Best New Horror 29

by Stephen Jones

  “Never mind,” he said softly.

  He always suggested it. She never responded. And he never pushed it.

  As claustrophobic as the island and the water and the causeway made him feel, the mainland made her feel even worse. She didn’t own a car, and the one time she had braved the journey to his place in a taxi—at his invitation and expense—she’d been like a small terrified animal that had spent its whole life in a cage and didn’t know how to cope in the outside world. It had been awful to see. He’d driven her back himself the same night.

  But she was happy here. She was living in the world that had always fascinated her, and the Gulf of Mexico was her backyard. There were shops and restaurants along the seafront, including Casa Mare, a shabby-chic little café where they usually ate when he visited. It was only a ten-minute walk away, but as far as Evan was concerned, in the stifling heat of a Texas summer, it might as well be ten miles. But he was willing to endure it for her.

  He smiled at Lea and she mirrored his expression. She looked like a vintage movie star in her enormous shades and sun hat. And the white bikini-top and cut-offs made her tanned skin appear even darker. Everything about her radiated health and happiness. Physically anyway.

  “You’ve gone totally native,” Evan said. Next to her he looked pale and anaemic. No one would ever guess they were twins.

  He armed sweat off his forehead as he closed the car door. The sun blazed overhead and he could feel the heat of the driveway through his sandals. Summers here were notoriously brutal, sweltering and sticky with humidity. Even so, houses like Lea’s often didn’t have air-conditioning. He never understood how she could stand it.

  She smiled as she retrieved her flip-flop. She didn’t bother to put it back on, and he winced at the sight of her bare foot on the scorching pavement. He remembered how the blacktop in the school playground used to turn soft in the heat, and the swings and monkey bars were too hot to touch.

  Lea took his arm and pulled him towards the house. “Come on,” she said. “I can’t wait to show you!”

  At the top of the stairs she kicked off her remaining flip-flop and dropped the other one beside it on the porch, leaving Evan behind to remove his sandals. Sand gritted under his bare feet as he stepped inside and he made a face. The floor was always sandy. He didn’t know why she even bothered with the Buddhist no-shoes thing at all.

  He tried to pull the front door closed, only for it to bang against the frame and bounce open again. It was hanging crookedly askew, wrenched off its top hinge.

  “Lea, your door is…”

  But she had vanished into the back.

  He peered at the busted hinge for a moment longer before edging back inside, where it was cooler. The ceiling fan was on, listlessly stirring the heavy air. He pulled the chain to make it turn faster.

  He didn’t need to be told to help himself to coffee. Lea always managed to time it perfectly with his arrival. The aroma was heavenly, but it did little to mask the stronger smell of the sea that permeated the house through the open windows. There was a brisk breeze, but the air itself was like liquid salt. Lea said she found the scent of fish comforting, but to Evan it just smelled like the dumpsters outside a seafood restaurant.

  He downed the coffee, sighing with pleasure at the invigorating taste. It was only in the past year that she’d finally gotten it right. Lea never drank coffee herself, so brewing the perfect pot for her brother had always been something of an experiment. He peeked in the cabinet to see what he was drinking and was surprised to find an expensive designer brand he never would have splurged on for himself. But he wasn’t going to complain or tell her she shouldn’t have. After years of suffering through her lesser efforts, this tiny luxury was only fair.

  It took him a moment to register what was odd about the cabinet. Then it clicked. There was nothing to eat. Just a half-empty bag of rice and a couple of cans of tuna, nothing that looked like proper food. His curiosity got the best of him and he decided to look in the refrigerator, only to recoil at the stench. He slammed the door. Whatever was in there was well past its sell-by date. He had a sudden image of rotting bait and buckets of chum sitting out in the heat.

  Well, maybe she just ate out all the time. Or she hadn’t gone to the store yet for provisions. Maybe it was too hot even for her. He decided not to say anything. Not about the fridge anyway. He was definitely going to ask about the front door.

  He was pouring another cup of coffee when she reappeared, bearing a long shallow plastic box, the kind you stored things in under the bed. She set it on the kitchen table and waved him over. “They’re sleeping,” she said in a theatrical whisper.

  “You know your door is broken?”

  She either didn’t hear him or didn’t care.

  “Lea,” he said. “Hello? What happened to your door? How long has it been like that?”

  She looked up, distracted and annoyed that he was focused on something else. “How long has what—oh, the door. I don’t know. Couple of months. The last tropical storm.”

  “Are you serious? Lea, do you have any idea how dangerous that is? Anyone could come in here! Or anything! Look, all my tools are in the car. Let me just get them and I’ll—”

  “Leave it!”

  He froze, silenced by the ferocity in her voice. He stood staring at her, too stunned to speak.

  After a while she forced a little laugh. “Sorry. I just…I really want you to see this. Please?”

  Her girlish plea made him relent. And her insistence had actually piqued his curiosity. With a final glance at the door, he crossed to the table and peered into the container. She might have just taken it from the oven, there was so much heat coming off it. Presumably she kept it on the back porch and had only brought it in to spare him the horror of the inhospitable temperature outside. But she’d only saved him from the heat, not the smell. If anything, it was worse than what was in the fridge. He wrinkled his nose and resisted the urge to pinch it shut.

  The water was murky, but he could make out the shapes of several tiny pale creatures floating within, each about the size of a grain of rice. They didn’t appear to be moving, not of their own volition. The water was still sloshing gently from the movement of the box and the creatures were rocked with the current.

  Evan didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t even sure what he was supposed to be looking at. Frankly, he was far more concerned about the door.

  “Now watch,” Lea said. She dipped her fingers into a little plastic container and sprinkled some brown flakes into the warm, cloudy water. Nothing happened.

  Evan opened his mouth to tell her the things looked dead to him, but she shushed him before he could speak. He sighed and turned his attention back to the water.

  After a few moments he thought he saw one of them twitch, just a whisper of movement. Lea’s little gasp told him this was the reaction she’d been expecting. Another creature jerked and darted across the water, leaving a tiny V-shaped wake behind it. One by one the others began to stir, scurrying around in the water. He could make out the flicker of tiny legs.

  Lea looked overjoyed, but her excitement was way out of proportion to what had just occurred.

  “So…” he ventured, “you gave fish food to some bugs and they woke up and swam around?”

  Her expression hardened, and she stared at Evan as though he were a stranger. “They’re not bugs,” she snapped.

  For a moment it seemed like she wasn’t going to explain further, and he felt like the rug had been pulled out from under him. He’d clearly offended her, but he was totally in the dark. “Look, I’m sorry, but I have no idea what I’m supposed to be seeing here. You’re the expert. You tell me what’s so amazing about it.”

  “They’re alive,” she said, her eyes shining.

  “I can see that. And?”

  “They shouldn’t be.”

  Evan was beginning to wonder whether this was some kind of practical joke. He’d driven all the way out here for this? He raised his eyebr
ows enquiringly, waiting for her to elaborate.

  “Do you know what was in that water before?” She gazed down at the box.

  “Judging from the smell, quite a lot of dead fish?”

  Lea shook her head. “Nothing alive or dead. Nothing organic at all. It’s just water from the Gulf.” She peered closely into his eyes, as though anticipating a breakthrough on his part. “Polluted water from the Gulf,” she added.

  Evan was tiring of the game. He pulled his T-shirt away from where it had stuck to his chest and stood beneath the fan. “You’re going to have to spell it out for me,” he said wearily.

  She dropped into a chair with a sigh. “Sorry. I forget sometimes you’re not actually here with me.”

  He frowned at the odd admission, but he knew what she meant. He talked to her also when he was on his own. Only in his case there was no answering voice. He suspected Lea had a version of him with her all the time, who listened to her manic chatter and understood it. His eyes flicked again to the broken door.

  “Just start at the beginning,” he urged, tilting his head back to feel the breeze on his face.

  “Yes. Okay. The beginning.” She seemed to notice his discomfort for the first time. She got up and went to the fridge, and he braced himself for the smell. But instead she opened the door to the freezer, filled a glass with ice cubes and handed it to him.

  He rubbed the glass gratefully across his forehead and over the back of his neck. No wonder she was so scattered; the heat was probably cooking her brain. He noticed that the sky had darkened with clouds. Rain would only increase the appalling humidity, but at least it might cool things down a little.

  “Do you remember the first time we went to the beach?” Lea asked.

  “I’ve never forgotten it.”

  “Do you remember that little Vietnamese girl?”

  He nodded. He’d never forgotten her either.

  After the weirdness with Lea and the crab, Evan had gone back to the sand, determined to build a new castle. Suddenly a scream rang out, as piercing as a siren. Sleeping sunbathers bolted upright, staring around, looking for the source of the cries.

  The little girl had been splashing in the shallow water not far from Lea, and she had stepped on a piece of glass. Except it was more than just a piece of glass. It was half a broken liquor bottle, the kind a thug might use to carve-up someone’s face in a bar fight. The glass had gone straight through her foot like a huge, vicious fang, and the girl was screaming at the top of her lungs as she lay where she’d fallen.

  It was as though someone had yelled “Shark!” Her screams brought everyone out of the water at full-pelt, even Lea. When the grown-ups realised what had happened, they clustered around the girl and her parents, who were shouting for someone in the gawking crowd to call an ambulance.

  There wasn’t much the lifeguard could do, and the bottle was wedged so far into the girl’s foot he advised them to leave it for the ambulance crew to remove. Or the surgeon in the hospital she was destined for.

  Evan shuddered. “Yeah, I remember her.”

  “Well, the same thing happened to me a couple of weeks ago.”

  At his look of horror she was quick to add, “Oh, not as bad as her, don’t worry. I got back here and managed to get all the glass out of my foot. At least I thought I did. I’m writing about the impact of climate change on the barrier islands, so I’ve been doing some tests on the water. Do you know how polluted the Gulf of Mexico is?”

  Evan held up his hands. “Focus, Lea.”

  “Yeah, sorry. Okay, so a couple of days later, my foot got infected and I realised there were still some pieces of glass in it. I thought soaking it in seawater might help, so I did that.”

  Evan had forgotten all about his own discomfort. “What? Why didn’t you go to a doctor?”

  She shrugged. “No insurance. Besides, I didn’t think it was that big a deal. Anyway, I fell asleep with my foot in one of those containers, and when I woke up I was fine. The water was all bloody and there were little shards of glass at the bottom, and my foot was healed.” Lea returned to the table and looked down at the things swimming in the box. “The next day, they appeared.”

  Evan followed her gaze and watched the creatures. They were livelier now, and there was something oddly focused about their movements. It bothered him.

  “They should have pulled that bottle out of the girl’s foot,” Lea mused, sounding far away. “They should have given it back.”

  He didn’t like the glazed look in her eyes, the awe in her voice. She sounded like someone who’d joined a cult.

  “What are you telling me?” he asked cautiously.

  She lifted her head, a smile playing across her features. “I took something from the ocean. So the ocean took something from me. And together we made something new.”

  It had to be the heat making her crazy. That or the infection had been worse than she thought. He heard the echo of her voice all those years ago.

  It was something else once. Somebody threw it away, threw it in the sea. And it became this.

  Evan turned away. He set the glass of melting ice cubes on the counter and looked out the window. The leaves were wet and he realised it had been raining for some time. The rain drummed on the roof like impatient fingers, but it couldn’t drown out the seagulls or the churning surf. The smell of rotting fish was starting to make his head spin. From here the water looked like chocolate milk, and he felt nauseated at the thought of his sister immersing herself in it day after day. How could they be so different? How could they look at that stretch of beach and see such entirely different worlds?

  He rubbed his temples as he tried to think of what to say. Dredging his memory unearthed another unpleasant nugget of weirdness, and the pieces began to fall into place.

  When they were kids, the beach and dunes had always been littered with trash, especially cans, bottles and those plastic yokes that held six-packs together. There was one day in particular when it seemed as if a garbage truck had overturned. They’d been about ten, Evan guessed, walking along the shore looking for seashells when they saw what looked like a plastic bag half-buried in the sand. It billowed a little in the breeze.

  But as they drew nearer they realised it was a jellyfish. Lea immediately grabbed a long piece of driftwood and speared the creature’s body, hoisting it high in the air.

  Evan dodged away from her. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m putting it back where it belongs,” Lea stated matter-of-factly. “In the sea.”

  Evan shuddered. A dead jellyfish was just as dangerous as a living one, still capable of burning you with its stinging tentacles.

  “I think you should leave it where people can see it.”

  But Lea wouldn’t be deterred. She held the stick high overhead and the jellyfish dangled above her like a flag. She looked like a knight carrying a banner into battle as she marched towards the water’s edge.

  Evan held his breath, waiting for the creature to fall, to drop onto her head. Or slide down the stick onto her hands.

  Perhaps it wasn’t dead. He didn’t like the way the gelatinous body resembled a huge, glazed eye. Was it watching him now?

  “The sea gets lonely,” Lea said. “If I put it back, she might turn it into something else.”

  These were ideas she had been obsessing over her whole life. How could Evan not have seen it? All at once he felt the crushing weight of guilt. He knew her better than anyone. He should have come out here more often, pushed aside his own neurotic fear about the stupid causeway. Instead he’d let her isolate herself on this island, in this squalid little shack, where her hold on reality had only gotten more slippery as the years went by.

  He pictured her holed-up in here while a hurricane lashed the trees outside and threw thirty-foot waves against the seawall. The island was already sinking as the sea levels rose. How long would it be before the foul waters swallowed the whole house? She said the door had been busted since the last tropical storm. He shuddered
to think who or what might have been able to just waltz right in while she slept. If she slept at all. Maybe she just sat up all night staring into buckets full of toxic waste, waiting for creatures to pop out and say hi. Maybe the open door was an invitation for something to come in from the sea.

  There was a click as the ice cubes shifted in his glass, and he felt as though someone had dropped one down the back of his shirt. He didn’t think those flakes she had dropped into the water were fish food. The heat, the smell, the sickening realisation…All at once he felt dizzy. His stomach lurched, and his voice was little more than a hoarse croak as he told her he needed the bathroom.

  He rushed from the kitchen and got there just in time to fall to his knees before the toilet. He hadn’t eaten anything that morning, and last night’s beer tasted horrible on the way back up. After a few wretched heaves, he flushed the toilet and confronted his haggard reflection in the mirror. He ran the faucet and splashed cold water in his face and over his head, wishing the refreshing sensation would never end.

  “You okay in there?” Lea called.

  “I’m fine! Just…the heat, you know? I’ll be out in a few minutes.”

  He listened as she padded away. Then he opened the door and slipped quietly down the hall, into her bedroom. There was something he needed to see. The rain was coming down harder, and a gust of wind rustled some loose papers somewhere in the room. It sounded like claws.

  Her laptop sat on a little table against the wall. It was open, and a screen-saver was dancing over the cracked screen. Evan tapped the trackpad and a document appeared. He assumed the confusing text that greeted him was a table with equations or chemical formulae. He scrolled to the beginning and began to read.

  The Poisoned Wellspring: The Real Impact of Climate Change on the Ocean

  4.56 billion years ago an immense cloud began to coalesce, spin and collapse under its own gravity in a process known as cold accretion. This solar nebula was the origin of our solar system. The orbiting chunks of rock and ice eventually became the four inner planets, and in what was still the infancy of the Earth, oceans began to form. Saltwater seas have dominated our planet for 3.5 billion years and they are the source of all life here. All indigenous life.