door now, the absolute blackness waiting in the hall through the doorway, and there’s laughter from that direction, a woman’s high, hysterical laugh, but so faint that it can’t possibly be coming from anywhere inside the house.

  “Anna,” she says again and the laughter stops and the thing on the ceiling clicks its needle teeth together.

  “She’s gone down, that one,” it whispers. “She’s gone all the way down to Mother Hydra and won’t hear you in a hundred hundred million years.”

  And the laughing begins again, seeping slyly up through the floorboards, through every crack on these moldering plaster walls.

  “I saw a something in the Sky,” the ceiling crawler whispers from its corner. “No bigger than my fist.’ ”

  And the room writhes and spins around her like a kaleidoscope, that tumbling gyre of colored shards, remaking the world and it wouldn’t matter if there were anything for her to hold on to. She would still fall; no way not to fall with this void devouring even the morning, or the afternoon, whichever, even the colors of the day sliding down that slick gullet.

  “I can’t see you,” Anna says, Anna’s voice but Julia’s never heard her sound this way before. So afraid, so insignificant. “I can’t see you anywhere,” and Julia reaches out (or down or up) into the furious storm that was the house, the maelstrom edges of a collapsing universe, and her arm sinks in up to the elbow. Sinks through into dead-star cold, the cold ooze of the deepest sea-floor trench, and “Open your eyes,” Anna says, Anna crying now, sobbing, and “Please, God, open your eyes, Julia.”

  But her eyes are open and she’s standing somewhere far below the house, standing in front of the woman on the rock, the thing that was a woman once, and part of it can still recall that lost humanity. The part that watches Julia with one eye, the desperate, hate-filled, pale green eye that hasn’t been lost to the seething ivory crust of barnacles and sea lice that covers half its face. The woman on the great rock in the cen
ter of the phosphorescent pool, and then the sea rushes madly into the cavern, surges up and foams around the rusted chains and scales and all the squirming, pinkwhite anemones sprouting from her thighs.

  Alone, alone, all, all alone,

  And the woman on the rock raises an arm, her ruined and shellstudded arm, and reaches across the pool towards Julia.

  Alone on the wide wide Sea.

  Her long fingers and the webbing grown between them, and Julia leans out across the frothing pool, ice water wrapping itself around her ankles, filling her shoes, and she strains to take the woman’s hand. Straining to reach as the jealous sea rises and falls, rises and falls, threatening her with the bottomless voices of sperm whales and typhoons. But the distance between their fingertips doubles, triples, origami space unfolding itself, and the woman’s lips move silently, yellow teeth and pleading, gillslit lips as mute as the cavern walls.

  —Murdered his daughter, sacrificed her—

  Nothing from those lips but the small and startled creatures nesting in her mouth, not words but a sudden flow of surprised and scuttling legs, the claws and twitching antennae, and a scream that rises from somewhere deeper than the chained woman’s throat, deeper than simple flesh, soulscream spilling out and swelling to fill the cave from wall to wall. This howl that is every moment that she’s spent here, every damned and salt-raw hour made aural and Julia feels it in her bones, in the silver amalgam fillings of her teeth.

  Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?

  And the little girl sits by the fire in a rocking chair, alone in the front parlor of her father’s big house by the sea and she reads fairy tales to herself while her father rages somewhere overhead, in the sky or only upstairs but it makes no difference, in the end. Father of black rags and sour, scowling faces, and she tries not to hear the chanting or the sounds her mother is making again, tries to think of nothing but the Mock Turtle and Alice, the Lobster Quadrille by unsteady lantern light, and Don’t look at the windows, she thinks, or Julia tries to warn her. Don’t look at the windows ever again.