Dark Terrors 5 - The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Anthology]

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  ‘What was I supposed to see?’ she dreams herself asking the unclouded sky, no clouds but there is thunder anyway, just as there was Morris Whitney’s voice without his body. And she’s scared for the first time, wants to wake up now, because there’s something moving about in the ferns on the other side of the stream, something huge, and the sound that isn’t really thunder from the sky again, the sound like a tear in the sky and it’s raining but it isn’t water that falls, and Anne shuts her eyes tight, no ruby slipper heels to click so she repeats Morris’s name, again and again, while the scalding filth drips down to blister her face and pool red and steaming at her feet.

  * * * *

  Morning and the storms have passed, blown away south to Bantry and Skibbereen, the Celtic Sea beyond, and the sky is perfect blue as Anne makes her way back to the cliffs alone. A rusty purple bicycle borrowed from the hotel’s cook and she follows the winding road north through the Glanleam woods, on past the lighthouse and then takes a narrower road west, little more than a footpath for sheep, really, past the steep rise of Reenadrolaun and down to Culloo. The sea air chilly on her face, on her hands, and her legs aching by the time she reaches the site.

  She sees the girl standing by the cliffs long before she’s close enough to recognise it’s Maire, tousled black hair and one of her heavy wool cardigans and she’s staring out at the foamwhite rollers, something dark in her right hand and Anne stops, lowers the bike’s kickstand and walks the last ten or twenty yards. But if Maire hears her, she makes no sign that she’s heard, stands very still, watching the uneasy, storm-scarred sea.

  ‘Maire?’ Anne calls out, ‘Hello. I didn’t expect to find you out here,’ and the girl turns slowly, moves stiff and slow like someone half asleep and Anne thinks that maybe she’s been crying, the red around her eyes, wet green eyes and bruisedark circles underneath like she hasn’t slept in awhile. ‘I want to ask you a question, about one of the photographs. I have it with...’

  And then Anne can see exactly what she’s holding, the small, black handgun, and Maire smiles for her.

  ‘Good morning, Dr Campbell.’

  A moment before she can reply, two heartbeats before she can even look away from the revolver, the sun dull off its stubby chrome barrel, and ‘Good morning, Maire,’ she finally says. Her mouth is dry and the words come out small and flat.

  ‘Did ye sleep well, then?’ the girl asks and Anne nods her head and Maire turns back towards the ledge, back towards the sea. ‘I was afraid you might have bad dreams,’ she says, ‘After lookin’ at those pictures.’

  ‘What is it, Maire, the disc in the photograph? You know what it is, don’t you?’ and Anne takes one step closer to the girl, one step closer to the point where the sod ends and the grey stone begins.

  ‘I didn’t kill him,’ the girl says. ‘I want ye to know that. I didn’t do it, and neither did Billy.’ Her finger tight and trembling around the trigger now and Anne is only a few feet away, only two or three more steps between them and ‘It’s bad enough, what we’ve done. But it wasn’t murder.’

  ‘You’re going to have to tell me what you’re talking about,’ Anne says, afraid to move, afraid to stand still, and the girl turns towards her again.

  ‘You weren’t meant to see the pictures, Dr Campbell. I was supposed to burn them. After we’d done with the tracks, we were supposed to burn everything.’

  Fresh tears from the girl’s bright eyes and Anne can see where she’s chewed her lower lip raw, fresh blood on her pale chin and Anne takes another step towards her.

  ‘Why were you supposed to burn the pictures? Did Morris tell you to burn the pictures, Maire?’

  A blank, puzzled expression on the girl’s face then, her ragged smile gone for a moment before she shakes her head, rubs the barrel of the gun rough against her corduroy pants. And then she says something that Anne doesn’t understand, something that sounds like ‘Theena dow’an,’ and ‘I don’t know Irish,’ Anne says, pleading now, wanting to understand and she can see the hurt and anger in Maire’s eyes, the bottomless guilt growing there like a cancer. The girl raises the revolver and sets the barrel against her right temple.

  ‘Oh God, please Maire,’ and the girl says it again, ‘Theena dow’an,’ and she turns back towards the sea at the same instant she squeezes the trigger and the sound the gun makes is the sound from Anne Campbell’s nightmare, the sound of the sky ripping itself apart, the sound of the waves breaking against the shore.

  ‘In the west there is still a tradition of the Fomorii who dwelt in Ireland before the arrival of the Gael. They are perhaps the most feared of all the water fairies and are sometimes known as the Daoine Domhain, the Deep Ones, though they are rarely spoken of aloud.’

  - Lady Wilde, Ancient Legends of Ireland (1888)

  Caitlín R. Kiernan lives in Birmingham, Alabama. Trained as a palaeontologist, she didn’t begin writing fiction until 1992. Since then, her short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies, including Dark Terrors 2 and 3, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror Eleventh Annual Collection, and The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Volume Nine and Ten. Her debut novel,Silk,received both The International Horror Guild and Barnes & Noble Maiden Voyage Awards for best first novel of 1998. More recently, two collections of her short fiction have been released - Tales of Pain and Wonder from Gauntlet Press, andFrom Weird and Distant Shores from Michael Matthews Press. ‘“Valentia” was written in July 1999,’ the author reveals, ‘immediately after a visit to the American Museum of Natural History to examine mosasaur fossils (mosasaurs are a group of large marine lizards which became extinct about sixty-five million years ago), and is the sort of story that usually results when I’m in the process of “shifting gears” from my palaeontological studies to fiction writing. The Devonian tetrapod tracks described in the story are real, discovered at Valentia Island in 1992 by the Swiss geologist Ivan Stossel. However, in “Valentia” I have relocated them to Culloo. As of this writing, the Geological Survey of Ireland is in the process of acquiring the actual site so that its fossils may be preserved and protected from looters.’

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  * * * *

  Barking Sands

  RICHARD CHRISTIAN MATHESON

  On vacation.

  Hawaii. Where fat, brown people treat flowers like Jesus.

  All us.

  Mommy. Daddy. Grampa Don.

  My brother who came out of Mommy with less brain than a cat. He smiles at everything. I call him Kitty. Daddy thinks it’s funny. Kitty can only open his mouth and stare and shake. Like there’s a maraca inside him.

  We rented a Toyota Tercel.

  ‘Cheapest car worth dog-fuck.’ That’s Grampa Don talking. Mommy hates it when he says dirty stuff. But he’s always drinking beer. Loses track of where his tongue is pointing and just says it. Grampa Don’s always making trouble.

  We’re on our way to Barking Sands.

  It’s a beach on the southern tip of Kauai. The sand barks there. Big, bald-headed dunes of it chirping and growling like someone is poking it while it sleeps. The wind does it; like a ventriloquist using the grains of sand as its dummy. It’s a very sacred place. They say the ancient tribes are still living on the cliffs way above Barking Sands. I say that inside the Tercel while it bounces over the muddy road. The mud is red and splashes the car so it looks like it has scrapes that are bleeding. Like when Kitty falls down and cries and I just stand and watch him and hope he bleeds to death.

  ‘There’s no tribes still living,’ says Mommy, eating an ice cream cone I couldn’t finish, making sure it doesn’t drip on the upholstery.

  Her tongue moves around it like a red bus going up a twisty road. Daddy breathes in the air and says it hasn’t smelled like this in Los Angeles since cave men went to work in three-piece fur suits.

  Grampa Don spits out the window, and the car hops and rocks, having a spaz attack. The Kauai roads feel like the moon. There’s no one going out to Barking Sands but us. It’s getting late and the road
is lonely.

  It is the moon. Just on earth.

  The sky will be dead soon. I feel a little afraid but for no reason.

  Kitty looks at me and smiles but sees my face and starts to cry. If I had a knife I’d slash his throat. I imagine his dead body lying face-up, in the casket, suddenly awake. Screaming and trying to get out but making no sound. Muted by the birth defect that gave him a busted speaker. I feel bad for him down there, trapped forever under the earth, stuck in his box, screaming. But he’ll never do anything with his life anyway.

  Maybe it’s better to know where he is.

  Grampa Don just cut one and all four windows are cranked down. A sweet and sour old-man cloud is sucked out. The blue ocean is starting to seem like a choking face. We’re far from the hotel where we’re staying and I hate Hawaii. Being here with them.

  Last night we went to a Luau and I stared at the pig on the long table. He looked alive. But his eyes didn’t move and as I tried to figure out what he was thinking, a big smiling man, in a white apron, cut into the pig with a shiny knife and slid a section of the pig’s body right out, like one of those wooden ball puzzles that’s made of different sections of wood.

  He dropped it on my plate and the pig kept staring forward, unable to fight back. The man motioned me to move on with his bloody knife, and began to cut the pig into more pieces, erasing him.

  I looked down at the piece of the pig and felt like throwing up.

  Later I brought the piece back and tried to put it where it had been on his body; reattaching his flesh. But by then, he was just bones and a head. The eyes were still facing forward and I pet him a little, seeing my own value as no higher than his, and hating people for what they’d done to him.

  Then, Daddy came and dragged me through a bunch of tourists with greasy mouths, lining up to watch the torches and grass skirts. I looked back to see the pig being taken away, its bones passing above the crowd, on a tray, like some terrible crown.

  ‘Barking Sands.’ Mommy is pointing.

  Grampa Don is already out of the car and looking for a place to dump garbage. But there isn’t one and he tosses it on the ground saying it will just rot and become a hotel lobby, over time, with enough rain and ‘fucking tourist money’.

  He says all the dinosaur bones grew into roads and rental cars after millions of years. He’s had four cans of beer since we left the Coco Palms Hotel, where we’re staying, and he’s unzipped and hosing down a tree-trunk.

  His ancient nozzle sprays Corona on everything like some poison Daddy uses back in Los Angeles, to make snails’ heads explode.

  Kitty points to a sign that says this is a holy burial ground. He likes words; their shape, worming together to form meaning he doesn’t understand. Grampa reads the sign and keeps sprinkling snail napalm like a punctured can.

  ‘This place is too fucking humid.’ Grampa Don is wiping his head, like those guys at the 76 station chiselling bugs off the windshield.

  Daddy takes pictures even though the sign says no photography ‘cause it’s a holy place and I guess that’s bad. Daddy doesn’t care. Mommy smiles and poses under the big cliffs that go up and up and up. Her dress looks like it belongs in a vase. Kitty is crawling on the sand, chasing our footprints like a rabid bloodhound that needs to be shot in the head. I wish I could get away from them all.

  It’s very windy and sand blows, sticking us with pins you can’t see. I cover my eyes and we all lean into the wind. Mommy says we look like arctic explorers going up a snow slope. She wants a happy family. But we aren’t.

  I hate these trips. Being together.

  Grampa Don takes Kitty’s hand. Daddy takes Mommy’s. A storm fills the sky with black sponges.

  Grampa Don lags behind and we all get to the Toyota. It’s starting to rain. Daddy starts the car and the mud is turning into dirty, orange glue that grabs our wheels. They spin.

  ‘Zzzzzzzzzzzz.’ Kitty sounds like a trapped tyre.

  The car is a mad dog chained to a tree. Thunder shakes us. Lightning cuts up the sky. Something is wrong. The sky is not happy or pretty any more. The air smells like dead things and angry wind makes all the plants and flowers look like they’re bending over to get sick.

  There is warm fog. I can’t see the ocean any more. It crashes, attacking.

  ‘What’s the fuckin’ problem?’ yells Grampa Don.

  Mommy tells him not to talk like that and he curses at her. Daddy tells him to leave her alone. They start to argue.

  I hate their guts.

  Grampa Don rolls down his window to look at the tyres. I notice something moving through the high sugarcane. He says he hates it here and yells at the mud and the sky and the big sand dunes that bark like wild dogs surrounding helpless animals.

  The car tries harder to move. Grampa Don is getting all wet. Mommy tells him to close the window and suddenly he makes a weird noise. An arrow with red feathers is sticking through his neck, sideways. He turns and I see the sharp tip dripping blood on his tanktop. There is mud and blood on his face. He can’t breathe. There are wet bubbles in his neck.

  Mommy screams.

  I see feathers moving through sugarcane. Blue ones. Yellow ones. I see brown skin. Hands, eyes.

  Grampa Don tries to scream and blood comes out of his mouth and sprays on everything. Kitty thinks Grampa Don is being funny and laughs, but makes no sound. Daddy screams at him to shut up and Kitty starts to cry. His face turns bright red.

  Feathers.

  We did something wrong. Something bad.

  I am scared as they hide in the sugarcane. I know I’ll be dead in another minute. I know I can’t escape in this mud and rain. I look at my family. Mommy tries to help Grampa Don and Daddy keeps flooring the gas, too stupid to realise it doesn’t help. I say nothing as they ask me to help. I do nothing.

  I hate them.

  An old man and two people who just argue all the time. A retard brother someone should’ve cut into little pieces a long time ago.

  The car is stuck. No matter what Daddy does. More arrows break the glass. We are bloody. We are dying. Rain is pounding harder, pinning us to the mud, and the tyres bury us deeper, spinning.

  Digging us a grave.

  As my family screams, I close my eyes and listen to the sand.

  Richard Christian Matheson lives in Malibu, California, and he is the son of veteran science fiction writer Richard Matheson. A novelist, short story writer and screenwriter/producer, he has scripted and executive produced more than five hundred episodes of prime-time network TV and was the youngest writer ever put under contract by Universal Studios. His critically acclaimed debut novel Created By was published in 1993, and his short, sharp fiction has been collected in Scars and Other Distinguishing Marksand, more recently,Dystopia,published by Gauntlet Press. His 35mm short film, Arousal, which he wrote and directed from his own story, was previewed at the 2000 World Horror Convention in Denver, Colorado, and he has recently scripted a four-hour mini-series based on Dean Koontz’s bestseller Sole Survivor. About his story in this volume, Matheson says: ‘There are places untied from time. Ghostly cities, ancient cathedrals. Places in serene recess, where centuries drift unnoticed. And there are places more precious; rarest of all. Places that bear no sign of man’s signature, existing within their own exquisite privacy. When I first saw “Barking Sands” beach I was overcome by its beauty: endless, unearthly dunes, misted by miles of primordial waves; somehow dreamlike. It was said the dunes barked; an anomaly of wind which allowed voice. I found it spiritual, oddly troubling. I walked the vastness, listening carefully, imagining what the sand might be saying; if it were invitation or warning. As with all things seductive, there were two answers.’

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  * * * *

  Everything, in All the Wrong Order

  CHAZ BRENCHLEY

  There’s this disease I heard about, drinking with medics one time, where things get so turned around inside that you end up vomiting your own shit.

  * * * *
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  Think about that, and bear with me. It’s a metaphor, okay? What actually happened was this: