The Mammoth Book of Nightmare Stories

by Stephen Jones

  It was when they stopped fighting that things had begun to atrophy. Now, instead of fighting, they sniped constantly. A shortcoming pointed out here, an old grievance dredged up there. It was a habit that clung as closely to them as they had once clung to each other. Friends did not snipe. But Jack and Theo were no longer friends.

  The Sydney Harbor threw off azure sparkles. The famous silhouette of the Opera House rose above the water like the tail flukes of a white whale diving deep. Jack and Theo chose an outdoor table at a café that promised Harbor-caught seafood.

  “It’s too windy out here,” Jack said after a few minutes, weighing down his flapping paper napkin with his knife.

  “It feels good. Smells like the ocean.”

  “Fine.” Jack pulled his windbreaker tightly around his lanky frame and huddled into himself.

  “Let’s go inside,” Theo said after a few minutes.

  “No, it’s fine, you wanted to stay out here.”

  “You’re cold. You’re making that quite obvious. We won’t be able to enjoy our lunch. Come on, let’s go in.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  Theo rose from the table, grabbing his napkin and silverware. “I said let’s go in the fucking restaurant!” He turned and stalked through the double doors of the café, not turning to see if Jack followed. After a minute, Jack did.

  The combination platter of prawns, oysters, and Balmain bugs was fresh and delicious. Ten minutes after it was served, Theo started checking his watch.

  “What’s wrong?” Jack asked.

  “The food took so long to come—if we don’t get going soon, we’ll miss the 1:15 ferry over to the zoo.”

  “So we’ll catch the next one.”

  “I wanted to get there by two o’clock.”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “It’s a big zoo. We won’t have time to see it all if we don’t get there early enough.”

  “So we’ll see whatever we have time for.”

  “What’s the point of that? If we’re not going to see it all, we may as well not go. In fact, let’s just not go.”

  “Oh, come on. Where else are we going to see a live platypus?” This was Jack’s feeble attempt at a joke. His once-irrepressible wit still occasionally tossed one out, but Theo never laughed any more.

  “We can see one on the Nature Channel back home.”

  “That’s good enough for you, is it? To see something on TV? Figures.”

  And so it went, over the cracked and sliced bodies of the small sea creatures. As it turned out, they did take the ferry to the Taronga Park Zoo that day, and even saw a live platypus. But neither of them enjoyed it very much.

  Two years ago, Jack had discovered that Theo was sleeping with a line cook at the restaurant where he worked. Theo had always maintained that he was bisexual, at least in theory, but the fact that the line cook was a woman made Jack feel doubly betrayed. It was as if Theo had rejected not just him, but his very maleness.

  The affair was not serious, and Theo had already broken it off by the time Jack found out. The line cook no longer worked at Theo’s restaurant, and Theo swore he didn’t know or care where she had gone. They decided to stay together, not so much because they believed they had anything worth saving as because the idea of being alone after so many years frightened them both too much.

  It is said that such betrayals may be forgiven, but can never be forgotten. Jack could do neither. Despite how the memory tore at him—or perhaps because of that tearing—he was never able to let it go. For longer than he cared to remember he pictured Theo with the woman and felt disgusted with his own body, could not bear to look at himself in the mirror or let Theo see him unclothed, let alone touch him. Even now, twenty-four months later, he would hurl it at Theo when Theo was least expecting it, in the most irrelevant situations possible, in the ugliest terms possible. “Oh, I’m not good enough for you because I don’t have a pussy. Or tits maybe? Is that it?”

  Surrender no weapon, even if it is as likely to blow up in your face as it is to hurt your enemy, even if you realize it is impossible for the battle ever to be won.

  The afternoon light on the ocean’s surface was a punishing thing, glittering coldly like diamonds, reflecting back up into their eyes. Within a couple of hours their faces were painfully sunburned. Small waves lapped against them, momentarily soothing but eventually turning their skin chapped and salty.

  “The boat’ll come for us,” said Theo. “They’ll get back to Cairns and see they forgot us. They’ll shit themselves. They’ll be back.”

  “But will we still be here?” said Jack. Theo realized it was a good question; they had no way of knowing how far they’d drifted from the site of the dive.

  They had inflated their BCDs and lashed together their empty air tanks, creating an unwieldy flotation device to which they could cling. They linked hands across this device, helping to hold each other up.

  “They’ll come for us,” Theo said again, with less conviction.

  More time passed; they could not tell how much. They were very thirsty. They had stopped talking at all. The sun sank lower in the sky, and the water took on a bloody tinge.

  Suddenly Jack lifted his head. “Listen,” he said, and then they both heard it: the sound of rotors chopping air. A helicopter! They could see it in the distance, a chitinous speck in the gloaming. They both began to shout. Jack let go of the air tanks and struggled in the water, trying to remove his swim trunks. When he had them off, he waved them above his head, a red flag that seemed hopelessly small in the vastness.

  The helicopter passed far to their right, circled a time or two more, then headed away. They screamed at it until their throats were raw even though they knew the people inside could not possibly hear them over the rotors and the wind. Theo laid his head against the air tanks and began to cry. Jack looked at him, then looked away toward where the helicopter had disappeared.

  “We could try to swim back,” he said.

  Theo choked on a sob, tried to catch his breath. His nose was running, and he ducked his face into the water to clear it. “The hell we could. Weren’t you listening to the captain? He said the reef was fifty kilometers from Cairns.”

  “We may have drifted closer.”

  “Not that much closer. Not possible. And we wouldn’t even know which direction to swim.”

  “We’d go the way the chopper went.”

  “Which way was that?”

  Jack looked around, started to speak, shook his head. He raised his arm out of the water to point, hesitated, then put it down.

  “I don’t know either,” said Theo, gripping Jack’s hands more tightly. They managed to heave themselves high enough on the air tanks to lay their heads together, and each felt a tiny bit of comfort, a spark in the cold salt void.

  They’d taken a rental car in Sydney and begun the long drive north along the coastal highway, heading for Cairns, the jumping-off point for dive tours of the Great Barrier Reef. Their love of scuba diving was one of the first things they’d discovered they had in common, a thing they had traveled all over the world to enjoy together. They shared a sense of awe for the depths, an appreciation of the sea’s majesty that neither of them had ever encountered in anyone else.

  It seemed an eternity since their last diving trip off the western coast of Jamaica, but they knew the Reef was supposed to be one of the most spectacular dives on Earth: it was a big part of what had brought them to Australia. Driving all the way to Cairns had been Theo’s idea. He’d wanted to detour into the outback along the way, but Jack had vetoed the idea on the grounds that it would be full of choking dust, black flies, and poofter-hating rednecks.

  They made good time the first day, driving almost ten hours, then found a room in a small hotel in Brisbane. They had thought to push on the following day, but in morning’s light Brisbane proved to be a lovely city, dotted with fountains and sculptures and even a windmill, frosted here and there with lacy ironwork balconies that r
eminded them of New Orleans’s French Quarter. They had last been in New Orleans nine years ago, so the memories were good. They booked their hotel room for another two nights.

  The next day they climbed Mount Coot-tha, an easy two-hour hike through slender trees with sunlight slanting through their branches. At the summit, Brisbane spread before them like an exquisite miniature painting, and they could see the rocky humps of islands in the bay. They lingered on the summit and found themselves alone. Jack came up behind Theo, embraced him and whispered in his ear.

  “I do love you. You know that, you must know that. I’m sorry I’ve been so awful the past few days. I could never have come here with anyone else.”

  “Me either,” said Theo, and squeezed Jack’s long fingers tightly in his own. “Let’s just forget the past few days and enjoy the rest of the trip.”

  They were too tired from the hike to have sex that night, or perhaps they were just afraid of risking the fragile peace they’d forged. But they talked for hours over dinner and wine, the kind of amiable, inconsequential talk they hadn’t had in recent memory, and they slept curled tightly in each other’s arms.

  The car wouldn’t start the next morning, though, and they had to wait four hours for a man from the rental agency to show up with a replacement, and they began to snarl at each other again. By the time they had transferred their luggage to the new car and were heading back up the coastal highway, a heavy silence hung between them. The greatest pain was this: each remembered the magic of the previous day on the mountain and the words they had spoken, but none of it mattered.

  The owner of Sea Pearl Diving Tours had been dressing down his instructor for nearly an hour, but this did not change the fact that the instructor had somehow failed to do a head count after the last dive. Only when the boat got back to Cairns did anyone realize that two of the passengers were missing.

  “Do you realize the odds of finding those people at this point?”

  “Yes,” the instructor said miserably.

  “Do you realize that you will be directly responsible for their deaths if they aren’t found?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have any idea how much their families will be able to sue us for? You know how fuckin’ litigious Americans are!”

  The instructor did not answer this last question, as he had no idea how such things worked. He was just a diver who was barely good enough to teach other people the rudiments of scuba diving, but he tried to take care of his groups. The worst thing that had ever happened on one of his dives prior to this was a German woman who had been badly stung by a box jellyfish. She’d been in a lot of pain and mad as hell, but ultimately she had been fine. He doubted the two Americans were going to be fine.

  “They’re being searched for?”

  “Yes, you fuckin’ wanker, they’re being searched for. We’ve got a helicopter and three boats combing a hundred-kilometer area of sea. A bit like finding the proverbial needle in the haystack, wouldn’t you say?”

  The instructor wouldn’t say anything at all. He only just managed to stand up and get himself out of the owner’s office before the hot tears of his shame began to flow.

  North of Brisbane, Theo and Jack crossed into the Tropic of Capricorn. The land became brown and scorched-looking, and they had to turn on the rental car’s air conditioner, which first worked abominably, then not at all. The tightening fist of the heat did nothing to improve their tempers. The scenery grew monotonous: jagged volcanic outcroppings stabbing into a dull reddish sky. Closer to Cairns there would be dripping, steaming rain forest, but here there was nothing for the eye to rest upon.

  They made their next overnight stop in Mackay, the heart of the sugar cane belt that began north of Brisbane and ran all the way up the coast past Cairns. Something about the cane intrigued Jack, and he wanted to explore the town. Theo, who had driven all day, had a pounding headache. In the hotel, he pulled the curtains and went to bed while it was still light. Jack ventured out alone.

  He walked through the straight streets, along the windy riverfront, past an incongruously large shopping mall and a sign notifying him that he was leaving the Mackay town limits. Then he was in the sugar cane fields. Cane towered over his head, dark purple, thick-jointed, leafy. The sky was beginning to darken. In the distance he saw a column of smoke rising over the fields, then orange flames flickering through the cane. Somebody was burning off a field before the harvest! Jack had read of this practice, which removed the leaves and was said to sweeten the cane, but he had not hoped for the extraordinary good luck of actually seeing it done, had not even known it was the right time of year.

  He stood at the edge of the road watching the fire for a long time. Its fierce color and wild motion drained the sluggishness of the long car ride from him. He did not wish Theo was with him. He felt unusually free, unusually himself. Out here, away from his lover of a dozen years, he was only Jack. He was no longer the bickering, blaming Jack of Jack-and-Theo, though he knew he would be that Jack again tomorrow. He realized he hardly knew this Jack any more, this man standing alone on a country road on the other side of the world from his home, watching sugar cane burn.

  For the thousandth or the millionth time, he thought of leaving, of walking on through the cane fields to the next town, of catching a train or a bus back to Sydney. His wallet and his passport were in his pocket. He could go.

  He thought about this for a while. Then he remembered Theo’s headache; the pain in Theo’s eyes had been genuine and slightly desperate. He could not bear the idea of leaving Theo to fall asleep in pain and wake up alone. Perhaps that was only his latest excuse, but it was true.

  Jack turned away from the bright flames and retraced his steps back through the cane fields, back into the town, back to the hotel where Theo slept.

  Somehow, clinging to each other across the lashed-together air tanks, Jack and Theo dozed fitfully through the night. They were cold when they woke at dawn, but the terrible thirst had eased a little. They both knew it would return in the full light of day.

  As the sun rose in the wrong direction across the sky, they saw a plane circling low above the ocean’s surface, far away. A little later they saw a boat on the horizon. They shouted and waved just as they had done the day before, but none of it made any difference.

  “I’m tired,” said Theo.

  There was a crack in his voice, and at another time Jack might have latched onto that and shaken it like a pit bull. Instead he only said, “I know.”

  “Do you think we have any chance at all?”

  Jack began to answer, but then his head jerked up and his eyes widened. He stared at Theo, mute, obviously terrified.

  “What?”

  “I felt something brush my leg,” said Jack.

  They looked down through the clear water and saw huge dark torpedo-shapes circling lazily below.

  “Sharks.”

  “The dive instructor said they wouldn’t bother people.”

  “Yeah, I’d put a lot of stock in what the dive instructor said.”

  They were quiet for a while, staring down at the dark circling shapes. The sharks made no attempt to approach them, not yet. But the psychological effect was that of a man lost in the desert who sees the first vultures overhead.

  “We’re going to die,” said Theo. It was not a question, not even a half-veiled plea for denial or comfort; it was nothing but a statement of fact.

  “Come here,” said Jack, and let go of the air tanks.

  They shucked their inflatable life vests and gave them to the current. Theo kicked off his fins and his swim trunks, and they pressed their bodies together, making a line of warmth in the slight chill of the ocean. The water was a great buoyant hand cradling them as they held each other. They sometimes still had sex, but it had been years since they’d really kissed. They kissed now, softly, remembering the feel and taste of each other’s mouths; then harder, with teeth and tongues, with fingers tangling in each other’s wet hair.

  �
�You’ve got a one-track mind,” said Theo, and they both laughed. It was something he had said to Jack in the early, sex-drenched days of their relationship, when they could not get enough of each other.

  Their hands crept lower, beneath the water line. Their cocks were two rigid columns of flesh. They no longer felt the cold water, had no awareness of the depths yawning beneath them; it was like being in bed together years ago, knowing and feeling nothing outside their world of two-made-one.

  They did not trust death to give them that fabled final orgasm. They gave it to each other with their hands and the friction of their bodies, and their seed mingled with the ocean, the salty essence of their lives returning to its primordial home, a triumph over the void as well as an acceptance of it.

  Then they held each other very tightly and let the tanks float away. They did not want to be taken, to wonder who would go first, to see each other ripped apart, the pool of blood spreading like an oil slick on the water’s surface. Instead, they took one last breath in unison, savoring the seldom-noticed sweetness of air, and dived together forever.

  THE UNFORTUNATE

  TIM LEBBON

  Tim Lebbon is a New York Times best-selling writer who has had more than forty novels published to date, including a number of collaborations with Christopher Golden, the movie novelizations of 30 Days of Night, The Cabin in the Woods, and Kong: Skull Island, and tie-ins to the Hellboy, Star Wars, Alien, Predator, and Alien vs. Predator franchises.

  Some of his own, more recent titles include Coldbrook, The Hunt, The Family Man (as “T. J. Lebbon”), and Relics, while his short fiction has been collected in Nothing as it Seems and Last Exit for the Lost. Lebbon’s eponymous short story was made into the movie Pay the Ghost starring Nicolas Cage, and his novel The Silence was recently filmed featuring Stanley Tucci and Miranda Otto.

  He is a winner of the Bram Stoker Award for Short Fiction and the British Fantasy Awards for Best Novel, Best Novella, and Best Short Fiction.