Best New Horror 29

by Stephen Jones

  The trees hissed as he closed his eyes and Mo coalesced there, reaching out for him as he had done for her half a century ago. The arms that tried to encircle his body were much too short for the task.

  GEMMA FILES

  LAGAN

  GEMMA FILES was formerly a film critic, journalist, screenwriter and teacher, and has been an award-winning horror author since 1999. She has published two collections of short work (Kissing Carrion and The Worm in Every Heart), two chapbooks of speculative poetry (Bent Under Night and Dust Radio), a Weird Western trilogy (the “Hexslinger” series—A Book of Tongues, A Rope of Thorns and A Tree of Bones), a story-cycle (We Will All Go Down Together: Stories of the Five-Family Coven) and an award-winning stand-alone novel (Experimental Film).

  The author has two new story collections from Trepidatio (Spectral Evidence and Drawn Up From Deep Places), one upcoming from Cemetery Dance (Dark Is Better), and a new poetry collection from Aqueduct Press (Invocabulary).

  She is currently working on a book of essays about horror culture as comfort food in an age of fear.

  “In maritime law, the terms ‘flotsam’, ‘jetsam’ and ‘lagan’ describe specific and distinct kinds of wreckage,” explains Files. “‘Jetsam’ describes goods voluntarily cast into the sea (jettisoned) by the crew of a ship, usually to lighten it in an emergency. ‘Flotsam’ describes goods left floating on the water by accident, often after a shipwreck. Both may generally be salvaged, reverting to the original owner only if explicitly claimed.

  “‘Lagan’, on the other hand, is the term for goods that have been marked, most often by a buoy, so the previous owner can retrieve it later. Lagan therefore remains that owner’s property, and cannot be salvaged unless it can be legally proven that the owner is either dead, or abandoned it under circumstances which assured they could not possibly have ever held out any real hope of recovering it.

  “It’s oddly amusing to me to recall that at one point, I was known for writing specifically erotic horror—I sold five stories to Ridley and Tony Scott’s blood-and-nudity anthology cable TV series, The Hunger, after all, and two of my earliest placements were in Michael Rowe’s seminal anthologies Queer Fear and Queer Fear II. Writing the “Hexslinger Series” also gave me a bit of a reputation, I suppose, or at least enough of one to get a lot of irate Amazon reviews from users who hadn’t expected any hot gay sex in their Weird Western with Aztec gods and black magic.

  “These days, however, I just don’t get to flex those muscles much anymore…not unless somebody like Vince Liaguno comes along, at least.

  “So here was Vince, asking me to write something specifically erotic, specifically queer, and specifically horrifying. The three components that immediately popped into my head were the fetish known as vore (a fantasy of deriving sexual satisfaction from consuming and/or being consumed, from Hannibal-style cannibal cookouts to feeding yourself to some overpowering animal). The general dread and mystery of the sea (they’re always finding stuff that’s new down there, and it’s often awful!—the sea is like an endless, deceptively gorgeous stew of parasitism and predation!—except for all the parts of it we humans have fucked up beyond repair, because that’s just the sort of garbage-spreading eco-terrorists we are!); and the sort of chimeric, combinative, alchemical body horrors that rest securely somewhere between David Cronenberg’s The Fly and John Carpenter’s The Thing.

  “How does the thing they pull from the sea in ‘Lagan’ work, exactly? Don’t ask me, mate—I’m no scientist. I just know what scares me, and what I like, and how what I like scares me. And here’s the result.

  “Enjoy.”

  The sea is so much deeper than the grave.

  —Robyn Hitchcock.

  “YOU LOOK LIKE shit,” Sean said. “Seriously, mate. Like you haven’t slept in yonks.”

  Draped across the rail, Ric didn’t bother to shake his head. “That’s ’cause I haven’t.”

  Barely gone noon, the air even below-decks so hot everybody felt mildly feverish. Not that Sean’d be able to tell, really, barring recourse to the ’Net; though he’d bluffed his way on board (with Ric’s connivance) by mis-representing his summer job at Auntie Di’s veterinary clinic as some sort of pre-med internship, all he’d had to do thus far was dole out dramamine, ibuprofen, Polysporin and Band-aids. Oh, and stitch up a few shallow wounds here and there, but that’s where a strong stomach and Mum’s sewing lessons came in handy.

  “Best go down, then,” Sean suggested. “Knock a few back, have a bit of a zizz…”

  “Can’t do that, mate.” Ric looked at him full on, then—face haggard under its tan, eyes bruise-set, like they’d been boiled. “I do that, I’ll have the dream. And then…yeah, better not.”

  Which dream’s this, again? Sean thought of saying, but didn’t.

  But Ric was already deep into monologue-mode: “…like I’m drowning, or…remember the one about cats sitting on babies’ faces, stealing their breath? Like I’m being pressed down by something, so hard I’m paralysed, and it covers my face so I can’t breathe, all warm and moist but not furry at all, it’s skin, flat as a bag, and wrinkled, and naked. Like…somebody else’s bloody scrotum.”

  “Ah, Jesus, now I know you’re not serious.”

  “You’re the one fuckin’ asked, you prat.”

  To which Sean simply shrugged and leant back against the rail, arms crossed to ward off a vague, creeping discomfort. “That’s just a night-hag, Ric; bloody sleep apnoea, dressed up like the Late-Night Fright Show. Sure you’re not speeding again?”

  “Been out going on a week, so no.” But even total exhaustion couldn’t completely root out the essential Ric-ness, same eyebrow-waggling comic charm which’d originally fished Sean in, at least halfway. “S’pose a quick blowie’s out the question, then?”

  “And that’d pay back for me how, exactly?”

  “Fresh protein?”

  Without wanting to, Sean found himself hovering on the verge of laughter before biting it back, hard. “Thanks, but no thanks. How’s about a few aspirins and a massage, and we call it even?”

  “Prick-tease.”

  “Well, you know me.”

  Ric shot him a dark look from under equally dark lashes, genuinely too knackered to take further offence. Just as well: six-two of enraged Melbourne Greek was nothing to sneeze at, the best of times, and Sean really didn’t feel up to doing yet another piss-off-out-of-my-personal-space Macarena with the fucker, below-decks or above-. He one-eightied to look out over the water instead.

  Sometimes the ocean seemed a bright-burnt skin they could crawl upon blindly, persuading themselves it was impenetrable, but this wasn’t one of those days. The usual salt-haze had boiled off, discovering all too clearly the near-endless soup of part-degraded garbage and haphazard death they floated in: the Great Pacific Garbage Knot’s outermost gyre, folding all manner of entropised crap in towards the centre, where it could hit, stick, grow by incredibly slow degrees into the loose trash-conglomerate “island” that rumours now reckoned at roughly half the size of Texas.

  Around them, “Captain” Shaftoe’s folly let out a chorus of groans, like small animals were being pinched between its joints. Dougray Shaftoe himself having only the barest interest in boats for their own sake, it was nameless except for its maritime registry code; between themselves, Ric and Sean had taken to calling it the Bad Idea, persisting long after the joke stopped being funny. A full-displacement hull outrigger shrimp trawler from New Guinea, Shaftoe had had it converted to salvage-hauler by removing the refrigeration equipment, freeing up storage space for that legendary cargo harvest he was sure would drift into their laps if they only camped out by the Knot long enough. Chief amongst many things he hadn’t really reckoned on, though, was the lingering stench of a million hauls past, which made sleeping on the Idea a fairly disgusting exercise in itself, nightmares notwithstanding.

  Neither the actual smell nor the general stench of idiocy hovering ’round this venture had seemed quite so
obvious back in Port Moresby, where Sean had been stupidly content to stand by as a blind-drunk Ric threw both their oars in with Shaftoe’s crew. Still, ridiculous as this all seemed in hindsight—especially from his current perspective, bobbing like a tin-can in the middle of arse-end nowhere with a bunch of similarly delusional losers—at least he hadn’t compounded the mistake by giving it up to Ric later on, considering what a berk he’d since turned out to be. And it was the rancid aftertaste of that not-quite-relationship, in fact—liberally cut with five weeks of too-close quarters, and Ric’s increasing craziness throughout—which now kept Sean securely at arm’s length, unwilling to dole out even a perfunctory clap on the shoulder (Cheer up, mate! Could be worse…somehow), lest it be misconstrued as a come-on.

  “We’re all in the same boat, though, aren’t we?” Ric demanded, breaking Sean’s train of thought. “Like, literally.”

  “You’re right there,” Sean agreed. But felt his gaze drawn further down, towards the hatch, where that all-important first piece of flotsam they’d picked up still lay discarded—a dark green, plastic-blend hull-chip marked with the centre-set yellow letters EEN and PHOE.

  Green Phoenix.

  Experimental craft, whole thing’s made out of recyclables, Sean had told Shaftoe, running three searches at once, while the rest of the tiny crew loomed angrily ’round them. They launched, uh…two years back, off of California; big idea was to surf currents all the way here, tracing the gyre’s path and taking samples of all the garbage that went along with ’em. Been out of contact for…nine months, looks like.

  Private venture?

  Corporate—ReVive, a subset of Grummacher Pan-Oceanic. WikiLeaks says they set it up as a PR dodge, to shift attention off those dumping scandals.

  So…they’d pay to find out what happened to it, yeah?

  Yeah, sure. Probably.

  Which gave them a plan, at long last. That little piece of drift was the best “catch” they’d had since pushing off, one way or the other—and it’d certainly stopped that potential mutiny in its tracks, for which Shaftoe’d privately declared himself grateful. As he bloody well should be.

  Trouble had started a fortnight back, when Arjit and Sam-I-Am went poking ’round in the hold, only to discover half the crates down there were empty rather than supply-packed—meant for that endless flood of three-year-old jetsam Shaftoe’d been shit-sure would flock their way, they only made it to the Knot and camped out in its orbit. So far—as one might only expect, given the original plan’s intensely un-researched laziness—it hadn’t exactly panned out; the stuff they did rake from the water tended to be either damaged or worthless, with an occasional side-order of resale-unfriendly randomness. (An entire crate of little party balloons that blew up into funny animal shapes, for example, seemed virtually designed not to attract big eBay bidders, unless one of them turned out to be a nostalgic Nicolas Cage.)

  What are we gonna do for food, then? Arjit’d demanded, understand-ably.

  Fish? was Shaftoe’s grand suggestion. Ship’s already set up for it, right?

  Yeah. Except that the area was contaminated, as befit a fucking two hundred and fifty thousand square mile dump, a rummage-bin toxin-patch culled from here to China; every catch they brought up was half corpses, scales dull and lifting, gills deformed, their bloated stomachs stuffed with degrading plastic leaching fluorocarbons. Sam-I-Am took to sharpening his clasp-knife, while Arjit spoke darkly of how easy it would be to signal pirates, if not simply give Shaftoe (who’d holed himself up in his cabin, where he kept at least two guns) the stealthy heave some night, and become them.

  Then Sean found the Green Phoenix drift while flushing out the bilges, done some satellite uplink-grade asking ’round, and made his pitch. Radar and hard work did the rest—hadn’t taken much past forty-eight hours, in the end: a media event, just waiting to happen. The whole of the wreck, or what was left, plus an arse-load of lagan clearly marked with reVive’s eco-friendly tramp stamp. Plus, inside one of them, something even Sean could’ve never foreseen…

  …a survivor.

  Above water-level, the garbage piles together in shoals, mortared with its own melt; pollution becomes cement, suture, cobbling a crazy-quilt that daily grows more dense. Beneath, the underside spirals down in tails like kelp, great interlocking daisy-chains of current like inverted tornadoes: Turning and turning, an endless fishline loop, to scrape at the sea-bottom.

  Under the water, down in the dark; where light fades as it diffuses, where things become slimy and inappropriate, unreadable as some alien alphabet. The mimic-octopus on the off-reef floor, masquerading as either what it eats or fears—burying itself until only two or three limbs are visible, a coiled knot of mock sea-snakes, poison-banded. The sponge angler, further down and dimmer, rooting itself amidst anemone-forests and great shell-shelves—flicking one long spine out and back, out and back into the oncoming current, to reel in unwary prey. The glass-headed barrel-eyes, prowling restless at Immeasurable Depths—swivelling its nostrils in two different directions at once, negotiating by its nude brain’s light, mouth wide for whatever it chances to blunder against.

  None of us are what we seem below a certain depth, where narcosis’ inevitable prospect transmutes to one immense, all-over kiss, suffocation a blissful blessing. Caught up in this joyful sub-tide, we forget our original forms, grow fluid and slippery, like drowned men’s flesh. We degrade by degrees, scatter our bones at random in a broken necklace, and watch them turn to coral.

  Even further down, bones are a luxury, far too easily crushed. Here we become elastic, infinitely supple; we drift, exerting no unnecessary effort, reshaping ourselves to whatever comes along. Gelid, we spin ourselves out like ropes, chains of stomachs inside stomachs. We digest, and are digested, in turn.

  Thus hunger in itself becomes a form of selflessness, a form of worship. A form of love.

  Sean still couldn’t figure if it’d been blind luck, seat-of-the-pants cunning, or maybe a fortuitous combo of the two. When they’d first dredged it up, the rig looked like half a car-wreck fused with found-object sculpture—mucky scribble of knotted-up lead line cross-knit with weed, an American flag reduced to sodden ribbons lashing half a trimaran pontoon to one side of a rickety, semi-compacted shipping crate, whole thing stoppered by a massive, partially-cracked rainwater cycling tank they only later realised had been haphazardly patched with sail tape, from the inside. Just a random conglomer-ation of garbage, or so they’d thought, ’til they tried to lift it: Impossibly heavy, shadowed internally, sloshing with who knew what. When Shaftoe gave the order, the crate’s sodden remnants prised up and away on three, like husking a coconut.

  And there he’d been, inside: curled foetal, skin a too-soft mess of salt and burn—like he’d been steeping in his own filth for weeks, poached egg-style under that relentless sun. Try to pull him out now, and Sean could already see his hide ruck, bones ground like marbles in a sock from bobbing through twenty-foot waves, meat beneath just a rancid stew. That bright thatch of hair slipping off beneath prying fingers, an ill-glued skullcap.

  Sean caught his breath at the very idea, deep. Then gasped, almost retching, as he seemed to feel the whole cobbled-together escape pod’s funk come in at his eyeballs, ream him from stem to stern; not so bad, really, once you got used to it. Not so very bad, at all.

  Which was when the man in question had opened his eyes, green-guileless as the sea itself, and looked at him.

  They got him down to “sickbay” (ie, Sean’s storage-closet of a bunk), sent Sam-I-Am and Ric back up for a gallon jug of fresh, and started the process—cut away what was left of his clothes, sluiced him down, sponged away the shed. What emerged was sallow yet weirdly fresh-looking, free of scars and hair alike, cool and firm to the touch. No detectable pulse at neck or wrist, so Sean was forced to search further afield: brush his torpid tackle aside, snoozing oyster-slack in the shadow of his equally blond groin’s half-shell, and feel for the femoral. Which did indeed respond, albe
it sluggishly, as though still underwater.

  Then: Aussie, his patient’d suddenly observed, mouth not even sounding dry after what had to be days of drifting, and not seeming concerned at all about a stranger’s hand in his crotch; it was a soothing voice with vowels worn flat, classic SoCal drawl up-climbing towards the sentence’s end, familiar from any one of a hundred TV commercials. ’M I…near there, now?

  Closer to Papua the one side, Indonesia the other.

  So…still in th’ Knot, then.

  Still, yeah. Don’t try to talk.

  Then Sean scooped two fingertips’ worth of water, let the guy suck it back, and felt his tongue’s unexpected heat lave the prints; immediately, his cheekbones burnt hectic, saliva-scoured nerves firing raw, nape sweat-damp. To fend off a blush, he contradicted himself, asking: You’re Grinnage, right? Simon? Navigator, did all the IT work…I saw your Photo Stream on Flickr.

  …’f you say so.

  Look, you either are or you aren’t, mate. It’s not multiple bloody choice.

  The guy made a sketchy attempt at a shrug, which worked out more like a ripple. He seemed limp, leached, like all his minerals were gone.

  Could be, he allowed, finally.

  A cough. Sean looked up to find Shaftoe in the doorway, arms crossed, frowning. Demanding: What’s that even mean, son?

  Means…I could be this…whoever you said. Or not. Could be you, or him…

  (nodding here at Sean, who coloured again, obliquely embarrassed)

  …or anybody.