The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 10 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  “Oooh,” Lark whispers, awevoiced, as she cranes her neck to see through the trees rushing past, the craggy coast visible in brief glimpses between their trunks and branches. Her head stuck out the window, the wind whipping at her fine, silkwhite hair and Tam thinks how she looks like a dog, a stupid, slobbering dog, just before Crispin says, “You look like a dog.” He tries hard to sound disgusted with that last word, but Tam suspects he’s just as giddy, just as enchanted by the Pacific rain forest, as his sister (if they truly are brother and sister; Tam doesn’t know, not for sure, doesn’t know that anyone else does either, for that matter).

  “You’ll get bugs in your teeth,” he says. “Bugs are gonna fly right straight down your throat and lay their eggs in your stomach.”

  Lark’s response is nothing more or less than another chorus of “ooohs” and “ahhhs” as they round a tight bend, rush through a break in the tree line and the world ends there, drops suddenly away to the mercy of a silveryellowgrey sea that seems to go on forever, blending at some far-off and indefinite point with the almost colorless sky. There’s a sunbright smudge up there, but sinking slowly westward, and Tam looks at the clock on the dash again. It’s always twenty minutes fast, but still, it’ll be dark a long time before they reach San Francisco.

  Tam punches the cigarette lighter with one carefully-manicured index finger, nail the color of an oil slick, and turns up the music already blaring from the Impala’s tape deck. Lark takes that as her cue to start singing, howling along to “Black Planet”, and the mostly bald tires squeal just a little as Tam takes the curve ten miles an hour above the speed limit. A moment in the cloudfiltered sun, blinding after the gloom, before the tree shadows swallow the car whole again. The cigarette lighter pops out, and Tam steals a glance at herself in the rearview mirror as she lights a Marlboro: yesterday’s eyeliner and she’s chewed off most of her lipstick, a black smudge on her right cheek. Her eyes a little bleary, a little red with swollen capillaries, but the ephedrine tablets she took two hours ago, two crimson tablets from a bottle she bought at a truck stop back in Oregon, are still doing their job and she’s wider than awake.

  “Will you sit the fuck down, Lark, before you make me have a goddamn wreck and kill us all? Please?” she says, smoky words from her faded lips and Lark stops singing, pulls her head back inside and Crispin sticks his tongue out at her, fleshpink flick of I-told-you-so reproach. Lark puts her pointy, black boots on the dash, presses herself into the duct-taped upholstery, and doesn’t say a word.

  * * * *

  They spent the night before in Eugene and then headed west, followed the meandering river valleys all the way down to the sea before turning south toward home. Almost a week now since the three of them left Los Angeles, just Tam and the twins because Maggie couldn’t get off work, but he’d told them to go anyway; she didn’t really want to go without him, knew that Lark and Crispin would drive her nuts without Magwitch around, but the tour wasn’t coming through L.A. or even San Francisco. So she went without too much persuading, they went, and it worked out better than she’d expected, really, at least until today.

  At least until Golden Beach, only thirty or forty miles north of the California state line and Crispin spotted the swan neck of a Brachiosaurus towering above shaggy hemlock branches and he immediately started begging her to stop, even promised that he wouldn’t ask her to play the P.J. Harvey tape anymore if she’d Please Just Stop and let him see. So they lost an hour at The Prehistoric Gardens, actually paid money to get in and then spent a whole fucking hour wandering around seventy acres of drippywet trees, listening to Crispin prattle on about the life-sized sculptures of dinosaurs and things like dinosaurs, tourist-trap monstrosities built sometime in the 1950s, skeletons of steel and wood hidden somewhere beneath sleek skins of wire mesh and cement.

  “They don’t even look real,” Tam said, as Crispin vamped in front of a scowling stegosaur while Lark rummaged around in her purse for her tiny Instamatic camera.

  “Well, they look real enough tome,” he replied and Lark just shrugged, a suspiciously complicit and not-at-all-helpful sort of shrug. Tam frowned a little harder, no bottom to a frown like hers, and “You are really such a fucking geek, Crispy,” she said under her breath but plenty loud enough the twins could hear.

  “Don’t call him that,” Lark snapped, defensive sister voice, and then she found her camera somewhere in the vast, blackbeaded bag and aimed it at the pretty boy and the unhappy-looking stegosaur. But, “A geeky name for a geeky boy,” Tam sneered, as Lark took his picture; Crispin winked at her, then, and he was off again, running fast to see the Pteranodon or the Ankylosaurus. Tam looked down at her wristwatch and up at the sky and, finding no solace in either, she followed zombie Hansel and zombie Gretel away through the trees.

  After The Prehistoric Gardens, it was Lark’s turn, of course, her infallible logic that it wasn’t fair to stop for Crispin and then not stop for her and, anyway, all she wanted was to have her picture taken beside one of the giant redwoods. Hardly even inside the national park and she already had that shitty little camera out again, sneaky rectangle of woodgrain plastic and Hello Kitty stickers.

  And because it was easier to just pull the fuck over than listen to her snivel and pout all the way to San Francisco, the car bounced off the highway into a small turnaround, rolled over a shallow ditch and across crunchsnapping twigs; Lark’s door was open before Tarn even shifted the Impala into park and Crispin piled out of the back seat after her. And then, insult to inconvenience, they made Tam take the photograph: the pair of them, arm in arm and wickedsmug grins on their matching faces, a mat of dry, cinnamon needles beneath their boots and the boles of the great sequoias rising up behind them, primeval frame of ferns and underbrush snarl all around.

  Tam sighed loud and breathed in a mouthful of air so clean it hurt her Angeleno lungs and she wished she had a cigarette, then Just get it the fuck over with, she thought, sternpatient thought for herself. But she made sure to aim the camera just low enough to cut the tops off both their heads in the photo.

  Halfway back to the car, a small squeal of surprise and delight from Lark and “What?” Crispin said, “What is it?” Lark stooped and picked up something from the rough bed of redwood needles.

  “Just get in the goddamned car, okay?” Tam begged, but Lark wasn’t listening, held her discovery cut for Crispin to see, presented for his approval. He made a face that was equal parts disgust and alarm and took a step away from Lark and the pale yellow thing in her hands.

  “Yuck,” he said, “Put it back down, Lark, before it bites you or stings you or something.”

  “Oh, it’s only a banana slug, you big sissy,” she said and frowned like she was trying to impersonate Tam. “See? It can’t hurt you,” and she stuck it right under Crispin’s nose.

  “Gagh,” he moaned, “It’s huge,” and he headed for the car, climbed into the back seat and hid in the shadows.

  “It’s only a banana slug,” Lark said again. “I’m gonna keep him for a pet and name him Chiquita.”

  “You’re going to put down the worm and get back in the fucking car,” Tam said, standing at the back fender and rattling Magwitch’s key ring in one hand like a particularly noisy pair of dice. “Either that, Lark, or I’m going to leave your skinny ass standing out here with the bears.”

  “And the sasquatches!” Crispin shouted from inside the car and Tam silenced him with a glare through the rear windshield.

  “Jesus, Tam, it’s not gonnahurt anything. Really. I’ll put it in my purse, okay? It’s not gonna hurt anything if it’s inside my purse, right?” But Tam narrowed her mascara smudgy eyes and jabbed a finger at the ground, at the needle-littered space between herself and Lark.

  “You’re going to put the motherfucking worm down, on the ground,” she growled, “and then you’re going to get back in the motherfucking car.”

  Lark didn’t move, stared stubbornly down at the fat slug as it crawled cautiously over her right palm,
leaving a wide trail of sparkling slime on her skin. “No,” she said.

  “Now, Lark.”

  “No,” she repeated, glanced up at Tam through the cascade of her white bangs. “It won’t hurt anything.”

  Just two short, quick steps and Tam was on top of her, almost a head taller anyway and her teeth bared like all the grizzly bears and sasquatches in the world. “Stop!” Lark screeched. “Crispin, make her stop!” She tried too late to turn and run away, but Tam already had what she wanted, had already snatched it squirming from Lark’s sticky hands and Chiquita the banana slug went sailing off into the trees. It landed somewhere among the ferns and mossrotting logs with a very small but audible thump.

  “Now,” Tam said, smiling and wiping slug slime off her hand onto the front of Lark’s black Switchblade Symphony t-shirt. “Get in the car. Pretty please.”

  And for a moment, time it took Tam to get behind the wheel and rev the engine a couple of times, Lark stood, staring silent toward the spot in the woods where the slug had come down. She might have cried, if she hadn’t known that Tam really would leave her stranded there. The third rev brought a big puff of charcoalsoot exhaust from the Impala’s noisy muffler and Lark was already opening the passenger-side door, already slipping in beside Tam.

  She was quiet for a while, staring out at the forest and the stingy glimpses of rocky coastline, still close enough to tears that Tam could see the wet shimmer in the windowtrapped reflection of her blue eyes.

  * * * *

  So the highway carries them south, between the ocean and the weathered western slopes of the Klamath Mountains, over rocks from the time of Crispin’s dinosaurs, rocks laid down in warm and serpent-haunted seas; out of the protected cathedral stands of virgin redwood into hills and gorges where the sequoias are forced to rub branches with less privileged trees, mere Douglas fir and hemlock and oak. And gradually their view of the narrowdark beaches becomes more frequent, the toweringsharp headlands setting them one from another like sedimentary parentheses.

  Tam driving fast, fast as she dares, not so much worried about cops and speeding tickets as losing control in one of the hairpin curves and plunging ass-over-tits into the fucking scenery, taking a dive off one of the narrow bridges and it’s two hundred feet straight down. She chain smokes and has started playing harder music, digging through the shoe box full of pirated cassettes for Nine Inch Nails and Front 242, The Sisters and Nitzer Ebb, all the stuff that Lark and Crispin would probably be whining like drowning kittens about if they didn’t know how pissed off she was already. And then the car starts making a sound like someone’s tossed a bucket of nails beneath the hood and the temp light flashes on, screw you Tam, here’s some more shit to fuck up your wonderful, fucking afternoon by the fucking sea.

  “It’s not supposed to do that, is it?” Crispin asks, back seat coy, and she really wants to turn around, stick a finger through one of his eyes until she hits brain.

  “No, Einstein,” she says instead, “It’s not supposed to do that. Now shut up,” settling for such a weak little jab instead of fresh frontal lobe beneath her nails. The motor spits up a final, grinding cough and dies, leaves her coasting, drifting into the breakdown lane. Pavement traded for rough and pinging gravel and Tam lets the right fender scrape along the guardrail almost twenty feet before she stomps the brakes, the smallest possible fraction of her rage expressed in the squeal of metal against metal; when the Impala has finally stopped moving, she puts on the emergency brake and shifts into park, turns on the hazard lights.

  “We can’t just stop here,” Lark says, and she sounds scared, almost, staring out at the sun beginning to set above the endless Pacific horizon. “I mean, there isn’t even a here to stop at. And before long it’ll be getting dark . . .”

  “Yeah, well, you tell that to Magwitch’s fine hunk of Detroit dogshit here, babycakes,” and Tam opens her door, slams it closed behind her and leaves the twins staring at each other in silent, astonished panic.

  * * * *

  Lark tries to open her door, then, but it’s pressed smack up against the guardrail and there’s not enough room to squeeze out, just three or four scant inches and that’s not even space for her waif’s boneangle shoulders. So she slides her butt across the faded, green naugahyde, accidentally knocks the box of tapes over and they spill in a plasticloud clatter across the seat and into the floorboard. She sits behind the wheel while Crispin climbs over from the back seat. Tam’s standing in front of the car now, staring furiously down at the hood, and Crispin whispers, “If you let off the brake now, maybe we could run over her,” and Lark reaches beneath the dash like maybe it’s not such a bad idea, but she only pulls the hood release.

  “She’d live, probably,” Lark says, and “Yeah,” Crispin says, and begins to gather up the scattered cassettes and return them to the dingy shoe box.

  * * * *

  The twins sit together on the guardrail while Tam curses the traitorous, steamhissing car, curses her ignorance of wires and rubber belts and radiators, and curses absent Magwitch for owning the crappy old Impala in the first place.

  “He said it runs hot sometimes, and to just let it cool off,” Crispin says hopefully and she shuts him up with a razorshard glance. So he holds Lark’s hand and stares at a bright patch of California poppies growing on the other side of the rail, a tangerineorange puddle of blossoms waving heavy, calyx heads in the salt and evergreen breeze. A few minutes more and Lark and Crispin both grow bored with Tam’s too-familiar indignation, tiresome rerun of a hundred other tantrums, and they slip away together into the flowers.

  “It’s probably not as bad as she’s making it out to be,” Crispin says, picking a poppy and slipping the sapbleeding stem behind Lark’s right ear. “It just needs to cool off.”

  “Yeah,” she says, “Probably,” but not sounding reassured at all, and stares down the precarious steep slope toward the beach, sand the cinder color of cold apocalypse below the grey shale and sandstone bluff. She also picks a poppy and puts it in Crispin’s hair, tucks it behind his left ear, so they match again. “I want to look for sea shells,” she says “and driftwood,” and she points at a narrow trail just past the poppies. Crispin looks back at Tam once, her black hair wild in the wind, her face in her hands like maybe she’s even crying, and then he follows Lark.

  * * * *

  Mostly just mussels, long shells darker than the beach, curved and flaking like diseased toenails, but Lark puts a few in her purse, anyway. Crispin finds a single crab claw, almost as orange as the poppies in their hair with an airbrush hint of blue, and she keeps that too. The driftwood is more plentiful, but all the really good pieces are gigantic, the warped and polished bones of great trees washed down from the mountains and scattered about here, shattered skeletons beyond repair. They walk on warm sand and a thick mat of sequoia bark and spindletwigs, fleshy scraps of kelp, follow the flotsam to a stream running down to meet the gently crashing sea, shallowwide interface of saltwater and fresh. Overhead, seagulls wheel and protest the intrusion; the craggy rocks just offshore are covered with their watchful numbers, powdergrey feathers, white feathers, beaks for snatching fish. And pecking eyes, Lark thinks. They squawk and stare and she gives them the finger, one nail chewed down to the quick and most of the black polish flaked away.

  Crispin bends and lets the stream gurgle about his pale hands. It’s filled with polished stones, muted olive and bottle green pebbles rounded by their centuries in the cold water. He puts one finger to his lips and licks it cautiously and “Sweet,” he says. “It’s very sweet.”

  “What’s that?” Lark says and he looks up, across the stream at a windstunted stand of firs on the other side and there’s a sign there, almost as big as a roadside billboard sign and just as gaudy, but no way anyone could see this from the highway. A great sign of planks painted white and lettered crimson, artful, scrolling letters that spell out, “ALIVE AND UNTAMED! MONSTERS AND MYSTERIES OF NEPTUNE’S BOSOM!” and below, in slightly smaller script
, “MERMAIDS AND MIRACLES! THE GREAT SEA SERPENT! MANEATERS AND DEVILFISH!”

  “Someone likes exclamation points,” Lark says, but Crispin’s already halfway across the stream, walking on the knobby stones protruding from the water and she follows him, both arms out for balance like a trapeze acrobat. “Wait,” she calls to him, and he pauses, reluctant, until she catches up.

  * * * *

  The old house trailer sits a little way up the slope from the beach, just far enough that it’s safe from the high tides. Lark and Crispin stand side by side, holding hands tight, and stare up at it, lips parted and eyes wide enough to divulge a hint of their mutual surprise. Lark’s left boot is wet where she missed a stone and her foot went into the stream, and the water’s beginning to seep past leather straps and buckles, through her hose, but she doesn’t notice, or it doesn’t matter, because this is that unexpected. This old husk of sunbleached aluminum walls, corrugated metal skin draped in mopgrey folds of fishing net, so much netting it’s hard to see that the trailer underneath might once have been blue. Like something a giant fisherman dragged up from the sea, and finally, realizing what he had, this inedible hunk of rubbish, he left it here for the gulls and the weather to take care of.