All of these men and their actions. Lies and blood and betrayals, links in the chain leading, finally, to this moment, to that ninth wave, mightier than the last, all in flame, and Meredith swallowed a mouthful of sea water and struggled to keep her head above the surface.
“Hurry, child!” her mother’s ghost shouted from the pier. “They are rising,” and Meredith Dandridge began to pray then that she would fail, would surrender in another moment or two and let the deep have her. Imagined sinking down and down for all eternity, pressure to crush her flat and numb, to crush her so small that nothing and no one would ever have any need to harm her again.
Something sharp as steel swiped across her ankle, slicing her skin, and her blood mingled with the sea.
And the next stroke drove her fingers into the mud and pebbles at the edge of the island, and she dragged herself quickly from the pool, from the water and the mire, and looked back the way she’d come. There were no demons in the water, and her mother’s ghost wasn’t watching from the pier. But her father was, Machen Dandridge and his terrible black book, his eyes upturned and arms outstretched to an indifferent Heaven; she cursed him for the last time and ignored the blood oozing from the ugly gash in her right foot.
“This is where I stand,” she said, getting to her feet and turning towards the small cave at the center of the island, her legs as weak and unsteady as a newborn foal’s. “At the bottom gate, and I hold the key to the abyss.”
The yellow-green light was almost blinding and soon the pool would begin to boil.
“The ebony key to the first day and the last, the key to the moment when the stars wink out one by one and the sea heaves its rotting belly at the empty, sagging sky. The blazing key that even angels fear to keep.”
For an instant, there was no cave, and no pool, and no cavern beneath a resentful, wicked house. Only the fire, pouring from the cave that was no longer there, to swallow her whole, only the voices of the void, and Meredith Dandridge made her fear a shield and a lance, and held the line.
And in the days and weeks that followed, sometimes Machen Dandridge came down the stairs to stand on the pier and gaze across the pool to the place where the thing that had been his daughter nestled in the shadows, in the hollows between the stones. And every day the sea gave her more of its armour, gilding her frail human skin with the limey shells and stinging tentacles that other creatures had spent countless cycles of Creation refining from the rawest matter of life, the needle teeth, the scales and poisonous barbs. Where his wife and son had failed, his daughter crouched triumphant as any martyr, and sometimes, late at night, alone with the sound of the surf pounding against the edge of the continent, he sometimes thought of setting fire to the house and letting it burn down around him.
He read the newspapers.
He watched the stars for signs and portents.
When the moon was bright, the women still came to dance beside the sea, but he’d begun to believe they were only bad memories from some time before and so he rarely paid them any heed.
When the weather was good, he climbed the hills behind the house and sat at the grave of his dead wife and whispered to her, telling her how proud he was of Meredith, reciting snatches of half-remembered poetry, telling her the world would come very close to the brink because of what he’d done, because of his blind pride, but, in the end, it would survive because of what their daughter had done and would do for ages yet.
On a long rainy afternoon in May, he opened the attic door and killed what he found there with an axe and his old Colt revolver. He buried it beside his wife, but left nothing to mark the grave.
He wrote long letters to men he’d once known in England and New York and Rio de Janeiro, but there were never any replies.
And time rolled on, neither malign nor beneficent, settling across the universe like the grey caul of dust settling thick upon the relics he’d brought back from India and Iran and the Sudan a quarter of a century before. The birth and death of stars, light reaching his aging eyes after a billion years racing across the vacuum, and sometimes he spent the days gathering fossils from the cliffs and arranging them in precise geometric patterns in the tall grass around the house. He left lines of salt and drew elaborate runes, the meanings of which he’d long since forgotten.
His daughter spoke to him only in his dreams, or hers, no way to ever be sure which was which, and her voice grew stronger and more terrible as the years rushed past. In the end, she was a maelstrom to swallow his withered soul, to rock him to sleep one last time, to show him the way across.
And the house by the sea, weathered and weary and insane, kept its secrets.
GLEN HIRSHBERG IS THE author of a novel, The Snowman’s Children, and the International Horror Guild Award-winning collection of ghost stories, The Two Sams, both published by Carroll & Graf in the United States.
His short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies, including The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror and The Years Best Fantasy and Horror series, Dark Terrors 6: The Gollancz Book of Horror, Trampoline: An Anthology and The Dark: New Ghost Stories.
He is currently completing a new novel and a second set of ghost stories.
Hirshberg returned to Southern California almost a decade ago, but has not written about it until this story, as he reveals: “Too little of the man-made landscape of this region encourages the sort of aesthetic experience Ramsey Campbell, for one, has always believed crucial to the creation of a satisfying ghostly tale, unless your nearest Banana Republic gets you good and crawly.
“But a few years ago, my wife and I stumbled onto what was left of the old pier near downtown Long Beach and discovered the last open establishment there. ‘Flowers’ is an homage to the people we saw and met, and to that now-defunct place, which really was a place, at the very least.”
Mechanical constructions designed for pleasure have a special melancholy when they are idle. Especially merry-go-rounds.
—Wright Morris
ASH CAME IN LATE, on the 10:30 train. I was sure Rebecca would stay home and sleep, but instead she got a sitter for our infant daughter, let her dark hair down for what seemed the first time in months, and emerged from our tiny bathroom in the jeans she hadn’t been able to wear since her cesarean.
“My CD,” she said happily, handing me the New York Dolls disc she’d once howled along with every night while we did the dishes, and which I hadn’t even seen for over a year. Then she stood in front of me and bobbed on the clunky black shoes I always loved to see her in, not because they were sexy but because of their bulk. Those shoes, it seemed to me, could hold even Rebecca to the ground.
So all the way across the San Fernando Valley we played the Dolls, and she didn’t howl anymore, but she rocked side-to-side in her seat and mouthed the words while I snuck glances at her in the rearview mirror. The last time I could remember seeing her in this mood was on her thirty-first birthday, over a year ago, right before her mother died and the homeless person’s political action committee she’d been serving on collapsed in the wake of 9/11 as charitable donations got siphoned to New York and she finally decided to give up on the rest of the world long enough for us to try to have a child. I had thought maybe this Rebecca – arms twitching at her sides like folded wings, green eyes skimming the night for anything alive – had vanished for good.
As usual, even at that hour, traffic snarled where the 101 and the 110 and the 5 emptied together into downtown Los Angeles, so I ducked onto Hill Street, edging us through the surprising crowds of Chinese teens tossing pop-pops in the air and leaning against lampposts and chain-shuttered shop windows to smoke. Rebecca rolled down her window, and the car filled with burning smells: tobacco, firecracker filament, pork and fish. I thought she might try bumming a cigarette from a passing kid – though as far as I knew, she hadn’t smoked in years – but instead she leaned against the seatback and closed her eyes.
We were pulling into Union Station when she turned the volume down, caught me looking at her in t
he mirror, and said, “A flowered one.”
I grinned back, shook my head. “He’s a new man, remember? Official, responsible, full-time job. Brand new lakefront bungalow. He’ll be wearing grey pinstripes. From a suit he bought but hasn’t worn.”
We were both wrong. And of course, the funniest thing – the worst – was that even with all that green and purple paisley flashing off the front of this latest vest like scales on some spectacular tropical fish, I still didn’t see him until I’d driven ten yards past him.
“Hey, dude,” he said to both of us as he approached the car, then dropped his black duffel to the curb and stood quietly, leaning to the right the way he always did.
He’d shaved off the last of the tumbling dark brown curls which, even thinning, used to flop over both his eyes and made him look like a lhasa apso. Even more brightly than the new vest, the top of his head shone, practically winking white and red with the lights from passing cars. His shoulders, big from the boxing classes he took – for fitness, he’d never gotten in a ring and swore he never would – ballooned from either side of the vest. His jeans were black, and on his wrists were leather bracelets studded with silver spikes.
“Ash, you, urn,” I said, and then I was laughing. “You don’t look like a nurse.”
“Wait,” Rebecca said, and her hand snaked out the window and grabbed the side of Ash’s vest, right where the paisley met the black polyester backing. Then she popped her seatbelt open and leaned to look more closely. “Did you do this?”
Ash’s blush spread all the way up his head until he was red all over, and his tiny ferret-eyes blinked. It was as though Rebecca had spray-painted him.
“Do what?”
“What was this?” Rebecca said. “Was this a shirt?”
“What do you mean?”
“Look, El. Someone cut this shiny paisley part off . . . curtains, maybe? Something else, anyway. And they stitched it to the rest. See?” She held the edge of the vest out from Ash’s sides.
Ash’s blush deepened, but his smile came more easily than I remembered. “No wonder it cost a dollar.”
Rebecca burst out laughing, and I laughed, too. “Been way too long, Ash,” I said.
Still leaning, as though he were standing in some invisible rowboat in a current, Ash folded himself into our Metro’s tiny back seat. “Good to be here, Elliot.” He pronounced it “El-yut”, just as he had when we were twelve.
“You get all dolled up for us?” I said, nodding in the mirror at the vest, and to my surprise, Ash blushed again and looked at the floor.
“I’ve been going out a lot,” he said.
Both he and Rebecca left their windows open as I spun the car out of the lot and, without asking, turned south. With Chinatown behind us, the street corners emptied. I couldn’t see the smog, but I could taste it, a sweet tang in the air that shouldn’t have been there and prickled the lungs like nicotine and had a similar sort of narcotic, addictive effect, because you just kept gulping it. Of course, that was partially because there wasn’t enough oxygen in it.
“Where are you going?” Rebecca asked as we drifted down the white and nameless warehouses that line both sides of Alameda Street and house the city’s other industries, whatever they are.
“Don’t know,” I said. “Just figured, between that vest and your mood, home wasn’t an option.”
Rebecca twisted her head around to look at Ash. “Where’s all this out you’ve been going?”
“Meditation classes, for one,” Ash said, effectively choking Rebecca to silence. She’d forgotten about Ash’s professed Zen conversion, or discovery, or whatever it was. He’d told us about it in a particularly cryptic phone call that had struck both of us as dispassionate even for Ash. Yet another 9/11 by-product, we both thought at the time, but now I actually suspected not. Even back in our Berkeley days, Ash’s sense of right and just behavior had been more . . . inward, somehow, than Rebecca’s.
Also less ferocious – he hadn’t actually believed he could affect change, or maybe wasn’t as interested, and was therefore less perpetually disappointed. And now, as we floated between late-night trucks down the dark toward the freeways, a series of quick, sweet feelings lit up inside me like roman candles. I was remembering Friday nights lost in Oakland, gliding through streets emptier and darker than this in Ash’s beat-up green B-210, singing “Shoplifters of the World,” spending no money except on gas and double-doubles from In-N-Out. We always got them animal style even though Rebecca hated the grilled onions, because it never got old knowing the secret menu, declaring it to cashiers like a password.
“I’ve been going to music, too. Lots of clubs. My friends Rubina and Liz—”
“Long Beach,” Rebecca said over him, and I hit the brakes and paused, right on the lip of the onramp to the 10. Whether out of perceptiveness or meditation training or typical Ashy patience, our friend in the back went quiet and waited.
“Rebecca,” I said carefully, after a long breath. She’d been taking us to her sister’s almost every weekend since her mother died. She’d been going during the week, too, of late, and even more than she told me, I suspected. “Don’tyouwantto getAsh a Pink’s? Show him that ant at the Museum of Jurassic Tech? Take him bowling at the Starlight? Show him the Ashy parts of town?”
“Starlight’s gone,” Rebecca said, as though she were talking about her mother.
“Oh, yeah. Forgot.”
Abruptly, she brightened again. “Not my sister’s, El-yut. I have a plan. A place in mind. Somewhere our vested nurse-boy back there would appreciate. You, too.” Then she punched play on the CD-player. Discussion over. Off we went.
All the way down the 110, then the 405, Rebecca alternately shook to the music and prodded Ash with questions, and he answered in his familiar monotone, which always made him sound at ease, not bored, no matter whatjob he’d just left or new woman he’d found and taken meditating or clubbing or drifting and then gotten dumped – gently – by. Ash had been to more weddings of more ex-girlfriends than anyone I’d ever met.
But tonight, he talked about his supervisor at the hospital, whose name apparently really was Ms Paste. “She’s kind of this nurse-artist,” he said. “Amazing. Hard to explain. She slides an I.V. into a vein and steps back, and it’s perfect, every time, patient never even feels it. Wipes butts like she’s arranging flowers.”
Rebecca laughed, while Ash sat in the back with that grin on his face. How can someone so completely adrift in the world seem so satisfied with it?
We hit the 710, and immediately, the big rigs surrounded us. No matter what hour you drive it, there are always big rigs on that stretch of highway, lumbering back and forth between the 405 and the port, their beds saddled with giant wooden crates and steel containers newly gantried off incoming ships or headed for them, as though the whole city of Long Beach were constantly being put up or taken down like a circus at a fairground. As we approached the fork where the freeway splits – the right headed for the Queen Mary, the left for Shoreline Village and the whale watching tour boats and the too-white lighthouse perched on its perfectly mown hilltop like a Disneyland cast-off – I slowed and glanced at my wife. But Rebecca didn’t notice. She had slid down a little in her seat, and was watching the trucks with a blank expression on her pale face.
“Rebecca?” I said. “Where to?”
Stirring, she said, “Oh. The old pier. You know where that is? Downtown, downtown.”
Just in time, I veered left, passing by the aquarium and the rest of the tourist attractions to head for the city center. Not that there was much difference anymore, according to Rebecca. Scaffolding engulfed most of the older buildings, and as we hit downtown, the bright, familiar markings of malls everywhere dropped into place around us like flats on a movie set. There were Gap and TGIF storefronts, sidewalks so clean they seemed to have acquired a varnish, fountains with statues of seals spouting water through their whiskers. Only a few features distinguished Long Beach from the Third Street Promenade
or Old Town Pasadena now: a tapas bar; that eighty year-old used bookshop with the bowling alley-sized backroom that seems to exude dust through the wood and windows, even though the windows are painted shut; and, just visible down the last remaining dark blocks, a handful of no-tourist dives with windowless doors and green booths inside for the more traditionally minded sailors.
“Go straight through,” Rebecca said. “Turn right at the light. God, it’s been years.”
Given her tastes and the sheer number of days she’d spent with her mother, then with her sister, ever since we’d moved down to L.A., that seemed unlikely. But Ash’s patience was soothing, infectious, and I waited. And as we edged farther from the downtown lights, through sports cars and S.U.V.’s skimming the streets like incoming seagulls and squawking at each other over parking places, Rebecca shut off the music and turned to us. “My dad used to take us here,” she said.
I hit the brakes harder than I meant to and brought the car to a lurching stop at the road that fronted the ocean. For a few seconds, we hung there, the lights of Long Beach in the rearview mirror, the ocean seeping blackly out of the jumbled, overbuilt coast before us like oil from a listing tanker.
“Your dad,” I said.
“Left, Elliot. Down there. See?”
I turned left, slowly, though there was no traffic. Neither tourists nor sailors had any use for this road anymore, apparently. “It’s been a long time since you mentioned your dad.” In fact, I couldn’t remember the last time. She talked about her school commissioner mother – stable, stubborn, fiercely loyal, nasty Scrabble player. Also her recovered junkie sister. But her father . . .
“I’ve never heard you mention him,” Ash said, detached as ever, just noting.
The Mammoth Book of Terror Page 47
