The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 24 (Mammoth Books)

by Stephen Jones

  Then I caught the word “sister”, and my stomach lurched because I did know who it was, after all. I remembered a broad, stocky girl of twelve or thirteen, her hair tied back in plaits that Rick liked to tug when his mother wasn’t looking. We had been friends back then, though I had always preferred to run with the boys.

  Kath must be in her twenties now, a couple of years younger than Rick. I swallowed and stared out across the beach, the waves whipped into white-tops by the steady breeze, and I wondered when I had managed to swallow sand.

  “Are you there?” she asked, and “Are you hearing me?” and she sounded so desperate I wanted to shout down the phone that no, she wasn’t alone, I was there. Instead I just croaked, “Yes?”

  “They say they found a body. They say it’s Rick. But I don’t—”

  The crackling was broken only by the waves and the boats and the sounds of voices shouting on the wind.

  “It can’t be him,” she said. “I’m flying out, but I can’t get there yet. Please, Alex, can you help? We have to know it isn’t him.”

  I found myself nodding, my throat closing up. I knew. My eyes teared even while I told myself that it wasn’t true, couldn’t be true. Twenty-three, I thought. It stuck in my head while I tried to think of words to say: twenty-three. It was so fucking wrong, and I looked straight into the sun, feeling the sting of salt spray in my eyes, blinded for a moment. I remembered a shape thrashing in a brilliant point of light, the head and arms and legs emerging, twenty-three years old and already marked by some fate he couldn’t see.

  I never doubted my capability to identify Rick until I was standing in front of the body. I had planned to give one simple nod, then do whatever I could to make sure his sister didn’t have to see him this way. The room was filled with the sound of fridges barely ticking over. The smell was at once sweet and unbearable; it couldn’t be compared to anything else.

  Rick didn’t have a face. My mind hadn’t got around that yet; the words twenty-three were still there, circling like buzzards, and now there was this new thought. My lips pressed together, keeping everything down and in, but inside my head was screaming: He hasn’t got a face.

  The hair was there, at least in part. Towards his forehead – where his forehead should have been – there were only tufts. The skin had been torn away. His eyes were still there but the lids had gone and I couldn’t look at them. His nose was a small, soft mound. I found myself staring at it and my stomach contracted. Thank God nothing came up; if it had I would have vomited over the corpse.

  I turned away from it and felt a hand on my shoulder. “Take your time,” the attendant said in strongly accented English, and I almost laughed. Time wasn’t going to help. The man without a face could have been Rick, could have been anybody. I wondered whether that would comfort his sister.

  I turned back, taking in the shreds of muscle still clinging to his skull, the places where bone shone through. I forced myself to try and make out what shape the face would have been.

  “Are there any other signs?” the attendant said, and I blinked.

  “What?”

  “Signs that you would know. There are no tattoos, but – a scar, maybe. An old scar.”

  I shook my head. Rick led a charmed life: had led a charmed life. As long as I’d known him he’d been into sky diving, zip-wires, rock climbing, anything that gave him a buzz. He’d never broken a bone, never had an injury I knew of. And then I had that image again: a girl with frizzy hair running after us while we rode our bikes, at least until the day she’d grown sick of being left behind and shoved a stick between the spokes of his wheels.

  I heard her crying in my mind. “I never knew,” she’d said. “I just thought it’d slow him down.”

  Rick had teased Kath about that scar on his knee for years.

  I turned back to the body and pulled aside the sheet. One knee was smooth, but the other had a white ridge underlining the patella. The left – had it been the left? I couldn’t remember.

  “Miss?”

  I closed my eyes, opened them again. “It’s him,” I said.

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  He nodded, looked happy, then overwrote the expression with sympathy. I didn’t care. Kath wouldn’t have to see this now. I thought of her horrified expression, back when she’d pulled that stunt with the bike; I wondered if it would have made her feel better to know that she had marked him then, claiming him as her own in readiness for a day like this.

  “He was found by a surfer,” the mortuary attendant explained, “in the ojos de agua.”

  I frowned. My Spanish wasn’t great, but I knew of a cenoté called Dos Ojos – two eyes. And agua – something I asked for every day.

  The attendant sighed. He sat back, putting his hands behind his head. “Your friend was diving in a cenoté. It was not on the tourist routes, no? Not safe. This cenoté had many systems. Many caves. Eventually, the caves come out in the sea. The sweet water – fresh water – it comes through the cave and goes into the sea. At high tide, it is like – how you say – a bathtub. You try swimming in a bathtub when the plug is pulled?”

  I frowned.

  “I have felt it myself, in a cenoté near my village. I had to get to the steps and keep hold.” He demonstrated, clenched his fists. “So I didn’t get pulled down. Your friend, he get pulled down.”

  “And the eyes?”

  “Sí. The sweet water, it bubbles up through the sea, like the water boils in that place. It is the ojos. The eyes of water.”

  “But Rick was a good diver. He wouldn’t have gone in alone.” I only said this because I didn’t want to ask about what was really in my mind: Rick’s face.

  “It happens.” He dismissed my friend with a wave of his hand.

  And so I had to ask: “How did his face get like that?”

  “He was beaten,” the man said. “Sucked down. Dragged against the rocks, all through the tunnels.” He sat forward, scraping his chair against the tiles. “I am sorry.”

  I wiped my damp palms on my shorts, shook hands and left. It wasn’t until I stood outside, the sun like hot metal on my head, that I thought about his words: dragged against the rocks. And yet – Rick’s face was entirely gone; but the rest of his body had hardly been bruised at all.

  Kath’s flight was due in at 5:00 p.m., but I’d forgotten how long it took to get through customs at Cancun, to have the necessary papers checked and stamped. When she finally appeared it was disorienting to find I recognised her at once. It was the same Kath, the same stocky build, the same hair already frizzing in the heat. She didn’t speak to me, just dropped her bags and put her arms around my neck.

  I hugged her back. Her skin was cool but heat radiated from her anyway, like a child in a fever.

  I tried to explain what had happened while I drove away from the airport. I thought she’d want to sign the papers, get the body home as quickly as she could; and I’d go back to my tour, start trying to forget. So her words took me by surprise.

  “When are we heading out?” she asked.

  “Out?”

  “I want to see where it happened.” Her voice was small but impossible to counter. “I want to see where my brother died.”

  My mind was blank.

  “I’m coming with you,” she said, as if that was the only thing to be decided.

  The village was a small cluster of buildings, some painted pink or blue, but most left dust-coloured. “Down there,” I said. One of Rick’s colleagues, an American, had shouted directions down a crackly phone. I turned onto a side street, heading past a small white church. There was a group of men outside it, pulling a crucifix into position, hauling on ropes and steadying the base, no doubt preparing for Easter. They stopped working as we passed, shuffling back, staring. One old man grinned, his face a sudden mass of wrinkles, his eyes impossibly blue. Eyes of water, I thought, and grimaced.

  Beyond the village we took a narrow track and headed straight into the thorny scrub
forest. The Mexican jungle wasn’t how I’d imagined. The trees were interspersed with agave and palms, the spaces between filled with thorns and spines, everything parched and brittle.

  After a while we saw a palapas, an open-sided hut thatched with palm fronds. When we rounded it we found a clearing full of tents, generators, pick-ups, cars. There were stacked crates, bottles of water, barbecue equipment, diving kit, plastic tubs containing what looked like firewood. Two men leaned over a trestle table with paperwork spread upon it. One of them, a slender Mexican, approached, holding out his hand to shake before we’d even stepped out of the car.

  “So sorry, Señorita,” he said, and Kath closed her lips tight.

  “I am Arturo. You will stay with us tonight. Tomorrow, we show you everything.” He waved at the sky; it was already greying, though the humidity and heat remained. “Eat with us.” He gestured. People were emerging from a path that led into the jungle, talking and laughing. Some of them carried more of those plastic tubs. I turned to see Kath dragging her bag from the back seat; heard whistling from the palapas. A man with a wetsuit stripped to his waist was stringing extra hammocks beneath it. I nodded, thinking how much Rick would have loved this.

  Arturo bent over the plastic tubs, his eyes wide. The tubs didn’t contain firewood. They contained bones, tagged and labelled, darkened to the colour of mahogany. “We didn’t expect so many,” he said. “The Maya used this place. Cenotés were sacred places, then. Not just for swimming.” His eyes met mine. “They were gateways to the Underworld. Places to offer sacrifice.” He waved a hand over the tubs, indicating a femur, a skull. “Many sacrifices.”

  I took a sip of mescal, vicious in its raw bite. Kath bent low over the bones, peering in.

  “Is this what Rick was doing?” I asked. “Finding bones?”

  Arturo nodded. “The Maya had no water, apart from the cenotés. The god of rain – Chaac – he gave this water. So they give him these señores y señoritas.”

  “Did you know Rick well?”

  “In the rich places, Chichen Itza, Dzibilchaltun, they give gold, jade, as well as persons. It was an honour to be given to the gods. It was said that a sacrifice – they would not die.” Arturo chuckled. “They did not die, but they did not come back, no?”

  “And Rick?” My voice rose. “Did you notice he’d gone? Did you look for him?”

  Arturo met my gaze. “Of course,” he said. “He was one of us. A good diver. What happened, it was a – freak accident, no? We never had – tides like that before. This is a safe expedition. Organised.”

  I felt Kath’s hand on my arm. “Go on,” she said to Arturo. “I want to know everything.”

  I stared at her as Arturo started up again about sacrifices, the way sometimes their beating hearts were torn from their bodies; about how some were simply thrown into the cenotés, cenotés with no stair and no ladder. He opened one of the tubs, took something out. “Another kind of sacrifice,” he said. “This one is defleshing. They cut the skull – here, here – and peel the muscle down the face.”

  I stared at it. The skull was misshapen, the forehead steeply sloping and tall, alien-looking. I remembered reading something about how boards were clamped to Mayan babies’ heads, elongating them to show their status. I looked closer. There were cuts across the bone, showing where the muscle had been stripped. I remembered raw flesh tagged with flakes of skin, pale bone shining through from beneath, the soft mound of a nose. Pale eyes washed almost transparent, impossible to read their expression.

  “Sacrifice,” I said later, as Kath and I settled into our hammocks, pulling mosquito nets over the top. “Strange, isn’t it, that they threw bodies into the cenoté. Do you think they knew they were poisoning their drinking water?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “How they demanded blood,” I said, “it’s hard to understand. A good thing no one does that now.”

  “Don’t they?” she said, quietly. “Remember the village.”

  I cast my mind back, trying to work out what she meant, and thought of the men gathered around the crucifix. I remembered the waters off Cozumel, free-divers plunging down to touch the submerged Christ. Rick, being pulled down into blackness.

  “Do you remember that day with the bikes?” I asked, suddenly. “When Rick hurt his knee?”

  It took her a while to answer. “I lied,” she said. “I knew what would happen. It was the price I wanted him to pay, for always chasing off, leaving me alone.”

  She fell silent for so long I thought she was asleep. I listened to the snores coming from neighbouring hammocks, to insects singing in the night. And her voice came again, so low and broken I almost didn’t hear it.

  “I hated him then,” she said. “I was his sister and I hated him. I wanted to see him bleed.”

  I woke in the night. I wasn’t sure what had awakened me; I opened my eyes and saw heavy shapes suspended from the ceiling, people in their hammocks swathed like pupae. I half-sat, brushing netting from my face, and saw someone standing just outside the palapas. It was Rick. I could see it in the tousled hair, the way he stood, the white arc of his teeth. The moon cast a dark shadow at his feet.

  I swung myself out of the hammock and looked up once more, knowing he would be gone, but he was not. He raised a hand and waved.

  The scar on his knee – had it been the left, or the right? It must have been someone else laid there on the slab. Everything could be well again, made new. I realised I should be calling out to him, but he turned away and walked into the dark.

  “Wait,” I hissed, and headed after him. Now I couldn’t see him any more. There were only the tents huddled in the clearing, the dark mass of trees. I realised I was standing by the path that led into the jungle and I started down it, pushing past dry, clawing spines.

  “Rick,” I called. Only the air came back, pressing in close and warm. I went on, emerging into a small clearing. Rick was there, standing at the opposite side, smiling.

  “Rick, where the hell have you been?”

  He tilted his head, beckoning me on. I started towards him, looked down, and realised what I was about to do. I stopped so suddenly I slid, pin-wheeling my arms for balance. There was a hole in the ground. It was a metre across and almost perfectly circular, and when I looked into it, the blackness was so complete it appeared solid.

  I looked up, searching the shadows for Rick. The clearing was empty. When I looked back down the path, I saw only my own footprints written in the dust.

  My head ached. Last night no longer seemed real. We stood in the clearing, the sun blazing, looking into the hole. Arturo knelt down next to it. “It looks like a well,” he said. “It’s only when you lower yourself inside you discover it’s a cave. From there a passage leads to another, and another, all the way to the sea.”

  I peered down but still couldn’t see anything, only darkness. Someone brought a spotlight and when Arturo switched it on a little more rock wall was revealed, but nothing more. I imagined being lowered into that hole, thrown down it maybe, and swallowed.

  Arturo looked at me. “You can’t go in,” he said, and my stomach contracted. Then he added: “You can swim on the surface only.”

  I looked up at Kath and found she was looking at me too. I couldn’t breathe. Of course.

  They dragged a metal structure over the hole. It was connected to a winch and a metal chair hung from it. I kicked off my shoes and Arturo helped me into the chair, then raised his eyebrows. When I nodded he fixed a rope across my lap and put a flashlight into my hands before stepping back. They had already started the winch.

  I saw the earth floor of the jungle, then there was only rock. The chair bumped against it and I closed my eyes. When I opened them I saw only the dark. I reached out and found nothing there. I could faintly see my own arm but there was nothing else, nothing I could touch. My heart thudded with the creaking of the winch so that the two things seemed connected.

  “You’re nearly there.” The voice was distorted. “You wil
l want the light, Señorita.”

  The light: of course. I fumbled, switched it on. A bright beam struck out and I saw black webbing wrapped all around me; the roots of plants, clinging to the cave wall. I reminded myself that it was only a cenoté, like the one I’d visited with Rick. His face rose before me, pulped and misshapen; I blinked and it was gone.

  “Are you all right, Señorita?”

  I began to shout “Yeah, fi—,” and caught my breath as my feet struck cold water.

  “Miss Alex?”

  “Fine. I’m there.” I had a sudden image of the chair continuing to sink and fumbled to release the rope that bound me to it. The water was up to my knees, then my thighs. How deep was it? How far to the opening that had dragged Rick under and through? With a grunt I slid from the chair and water took me, splashing my face. I couldn’t touch the bottom. They could have warned me, I thought; no one had even asked if I could swim. Resentment rose as I tilted my head, looking back towards the light. It was a long way away.

  For a moment I thought of sacrifices thrown into the cave, the way they must have watched that same circle of light until they could no longer tread water and sank into the dark. This time, when I caught my breath, it came with a gasp. No. Soon I could swim back to the chair and they would lift me out. I would feel the sun on my face.

  I took deep breaths and shone the light around the cave. I wondered if there were fish – blind, white, maybe – and pulled my legs up close. I let the ripples grow silent.

  The Maya used this place. Cenotés were sacred places, then.

  Arturo’s words whispered around the walls.

  They were gateways to the Underworld . . . The god of rain – Chaac – he gave this water.

  I thought of some presence somewhere beneath me, undefined and huge and with eyes that saw everything, regardless of the dark or the distance. I caught my breath; I knew I should leave, now, before panic set in. I swam back to the chair and dragged myself onto it. “Pull me up!” I shouted.

  Nothing happened. The chair didn’t move. Then I heard a low sound, but not the winch; it deepened, growing hoarse, reverberating around the cave before tailing away. Then came the rumble of a distant motor. The other sound had gone. I tried to remember what it had been like and thought of slender animals with amber eyes that did not blink.