The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 23 (Mammoth Books)

by Jones, Stephen

  So why not wash the plate. And the knife, and the fork, and the glass. Hold back the ants, for a few minutes, at least.

  He never left the house with a goal. On those afternoons he was, truly, aimless. From where the house stood, high in the Santa Cruz mountains, he could have reached a number of diverting places within an hour or two. San Jose. Saratoga. Los Gatos. Santa Cruz itself, then south to Monterey, Carmel and Big Sur. Even way down to Los Angeles, if he felt like making a weekend of it.

  And then what?

  Instead he simply drove.

  There are only so many major routes you can take through the area’s mountains and redwood forests. Highways 17 and 9, or the road out over to Bonny Doon, Route 1 north or south. Of these, only 17 is of any real size. In between the main thoroughfares, however, there are other options. Roads that don’t do much except connect one minor two-lane highway to another. Roads that used to count for something before modern alternatives came along to supplant or supersede or negate them.

  Side roads, old roads, forgotten roads.

  Usually there wasn’t much to see down these last roads. Stretches of forest, maybe a stream, eventually a house, well back from the road. Rural, mountainous backwoods where the tree and poison oak reigned supreme. Chains across tracks which led down or up into the woods, some gentle inclines, others pretty steep, meandering off toward some house which stood even further from the through-lines, back in a twenty- or fifty-acre lot. Every now and then you’d pass one of the area’s very few tourist traps, like the “Mystery Spot”, an old-fashioned affair which claimed to honour a site of “Unfathomable Weirdness” but in fact paid cheerful homage to geometry, and to man’s willingness to be deceived.

  He’d seen all of these long ago. The local attractions with his wife and child, the shadowed roads and tracks on his own solitary excursions over the last few months. At least, you might have thought he would have seen them all. Every Saturday he drove, however, and every time he found a road he had never seen before.

  Today the road was off Branciforte Drive, the long, old highway which heads off through largely uncolonised regions of the mountains and forests to the south-east of Scott’s Valley. As he drove north along it, mind elsewhere and nowhere, he noticed a turning. A glance in the rear-view mirror showed no one behind and so he slowed to peer along the turn.

  A two-lane road, overhung with tall trees, including some redwoods. It gave no indication of leading anywhere at all.

  Fine by him.

  He made the turn and drove on. The trees were tall and thick, cutting off much of the light from above. The road passed smoothly up and down, riding the natural contours, curving abruptly once in a while to avoid the trunk of an especially big tree or to skirt a small canyon carved out over millennia by some small and bloody-minded stream. There were no houses or other signs of habitation. Could be public land, he was beginning to think, though he didn’t recall there being any around here and hadn’t seen any indication of a park boundary, and then he saw a sign by the road up ahead.

  STOP

  That’s all it said. Despite himself, he found he was doing just that, pulling over toward it. When the car was stationary, he looked at the sign curiously. It had been hand-lettered, some time ago, in black marker on a panel cut from a cardboard box and nailed to a tree.

  He looked back the way he’d come, and then up the road once more. He saw no traffic in either direction, and also no indication of why the sign would be here. Sure, the road curved again about forty yards ahead, but no more markedly than it had ten or fifteen times since he’d left Branciforte Drive. There had been no warning signs on those bends. If you simply wanted people to observe the speed limit then you’d be more likely to advise them to ‘Slow’, and anyway it didn’t look at all like an official sign.

  Then he realised that, further on, there was in fact a turning off the road.

  He took his foot off the brake and let the car roll forward down the slope, crunching over twigs and gravel. A driveway, it looked like, though a long one, bending off into the trees. Single lane, roughly made up. Maybe five yards down it was another sign, evidently the work of the same craftsman as the previous.

  TOURISTS WELCOME

  He grunted, in something like a laugh. If you had yourself some kind of attraction, of course tourists were welcome. What would be the point otherwise? It was a strange way of putting it.

  An odd way of advertising it, too. No indication of what was in store or why a busy family should turn off what was already a pretty minor road and head off into the woods. No lure except those two words.

  They were working on him, though, he had to admit. He eased his foot gently back on the gas and carefully directed the car along the track, between the trees.

  * * *

  After about a quarter of a mile he saw a building ahead. A couple of them, in fact, arranged in a loose compound. One a ramshackle two-storey farmhouse, the other a disused barn. There was also something that was or had been a garage, with a broken-down truck/tractor parked diagonally in front of it. It was parked insofar as it was not moving, at least, not in the sense that whoever had last driven the thing had made any effort, when abandoning it, to align its form with anything. The surfaces of the vehicle were dusty and rusted and liberally covered in old leaves and specks of bark. A wooden crate, about four feet square, stood rotting in the back. The near front tyre was flat.

  The track ended in a widened parking area, big enough for four or five cars. It was empty. There was no sign of life at all, in fact, but something – he wasn’t sure what – said this habitation was a going concern, rather than a collection of ruins that someone had walked away from at some point in the last few years.

  Nailed to a tree in front of the main house, was another cardboard sign.

  WELCOME

  He parked, turned off the engine, and got out. It was very quiet. It usually is in those mountains, when you’re away from the road. Sometimes you’ll hear the faint roar of an airplane, way up above, but apart from that it’s just the occasional tweet of some winged creature or an indistinct rustle as something small and furry or scaly makes its way through the bushes.

  He stood for a few minutes, flapping his hand to discourage a noisy fly which appeared from nowhere, bothered his face, and then zipped chaotically off.

  Eventually he called out. “Hello?”

  You’d think that – on what was evidently a very slow day for this attraction, whatever it was – the sound of an arriving vehicle would have someone bustling into sight, eager to make a few bucks, to pitch their wares. He stood a few minutes more, however, without seeing or hearing any sign of life. It figured. Aimless people find aimless things, and it didn’t seem like much was going to happen here. You find what you’re looking for, and he hadn’t been looking for anything at all.

  He turned back toward the car, aware that he wasn’t even feeling disappointment. He hadn’t expected much, and that’s exactly what he’d got.

  As he held up his hand to press the button to unlock the doors, however, he heard a creaking sound.

  He turned back to see there was now a man on the tilting porch that ran along half of the front of the wooden house. He was dressed in canvas jeans and a vest that had probably once been white. The man had probably once been clean, too, though he looked now like he’d spent most of the morning trying to fix the underside of a car. Perhaps he had.

  “What you want?”

  His voice was flat and unwelcoming. He looked to be in his mid–late fifties. Hair once black was now half grey, and also none too clean. He did not look like he’d been either expecting or desirous of company.

  “What have you got?”

  The man on the porch leant on the rail and kept looking at him, but said nothing.

  “It says ‘Tourists Welcome’,” Miller said, when it became clear the local had nothing to offer. “I’m not feeling especially welcome, to be honest.”

  The man on the porch looked weary. “
Christ. The boy was supposed to take down those damned signs. They still up?”

  “Yes.”

  “Even the one out on the road, says ‘Stop’?”

  “Yes,” Miller said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have stopped.”

  The other man swore and shook his head. “Told the boy weeks ago. Told him I don’t know how many times.”

  Miller frowned. “You don’t notice, when you drive in and out? That the signs are still there?”

  “Haven’t been to town in a while.”

  “Well, look. I turned down your road because it looked like there was something to see.”

  “Nope. Doesn’t say anything like that.”

  “It’s implied, though, wouldn’t you say?”

  The man lifted his chin a little. “You a lawyer?”

  “No. I’m a businessman. With time on my hands. Is there something to see here, or not?”

  After a moment the man on the porch straightened, and came walking down the steps.

  “One dollar,” he said. “As you’re here.”

  “For what? The parking?”

  The man stared at him as if he was crazy. “No. To see.”

  “One dollar?” It seemed inconceivable that in this day and age there would be anything under the sun for a dollar, especially if it was trying to present as something worth experiencing. “Really?”

  “That’s cheap,” the man said, misunderstanding.

  “It is what it is,” Miller said, getting his wallet out and pulling a dollar bill from it.

  The other man laughed, a short, sour sound. “You got that right.”

  After he’d taken the dollar and stuffed it into one of the pockets of his jeans, the man walked away. Miller took this to mean that he should follow, and so he did. It looked for a moment as if they were headed toward the house, but then the path – such as it was – took an abrupt right onto a course that led them between the house and the tilting barn. The house was large and gabled, and must once have been quite something. Lord knows what it was doing out here, lost by itself in a patch of forest that had never been near a major road or town or anyplace else that people with money might wish to be. Its glory days were long behind it, anyway. Looking up at it, you’d give it about another five years standing, unless someone got onto rebuilding or at least shoring it right away.

  The man led the way through slender trunks into an area around the back of the barn. Though the land in front of the house and around the side had barely been what you’d think of as tamed, here the forest abruptly came into its own. Trees of significant size shot up all around, looking – as redwoods do – like they’d been there since the dawn of time. A sharp, rocky incline led down toward a stream about thirty yards away. The stream was perhaps eight feet across, with steep sides. A rickety bridge of old, grey wood lay across it. The man led him to the near side of this, and then stopped.

  “What?”

  “This is it.”

  Miller looked again at the bridge. “A dollar, to look at a bridge some guy threw up fifty years ago?” Suddenly it wasn’t seeming so dumb a pricing system after all.

  The man handed him a small, tarnished key, and raised his other arm to point. Between the trees on the other side of the creek was a small hut.

  “It’s in there.”

  “What is?”

  The man shrugged. “A sad, dark thing.”

  The water which trickled below the bridge smelt fresh and clean. Miller got a better look at the hut, shed, whatever, when he reached the other side. It was about half the size of a log cabin, but made of grey, battered planks instead of logs. The patterns of lichen over the sides and the moss-covered roof said it had been here, and in this form, for a good long time – far longer than the house, most likely. Could be an original settler’s cabin, the home of whichever long-ago pioneer had first arrived here, driven west by hope or desperation. It looked about contemporary with the rickety bridge, certainly.

  There was a small padlock on the door.

  He looked back.

  The other man was still standing at the far end of the bridge, looking up at the canopy of leaves above. It wasn’t clear what he’d be looking at, but it didn’t seem like he was waiting for the right moment to rush over, bang the other guy on the head, and steal his wallet. If he’d wanted to do that he could have done it back up at the house. There was no sign of anyone else around – this boy he’d mentioned, for example – and he looked like he was waiting patiently for the conclusion of whatever needed to happen for him to have earned his dollar.

  Miller turned back and fitted the key in the lock. It was stiff, but it turned. He opened the door. Inside was total dark. He hesitated, looked back across the bridge, but the man had gone.

  He opened the door further, and stepped inside.

  The interior of the cabin was cooler than it had been outside, but also stuffy. There was a faint smell. Not a bad smell, particularly. It was like old, damp leaves. It was like the back of a closet where you store things you do not need. It was like a corner of the attic of a house not much loved, in the night, after rain.

  The only light was that which managed to get past him from the door behind. The cabin had no windows, or if it had, they had been covered over. The door he’d entered by was right at one end of the building, which meant the rest of the interior led ahead. It could only have been ten, twelve feet. It seemed longer, because it was so dark. The man stood there, not sure what happened next.

  The door slowly swung closed behind him, not all the way, but leaving a gap of a couple of inches. No one came and shut it on him or turned the lock or started hollering about he’d have to pay a thousand bucks to get back out again. The man waited.

  In a while, there was a quiet sound.

  It was a rustling. Not quite a shuffling. A sense of something moving a little at the far end, turning away from the wall, perhaps. Just after the sound, there was a low waft of a new odour, as if the movement had caused something to change its relationship to the environment, as if a body long held curled or crouched in a particular shape or position had realigned enough for hidden sweat to be released into the unmoving air.

  Miller froze.

  In all his life, he’d never felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise. You read about it, hear about it. You knew they were supposed to do it, but he’d never felt it, not his own hairs, on his own neck. They did it then, though, and the peculiar thing was that he was not afraid, or not only that.

  He was in there with something, that was for certain. It was not a known thing, either. It was . . . he didn’t know. He wasn’t sure. He just knew that there was something over there in the darkness. Something about the size of a man, he thought, maybe a little smaller.

  He wasn’t sure it was male, though. Something said to him it was female. He couldn’t imagine where this impression might be coming from, as he couldn’t see it and he couldn’t hear anything, either – after the initial movement, it had been still. There was just something in the air that told him things about it, that said underneath the shadows it wrapped around itself like a pair of dark angel’s wings, it knew despair, bitter madness and melancholy better even than he did. He knew that beneath those shadows it was naked, and not male.

  He knew also that it was this, and not fear, that was making his breathing come ragged and forced.

  He stayed in there with it for half-an-hour, doing nothing, just listening, staring into the darkness but not seeing anything. That’s how long it seemed like it had been, anyway, when he eventually emerged back into the forest. It was hard to tell.

  He closed the cabin door behind him but he did not lock it, because he saw that the man was back, standing once more at the far end of the bridge. Miller clasped the key firmly in his fist and walked over toward him.

  “How much,” he said.

  “For what? You already paid.”

  “No,” Miller said. “I want to buy it.”

  It was eight by the time Miller got back to his
house. He didn’t know how that could be unless he’d spent longer in the cabin than he realised. It didn’t matter a whole lot, and in fact there were good things about it. The light had begun to fade. In twenty minutes it would be gone entirely. He spent those minutes sitting in the front seat of the car, waiting for darkness, his mind as close to a comfortable blank as it had been in a long time.

  When it was finally dark he got out the car and went over to the house. He dealt with the security system, opened the front door and left it hanging open.

  He walked back to the vehicle and went around to the trunk. He rested his hand on the metal there for a moment, and it felt cold. He unlocked the back and turned away, not fast but naturally, and walked toward the set of wooden steps which led to the smaller of the two raised decks. He walked up them and stood there for a few minutes, looking out into the dark stand of trees, and then turned and headed back down the steps toward the car.

  The trunk was empty now, and so he shut it, and walked slowly toward the open door of his house, and went inside, and shut and locked that door behind him too.

  It was night, and it was dark, and they were both inside and that felt right.

  * * *

  He poured a small scotch in a large glass. He took it out through the sliding glass doors to the chair on the main deck where he’d spent the morning, and sat there cradling the drink, taking a sip once in a while. He found himself remembering, as he often did at this time, the first time he’d met his wife. He’d been living down on East Cliff then, in a house which was much smaller than this one but only a couple of minutes’ walk from the beach. Late one Saturday afternoon, bored and restless, he’d taken a walk to the Crow’s Nest, the big restaurant that was the only place to eat or drink along that stretch. He’d bought a similar scotch at the upstairs bar and taken it out onto the balcony to watch the sun go down over the harbour. After a while he noticed that, amongst the family groups of sunburned tourists and knots of tattooed locals there was a woman sitting at a table by herself. She had a tall glass of beer and seemed to be doing the same thing he was, and he wondered why. Not why she was doing that, but why he was – why they both were. He did not know then, and he did not know now, why people sit and look out into the distance by themselves, or what they hope to see.