The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 24 (Mammoth Books)

by Stephen Jones

  She disliked seeing Larkin there where before it had been her and Cade and Victoria, lost in that summer a dozen years ago now, happy times, when they’d finally been old enough to drive and they’d get lost on these back roads, looking for fallen-down houses and forgotten cemeteries, pulling off on abandoned sawmill lanes, listening to music like Elliot Smith and Andrew Bird – which had gotten them labelled fags at school. (And how can you and I be fags? We’re girls, Vic had said, like the insult was supposed to make some logical sense.) In a collapsing one-room schoolhouse their fingers skated above the rotting keys of an abandoned piano. Cade found a pile of handheld fans in one corner, the kind funeral homes gave out with their addresses printed on one side and a crowd of pink-cheeked cherubs on the other. How did such things get left behind and forgotten? they asked one another. In what must have been the cloakroom, someone had started a fire at one point, for the wall was scorched beneath the rows of little wooden pegs. The forest had crept right up to the window; Charlotte had tried to imagine what scene the schoolchildren had looked out on one hundred years ago, but the past seemed remote, inaccessible, even in a place that was trapped there.

  So long ago, and all of them grown up and gone away. She’d long known better than to come back here.

  It had started like this: the day was born sticky and hot, and she and Lee and Seth and Larkin had stumbled into it – and into Seth’s battered ’79 Impala – early, just past dawn, out of the motel rooms they’d taken in exhaustion after driving straight through several nights. The shabby motel was just east of Muscle Shoals and bade them by way of copy board to SUPPORT OUR TROOPS and added that YOU’LL NEVER BE LONELY IF YOU “FRIEND” JESUS. Larkin, at the wheel, snorted, “Fanatics,” but Seth said he got some good shots of it as they nosed out of the parking lot and back onto the highway. As noontime came and went and they crossed the state line from Alabama into Georgia, the day had not improved. Charlotte thought stifling summer days in the South often felt old and stale, as though someone had forgotten to freshen things up, to air the place out. You’d be outside and wish you could ask someone to open a window.

  Once they hit Bydell County, opening the windows had left them choking on clouds of red clay dust. Back in Oregon Seth had probably bought the Chevy for its white-trash hipster-chic aesthetic, and its lack of air-conditioning seemed negligible; here, as Lee pointed out, they faced a choice of asphyxiation by dust or dying of the heat like bugs trapped under glass. They had bounced along back roads, alternately coughing and sweltering, while the speakers crackled with the raw pickings of Mississippi bluesmen. Those guys – R.L. Burnside and T-Model Ford and Junior Kimbrough and all the rest on the Fat Possum label those were the real sounds of the South, Seth said, at least before Fat Possum sold out and started signing all those indie bands instead. Never mind that the Delta was hundreds of miles to the west of them; the whole region might as well have been a figment of Seth’s imagination, for all the resemblances his notions of the place bore to reality.

  Charlotte had dutifully taken them to the places she recalled: the schoolhouse – now unsafe for entry, its roof caved in – and the Civil War-era cemetery with its toppling monuments and graves of former slaves granted the dubious honour of burial with the master, and the abandoned barn surrounded by junked farm equipment: rusted tractors and broken tillers. Seth shot it all with a bland enthusiasm, and then they’d crossed these tracks, and it was her own fault they were here. “Wait,” she’d said. “Stop,” she’d said. And so they did.

  Back then, August had that winding-down feeling about it. The air remained sultry as ever; insects whirred in the brush and the sun rose relentlessly, day after day, as though it might never rain again. But they felt the end, Vic and Cade and Charlotte, felt the dark dull hallways of school-again looming near, the clanging lockers and the shrieking bells, textbooks on trigonometry, composition folders, laps around the gym, and smelly lunchrooms. The indignity of it all. But not yet. Some days still separated freedom from captivity. “We will make the most of it,” Vic had announced, throwing herself back into the clover that grew wild and ragged along the train tracks. Cade was rolling another joint, flapping one hand at a persistent hovering bee, but Charlotte had a headache and didn’t want to smoke anymore. “We should do something,” Vic went on, “some kind of ceremony to mark this summer. To mark us all.”

  She made up the words. She was good at making things up. Charlotte could no longer remember what exactly Vic had said, but could still see her as she’d looked that day: red hair twisted on top of her head, wearing shorts and a black Neutral Milk Hotel T-shirt, and somehow regal despite it all.

  Now Charlotte kicked at decaying ties, at scattered spikes. She had not been home in such a long time, and something almost like regret broke over her. Lee touched her on the back and made her jump.

  “All right?”

  She shrugged. He nodded. He always knew. They were closer than siblings. They plucked one another’s thoughts out of thin air. He knew her better than anyone, better than any lover – and lovers always left her, claiming she held some part of herself remote from anyone’s reach. She and Lee had met freshman year of their first day of college, when the housing department mistakenly assigned them to share a room in the co-ed dorm. Housing had reacted with considerably more horror than either of them and quickly found them gender-appropriate roommates, but they grew closer than siblings. Now Lee, exaggerating the Southern accent he’d left behind when they moved to the West Coast together, cried, “Oh mah gahd! It’s a train track!” and they were both cracking up without really knowing why, because it was one of those jokes, its origins lost in time, probably rooted in mockery of someone they’d disliked but impenetrable to outsiders and now to them as well. While they were still laughing he said, “I’m sorry. You didn’t have to come.”

  “No, don’t be.” She could imagine how events had unfolded before she entered the picture: the three of them, Lee and Seth and Larkin, getting high in Lee’s living room and talking about Seth’s idea for a documentary – something about the South (Seth had never been there) and a road trip, something he could enter into a film festival, maybe South by Southwest, when Lee, stoned and rash and half in love with Seth, blurted out Charlotte’s name, said she’d be into it, she was between jobs now anyway and kinda depressed (he’d said something like that, she was sure of it). Lee had grown up in a faceless Atlanta suburb but Charlotte hailed from a hick town. She could take them into Southern Gothic country, all right.

  The Southern Gothic that Seth imagined didn’t really exist any longer, if it ever had, but he’d never know that. Nonetheless the three of them came pounding on the door of her Sellwood studio that same night. Five days and a world ago: it had been one of those idyllic Portland summer evenings, just warm enough for an outside table at the brewpub round the corner (to which the four of them had repaired, because Charlotte’s studio was hot and stuffy and both alcohol and space were in short supply there). Safe in the lush green of a Pacific Northwest August, downing her third Ruby Red Ale, she could not remember the burnt-up humidity of Georgia in summer. Furthermore, she and Lee had both made the tactical error of assuming that Larkin, the only one of them with a real job – she worked at the advertising agency that made all the Nike commercials – would not be joining them. Larkin was okay but she had a way of assuming a blameless, bright, and superficial let’sbe-kind-to-the-help sort of air whenever she talked. “It’s so good to run into you,” she would say, smiling brightly while somehow still managing to signal that the exact opposite was true.

  At some point in the evening, maps had been produced, highlighters sketched ambitious routes along interstate highways. “It’s freaky down there,” Larkin warned, “Deliverance country,” but nobody paid her any attention. By nine the next morning, when the phone jangled Charlotte awake, she was hungover and regretting the promises she’d made, but they were on their way over and backing out felt impossible.

  Now Seth called back to them. �
��Let’s follow the tracks! This is good stuff!”

  “Excellent,” Lee said. “Now he’ll be hoping to encounter some backwoods eccentric he can get on camera.”

  “Some latter-day Hazel Motes.”

  “Nah, that’s a little too eccentric. Maybe another Howard Finster. Religious fanatics are a lot more palatable when they’re folk artists.”

  “And we grow ’em on trees here, those loveable eccentrics.”

  They watched the two for a moment. The sight of Larkin picking her way along the tracks in inappropriately flimsy red flip-flops made Charlotte feel meanly glad for just a moment. She said, “You know, it’s a lost cause, darlin’. I don’t care who else he might be sleeping with, he’s utterly devoted to her.”

  “I know. I’m an idiot.”

  Charlotte shrugged again. “The things we do for love, right?”

  That made him laugh. “You’ve never been in love in your life, how would you know? You’re the one who does the heart breaking!”

  “Shut up,” she said, lightly, steadily. She’d never told him about Cade and Vic, which meant she’d never told anyone. “Let’s go.” Seth and Larkin went over a rise and vanished on the other side. They followed. A field stretched to the left of them, its grasses yellowing and dying in the summer drought; to the right, the ground dipped and fell away into already dead forest blanketed by kudzu.

  When the kudzu covers something it leaves the shape behind and takes the thing itself down into the underworld, said Vic’s voice in her head. Cade said, My spooky girl. Vic drew macabre sketches of things rising from the forest floor, of rooms empty but for unsettling shadows in wrong places, of faces that floated at windows and figures made out of bits of tin can and leaves and bones. She posted her work to her webpage, where it had lingered ghostlike for years until the free webhosting company shut down altogether. Charlotte used to visit there often, imagining that this time she’d find a message embedded somewhere in the pixels.

  They’d thought to sleep out here under the stars that night. After half-an-hour of slapping mosquitoes they’d tried to squeeze into Cade’s pup tent, without success. Since nobody could sleep, Cade pointed out constellations and told them fantastic stories about gas giants and collapsing black holes. When they ran out of stars to name, Vic took over the storytelling.

  “Once upon a time,” she said, “I came walking here when I was a little girl. I found these same tracks and I started to follow them. They took me deeper and deeper into a forest. I was growing tired and then I looked down and I saw that the metal rails had turned to bone. The bone was smooth and polished like someone took loving care of it. I wondered who would do a thing like that.”

  Cade said, “You didn’t have to wonder long, though.” He brushed damp strands of hair from her forehead.

  “Not fair,” Vic said, “you’ve heard part of the story before.” Charlotte hated it when one of them reminded her it had been two of them before it became three of them, even though they meant nothing by it. Vic went on. “Three scruffy black dogs, uncollared, wild and hungrylooking, came slinking through the trees and waited a few yards away from me. Their flanks were thin and their ribs stuck out like this.” Vic held her hands in a way that mimicked protruding ribs. “And then the biggest dog spoke to me. It wasn’t a talking animal like in a children’s story. It was the most awful thing I’ve ever heard in my life. It had blackened teeth and a blackened tongue and its voice sounded like something savage and wild and malformed.”

  Charlotte couldn’t wait. “What did it say?”

  “It said, Little girl, my brothers and I are going to eat you up. We’re going to eat your feet first so you can’t run away, and then we’re going to eat your hands so you can’t hurt us. We’ll eat your stomach and your eyes, your elbows and your knees. We’ll eat up every bit of you, slowly, and then we’ll be filled up with pieces of you and you’ll be part of us, Vic.

  “But what he and his brothers didn’t notice was that while he was doing all that talking, I was filing my teeth into sharp needles. I filed my fingernails into claws and I took off my shoes and did the same for my toenails – he was a really long-winded dog – and when everything I could make sharp was as sharp as could be, I made my move. I leapt on the talking one first and tore out its throat. Then I killed the others with my sharp new claws.

  “By then I was all covered in blood and other awful things, and I wanted to bathe. I kept walking and I came to the railway trestle, and the river running beneath it. I took off all my clothes and I dived in, but while I was swimming I felt someone watching me from the shore. At first I thought it was just a water-spirit but then I knew for sure it was something else. So I came to the surface of the water and I saw a woman standing there. She was the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, or ever will see. I knew then that she was the one who cared for the tracks, who kept the bones polished and free of kudzu. She said, ‘You have killed my three best companions.’

  “I told her it wasn’t my fault. It was kill or be killed, after all. She nodded and said that she understood but she had to take something from me anyway. She said that, and then she turned and started to walk away. I called after her; I asked her what she was taking. She said I’d find out one day.”

  “And did you?” Charlotte again, leaning forward, eager.

  Vic said, “I’m still waiting.”

  Before they fell asleep at last Vic had suggested that they lay pennies on the tracks for trains to flatten, and even though they knew that nobody had used those tracks in decades, maybe a century, they did it anyway. They all heard the whistle in their dreams, and they woke to the sight of three smooth, flat disks balanced along the rails. Vic had scooped them up, laughing, and scraped little designs on them then and there, using her grandmother’s diamond engagement ring that she always wore on her right ring finger. In later years Charlotte wondered if Vic had done it herself, replaced the pennies with already-flattened ones she’d brought with her. But they agreed they had all heard the train passing, had felt the night air shiver, and anyway, it wasn’t the kind of thing Vic would do. She liked stories, not hoaxes.

  Seth and Larkin must have gotten farther ahead of them than either Lee or Charlotte had realised. They passed over the rise and saw no sign of them. Charlotte jumped when a flock of birds burst from a nearby copse of trees and climbed into the sky, shrieking. The only cloud they’d seen all day passed before the sun; it lessened the heat’s intensity but left her feeling breathless and hemmed in. They walked on. Ahead of them the railway vanished into a pine forest.

  Lee put a hand up to his mouth and called, “Seth! Larkin!”

  They waited. Only insects sang in reply.

  In the forest, the needles felt soft and slick underfoot. They had to leave the tracks in places where the undergrowth grew too thickly. Aluminium drink cans bleached shiny and anonymous by the sun and rain littered the railbed and gave way to other bits of garbage, twisted metal, rotting lumber. They really should turn back now. Charlotte felt it uncurling in her gut, the sense of crossing borders into stranger places.

  “I was in love,” Charlotte said to Lee. “Once.”

  “You lie. What happened?”

  “People leave,” she said. “You know.” It was almost true.

  They had parted that morning in high spirits, filled with plans for the week ahead. But Cade’s parents had lain in wait for him, as parents do. They sent him away – some kind of military boarding school, maybe, or worse, one of those boot camps like you saw on TV for troubled kids. Vic’s voice took on a bleak quality Charlotte had never heard in it as she reported what little she knew. And then Vic was gone as abruptly: IMs and emails went unanswered, the phone rang and rang for days, until at last Vic’s mother answered it. She was doing fine, she told Charlotte in a tight voice, and she could talk to her friends when she was better. Vic messaged her once after that, hastily: i did something stupid. tried to cut open my wrists. While Charlotte was typing a reply Vic added, gotta run, they�
��re back, they never leave me alone. Of course, Vic’s mother had been lying; Vic had never returned to school that year, and Charlotte, so clearly not our kind of people in a way that made Vic’s mother wrinkle her country-club nose, had not been told what became of her. And that had been the end of that.

  Or so it seemed. The following summer, two weeks into a waitressing job down at Hilton Head, she’d gotten a phone call.

  “It’s an emergency,” groused her manager Mac. He towered over her, all six-foot-five of him, in the narrow passage between the kitchen and the dining room where the staff phone was located. “Or it damn well better be.”

  “Char, it’s Vic.”

  “Is it an emergency?” Mac demanded, hands on hips. “You know you can’t take personal phone calls here!”

  “Jesus,” Vic said. “Char, listen, you have to come here tonight. Me and Cade are in town.”

  “Five minutes!” Mac mouthed, holding up a splayed hand, wiggling his five fingers in case she hadn’t gotten the message.

  “We’re going out to the train tracks. I know how to get through. I figured it out.”

  Something metal clattered to the floor in the kitchen. Wes, the sous chef, shouted, “Fuck!” The kitchen door jostled her in the back. “Your table sixteen is up, Char!”

  “Figured what out?”

  “How to cross borders. How to get to the other side. On purpose this time, not by accident.” Vic was impatient. “Meet us at moonrise. Sometime after midnight. We’ll wait for you.”

  An abrupt click was followed by silence. Mac leaned against the wall, one finger on the phone’s cradle. “Table sixteen wants their shrimp,” he smirked.

  Charlotte untied her apron and flung it at him. “Better take it to them.” In the parking lot her heart raced. She called both Vic’s and Cade’s home numbers from her cell phone, but the lines on the other end merely rang and rang, as she expected. Bydell was five hours away and she had no idea when the moon would rise. At first luck was with her as she raced through the night, her headlights swallowing the centre-line and not a cop in sight. Outside of Augusta, disaster: the clean-up from a multi-car accident blocked every lane and she sat at the back of a long line of cars. Crawling forward, she could see highway patrolmen carefully waving motorists to detour one by one onto the interstate’s shoulder, but by the time her turn came and she was moving at a steady speed again, the moon showed its face. “Waning gibbous,” she whispered, knowing the words because Cade had taught her the moon phases like incantatory phrases. Waxing gibbous. Full. Waning gibbous. Half-moon. Waning crescent. Dark. She kept driving. She didn’t know what else to do. Once she reached her destination, she sat by the tracks until sun-up. The first rays of light picked out something glinting on the tracks: their pendants. They had left her a message, but she didn’t know what to do with it.