The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New Horror

by Stephen Jones

  Danny got ice creams for himself and Gran, and hurried back. The bald man had gone, so Danny sat in the vacant place.

  “Who was that man, Gran?” he asked.

  “Which man?”

  “The one who had his arm around Grandad.”

  “Danny, what do you mean? I’m sure he wasn’t doing anything of the kind.”

  “He was,” Danny insisted. “I think he wanted Grandad to go with him.”

  Gran, hearing the conviction in his voice, leaned forward and turned to look at him.

  “This is a funny place, isn’t it?” Danny continued.

  “Todley Bay? Don’t you like it here?”

  “Not as much as Brighton.”

  “I think it’s very nice.”

  “There’s no kids.”

  Gran smiled. “There must be some.”

  “I can’t see any.”

  Gran pushed her glasses up her nose and looked around. “Not here, at the moment, perhaps,” she conceded, “but on the beach . . .”

  Danny swallowed the last of his ice cream and wiped his mouth. “No. It’s all old people, everywhere.”

  “You’re exaggerating. What about that girl who’s staying at our hotel. She’s about your age. Why don’t you try to get to know her?”

  “She’s sick. I bet she never leaves the hotel.”

  “Um,” Gran agreed thoughtfully, “she doesn’t look well. I expect she’s convalescing.”

  “I think she’s dying,” Danny said, matter-of-factly.

  “Danny!” Gran said loudly, causing Grandad to twitch out of his doze, “I’m sure that’s not true. What has got into you?”

  “What’s the trouble?” Grandad demanded. “What’s got into who?”

  “Danny, Harry. I don’t think he’s enjoying himself. He’s in a very strange mood.”

  “Danny?” said Grandad, looking at his grandson as though he were a total stranger.

  The grim look returned to Gran’s face. She glanced at her watch. “Good heavens, look at the time. We’d better start back for the evening meal,” she said, rising from her seat. Grandad rose up with her, like a Siamese twin joined to her at the shoulder.

  Danny was surprised how easy it was to get lost in the hotel. The corridors and public rooms were decorated uniformly throughout, which made it hard to get your bearings, but even so, it didn’t explain why he lost his way quite so often. He kept finding himself on the wrong floor! He’d carefully count the turns in the flights of stairs, so he was sure he knew exactly where he was, only to discover he was one, or even two, floors out.

  He noticed quite a few of the old people wandering around in even deeper bafflement than usual from time to time, which made him feel better, because it suggested he wasn’t the only one experiencing this peculiar disorientation.

  A couple of times Danny bumped into Kelvin, the nurse with the thin pencil moustache, who told him how to get to where he wanted to go. He wasn’t exactly unfriendly, but he must have been a very busy man, because he hardly stopped long enough to give the necessary directions before he blustered off again.

  On the third night of the holiday, after leaving his grandparents in the TV Lounge, Danny searched about down wrong corridors for ten minutes before he found his room. He complimented himself – he was getting better. The night before it had taken twice that long to get his bearings.

  As he was putting on his pyjamas, he heard the big box being shoved along the jetty. A shining mist that had crawled up off the sea with the onset of darkness had vanished when he looked out of the window. The air was clear, and he could see the man had nearly got the box to the end of the jetty. Danny was very interested to see what would happen next, because he knew there were two steps up from the jetty to the promenade and the street beyond, and he couldn’t see how one man could possibly get the box up them without help.

  He got into bed and pretended to be asleep when Gran came, so she only stayed a moment. (He felt bad about it, but he had become fed-up with her company that evening, because she was wearing herself out fussing over Grandad, who was definitely going ga-ga. They were both getting visibly worse daily. A lot of the time it was a pain being with them.)

  When Gran had gone, Danny got up again and looked out the window. The box was about a foot from the steps, and the man had gone. He watched for a while, but nothing happened, so he slid back between the sheets, feeling let-down and disappointed, and fell asleep. Later, something woke him up. Noises, coming from the direction of the jetty. Different noises! He trotted to the window and looked out.

  The man was back. He had set a lantern on the edge of the top step, and had placed a long metal tube or roller, four or five inches in diameter, at the base of the box, on the side closest to the steps. He was lifting the box with a jack.

  When it was the right height he kicked the roller under it on one side, let the box drop, then went around to the far side to repeat the process. When the roller was under the full length of the leading edge of the box, he went behind it and began to push. After a struggle, it moved a short distance towards the steps, and the side of the box above the roller rose a little higher. After giving three huge shoves the man got another, thicker roller from somewhere and laid it in front of the first one he had positioned. Then he went behind the box, and pushed and pushed.

  The front edge of the thing was soon higher than the bottom step and, in twenty minutes, after the man had put more rollers in place and done a lot more heaving, it was hovering a good distance above and beyond the top of the second. Then the man hit a problem. Because it was inclined at an angle, he was finding it increasingly difficult to move the box. He was having to push it up, as well as forward. He seemed to give up then, and went and sat on the top step and stared down at the box.

  Danny watched the slumped figure for a while until he got bored. He thought the man might have gone to sleep. He was just about ready to return to bed when he saw movements on the beach below him. The tide was almost in, and a man was walking off the narrow strip of sand, diagonally out into the sea.

  The small, thin, stooping figure, dressed in dark clothes, was just visible against the inky water, moving slowly and regularly, as though setting out for a stroll on the ocean bed. When the sea was in up to his waist he stopped, sank back into the water and disappeared from sight. Danny thought – no, he knew – the person, whoever he was, had stretched out on the sand, like the woman in the green costume he had seen the day before.

  There were a few deckchairs left out on the beach, Danny noticed, spread about near where the now presumably drowning man had been when he’d first sighted him. To his amazement he could see shapes that could only be people, sprawling in some of the chairs. Danny peered at his watch. It was almost midnight – it had been dark for almost two hours!

  They’re moon-bathing, he thought, and smiled uneasily in the dark, aware that the people didn’t look at all funny.

  As he looked back out the window he saw something scuttle up out of the sea, across the beach, in among the parked deckchairs. It moved like a spider. It clung close to the sand, had no definite shape, and at first Danny thought it was dead seaweed, broken loose from its roots, washed ashore, dried in the sun, and blowing in the wind. Until he realized there was no wind to speak of, certainly not enough to set in motion anything more substantial than a scrap of paper.

  What he could see was moving of its own volition, and soon demonstrated that it had considerable strength! A section of its edge blended with the outline of one of the occupied chairs, which lifted and tumbled over on its side, tipping the person seated on it onto the sand. The figure lay motionless for as long as it took the mobile shape to dart around and attach itself to an outstretched arm, the part of the body closest to the sea. The body twitched once, then slid smoothly to the tide line and into the waves beyond, where it, and the thing pulling it, sank out of sight. Then, for a time, nothing moved on the beach that Danny could see, though his eyes were alert for the slightest motion.


  It was a sound from the end of the jetty that grabbed his attention next – a loud grunt of pain or effort, or both. He turned just in time to see the bear-like man heave the box almost into the air and up onto the edge of the promenade. The action seemed to have spent the last of his energy. He flopped around picking up the rollers and tucking them under his arm like a man at the last extreme of exhaustion, then staggered off towards the harbour. Danny watched him shrink away into the darkness, then realized he was stiff with standing still, and crawled into bed.

  He fell asleep wondering what the man, who was awake most nights, did in the daytime.

  It was very hot next day. So much so that Gran and Grandad sat on the beach for the first time. They couldn’t walk far in the sand, because of Gran’s feet, so Danny put up deckchairs for them at the bottom of the steps that led to the promenade. He sat with them for a while, watching the beach fill with elderly holidaymakers then, for something to say, because the old pair were not inclined to talk in the heat, he mentioned that he had seen people on the sands late at night.

  “I expect they were workmen tidying up all the litter,” Gran said.

  “The tide does that,” Danny said, “when it goes in and out. No, they were sitting in chairs, like we are, or walking into the sea.”

  “Danny, you were dreaming. They’d have caught their deaths of cold.”

  Danny wanted to say he thought they were dead, or looked it, but knew that Gran would say he was talking nonsense and get cross with him.

  Even so, he couldn’t help saying, “I wish we had gone to Brighton. This place is weird.”

  “I think it’s very pleasant,” Gran said, “and restful. There’s none of the noise and fuss you get at so many holiday places nowadays. And people are so nice and polite.”

  “You didn’t like those men who tried to walk off with Grandad,” Danny observed.

  “You were probably wrong about them. Perhaps they thought Grandad was lost and they were taking him to a policeman.”

  Danny didn’t answer, because he had just spotted, not far away along the beach, one of the deckchairs he had seen someone slumped in last night. He knew it was the same one, because it was in exactly the same position in relation to a stack of chairs next to it as it had been when he had seen it from his bedroom window.

  It was facing away from him but he could tell it was occupied because the canvas seat was bulging down and back. He was about to go and take a look at it and its occupant when something made him change his mind. There was a cloud of flies swarming above the chair, dozens of them, big black ones, he thought he could almost hear them buzzing. No one else had set up their deckchairs for a good distance all around that particular one, Danny noticed.

  “Look at all those flies, Gran,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Over there – look.” He pointed. “Above that chair.”

  “I can’t see flies, Danny, if they land on me. My eyes aren’t good enough. I can only just see the chair.”

  For some reason this remark made Danny rather anxious. He felt suddenly isolated and vulnerable. Looking around he discovered he was, as far as he could see, the only child on the beach.

  He shut his eyes then, and pretended to sunbathe, but he couldn’t settle. His mind was swirling with vague apprehensions.

  For the first time all week he found he was missing his parents. At first, he had been relieved to get away from them. They had been so grumpy and depressing recently, though they had continued to treat him as kindly as they had always done. Nevertheless, life at home had been different since his father had received the letter telling him his job would no longer exist in ten weeks, and his parents had taken to endless grinding arguments about money. Danny heard them late at night in the room below his, their voices rasping on like two blunt saws taking turns to cut through a particularly thick, hard log.

  They were worried about Gran and Grandad too, and Danny could understand why now. He realized that the whole family had problems. He had problems! Suddenly he wanted to talk to his parents very badly, but he knew he wouldn’t see them until the end of the week.

  After half-an-hour he went and got some drinks. Grandad insisted on coming with him, somewhat to Danny’s relief. He tried not to listen to Grandad’s talk, because he seemed to think Danny was someone he had worked with years ago in Canada. That was unnerving, but he felt glad he was not walking alone.

  The way to the cafe took them past the huge, brass-bound box parked on the promenade. Even in bright sunlight it looked sinister Danny thought, though other passers-by seemed unawed by it. The wood had dried out a lot, and was beginning to crack, and the mossy weed clinging to it had turned grey and ash-like. A heat-haze shimmered over the tarpaulin.

  There was no sign of the great gull but, when Danny looked up into the sky, he saw, very high up, a black dot that was growing larger as it descended fast towards the ground. Danny grabbed Grandad’s hand to hurry him along. He had a vision of what the bird could do with its beak if it hit someone after descending at that speed from that height.

  He made sure, when they returned to Gran with their drinks, they went by a roundabout way along the beach, keeping well clear of the box. The route took them past the deckchair that had been shrouded with flies. It was empty now. Danny got the impression that a small group of youngish men in overalls, moving down the beach towards the sea, were carrying something they had lifted from the chair but, in the confusion of people, it was hard to be sure. He went quite near the chair and saw there were still a few flies on duty there, hovering over a wet, red-brown stain on the canvas seat.

  It seemed to be a bad day for insects. Early in the afternoon millions of tiny silver and brown flies with thin bodies and long legs appeared from nowhere on the beach. They hopped rather than flew, and got all over Danny’s bare legs and arms. They were strangely dry and weightless, like the congregations of corpses that gather on window ledges in empty houses in the summer, and seemed almost without substance. They didn’t bite or sting. They were just disgusting. Danny had soon had enough of them. He asked Gran if he could go for a boat trip around the bay.

  “You said I could, and if I don’t go soon, the holiday will be over,” he pleaded.

  “There’s still three more whole days,” Gran said, but she agreed he could do as he had asked. They left their beach-bag and Danny’s towels on their chairs because Gran said she was sure there were no thieves about, and the three of them made their way to the harbour.

  One of the two boats that did trips was out beyond the headland, just visible in the distance, and the second was almost full and ready to go. It was a big, wide boat that Gran declared quite safe, so she gave Danny some money and told him to get on board. He found a seat at the front and waved at his grandparents with his handkerchief for a joke. Gran waved back, and Grandad copied her movements exactly, a sight that made Danny laugh aloud.

  A teenage boy in sun-bleached denim jumped onto the boat and began collecting money and handing out tickets, then a man stepped quickly down from the harbour, started the engine, and grasped hold of the wheel.

  It was the bear-like man who Danny had seen moving the box. There was no mistaking his rolling movements, and he was wearing the same clothes as he had been the night before. Danny could tell by the shape of him. The only difference was that at night the man wore a cap and now had nothing on his bald head. Danny got a good look at his face, and not for the first time. He was sure the man had been sitting next to Grandad the day before, with his arm around the back of Grandad’s chair and his fingers on the old man’s shoulder.

  Danny jumped up to get off the boat just as, with a grinding growl of the engine that echoed off the hill behind the town, it cut away from the harbour wall. The man glanced sharply at him and the teenager asked him to get back in his seat. Danny did so at once, and tried to make himself small and inconspicuous.

  The man, at the front of the boat, was facing away from Danny. He made an announcement about
safety procedures as he steered the vessel out through the maze of moored pleasure-craft to the harbour mouth, then handed the wheel over to his young mate when they reached the open sea. He turned around, sat down, and lit a little cigar. As he blew out smoke he raised his head and glanced quickly around at his passengers. When he saw Danny, he took another sharp drag at his cigar and seemed to shake his head slightly. The gesture had no clear meaning that Danny could interpret, but it frightened him because he felt he had been singled out, perhaps even recognized.

  He remembered when he had been watching the man pushing the box along the jetty he had got the impression that the fellow had looked back up at him on a number of occasions, though there was no chance he could really have seen a small boy standing some considerable distance away in the dark, half-hidden behind a curtain. Unless he had remarkable eyesight! He certainly had remarkable eyes, which stared through Danny as though they were focused on a point a million miles behind his head.

  Danny thought of the huge black seagull then, that had been so high in the sky above the box when he had passed close to it with Grandad just a couple of hours earlier. The bird must have good eyesight too – it had dropped down at once when it had seen him approach, or so it had appeared to Danny.

  Why? Did it think he was going to do some harm to the box, that it seemed to be guarding? Danny couldn’t believe that. He hadn’t the means or strength to damage it, even if, for some crazy reason, he’d had the inclination to do so. He wasn’t bothered about the box – he wanted nothing to do with it, as he had told the bird when he had come close to it on the jetty two days ago. At the time it he had felt foolish talking to a seagull, but not so now. He just wished he had said more. He was afraid he had not made himself understood.

  When, after a quarter of an hour, the boat turned its prow into the Bay again for the return trip, Danny was glad the ride was half over. He’d been too confused and anxious to enjoy himself and imagined he was seasick, his stomach felt so queasy. He was very glad when the man, whose hard, unfriendly gaze had returned to him every few minutes, got up to take over the wheel again as they approached the harbour.