Best New Horror 29

by Stephen Jones

  “Sometimes that’s how it happens. You see a scene play out in your mind and you know it’s a keeper. The fun starts when you have to build a beginning and an end around it.”

  SALTER WOKE IN the night and this time the screams were real. Raw, lusty, the kind of scream only an infant can make. It seemed so close as to be just the other side of the canvas. This was his first night on the campsite. The family had turned up to their pitch late: Salter had eaten dinner and was reading by torchlight as a middle-aged man in shorts and a waterproof coat cursed over a jumble of poles and pegs. His partner switched on a radio tuned to old pop songs despite the camp rules stipulating no music at any time. Salter had purposefully selected this campsite because it was not child friendly, it didn’t allow pets and it placed a premium on silence. Why couldn’t people adhere to simple rules? Why was there this constant flouting of regulations? It might seem trivial to them—it’s only OMD, lighten up, Grandpa—but this was his holiday, a rare chance to enjoy some rest and recuperation before returning to the grind.

  And now this infant, shrieking [greeting, skriking]. Salter checked his watch. Just shy of 5:00 a.m. He rolled off his mattress and flexed the muscles complaining in his back before pulling open the tent flaps and sticking out his head. Folds of drizzle [mizzle, Scotch mist], colour low in the sky: green and pale gold where dawn threatened. Opposite, screaming miles of black. The cries became muffled, as if the parents had noticed his appearance and were trying their best to soothe the child. The poor thing might be teething, or suffering a cold. Well…they could have chosen to not bring it here, he thought, knowing that for a few pounds more he could have stayed in a B&B and not been disturbed at all. But part of the reason for this holiday—for these holidays—was because it was what he had done as a young boy. Abersoch, Dolgellau, Port Eynon. Each summer his mum and dad had loaded up the old Austin Princess with tents and fishing rods and they’d follow the M56 to Wales, him in the back seat with a Beano and a quarter of aniseed twists, specially for the trip. Save one for Mo, Dad would say. And he did, every time. His mum and dad would bicker good-naturedly about what they listened to on the cassette player and it was usually his mum who prevailed. Everyone she liked seemed to be called Joan or Joni and all of the songs seemed to be happy and sad at the same time.

  At the end of all this road there’d be the usual bellyaches [gripes, protests, whinges] about pitching the tent in the wrong place, or getting the groundsheet pinned down incorrectly…but the bad tempers didn’t last long. He would find a nice spot and bury that final sweet for Mo, Mum would get some pasta going on the camping stove and Dad would tuck into a couple of cans of McEwan’s. There would be rain, and complaints about bad backs. Fish would be caught or, more likely, wouldn’t. They played cards. They told jokes. He had loved these holidays.

  Now he rolled up his night things knowing that he wouldn’t be able to catch hold of the tail of sleep [shuteye, kip, slumber] so there was no longer any point in trying. He dressed quickly and reached for his raincoat, unzipping the tent at speed in order to make as much noise as possible. The violent sound of it was close and waspish in the dark. He would have words with the owner when the office opened at 9:00. He needed rest and no distractions. So much of his normal everyday life was riddled with noise that he craved these oases in the year, rare and precious holidays that allowed him to reflect and, yes, heal [repair, recover, mend]. He believed he was still coming back from that childhood insult—the shock and the unacknowledged pain; a grief that would not hatch in him—and only silence could provide the environment in which he might achieve that release.

  He walked to the far edge of the campsite where a perimeter fence gave access to a track through the woods. Beyond those trees Craig y Cilau rose like a sheer grey wave. Pockets of golden light opened up on the rock face as breaks appeared in the cloud that had clung to the base of the mountain all night. Already there were climbers arranged upon the limestone.

  Crossing the track he entered the woods at their thinnest point. Sunlight was filtering through here too, gilding the whitebeam and adding varnish to the boughs of rowan and hawthorn. He had no idea where he was going. Away was enough: he could still hear the child’s agonised, red cries rising in the trough behind him. Three hours until Davis, in his self-important tweeds and his moisturised beard, came down from his nice stone cottage to open the office and treat everyone with an air of amused indifference.

  The crack of a twig underfoot highlighted the depth of quiet he had stumbled into. He could no longer hear the child; its shrieks had been replaced by the soft suck and blow of a breeze sifting through the limbs. It was as if the wood had lungs and he had detected the rhythms of its breathing. He could smell moss and fungus, a mix of the clean and the corrupt, and, he was sure, the mineral aroma of the warming rock face. He felt the tension of the last few hours lift a little.

  The family must have been unaware of the regulations, as unlikely as that sounded. Salter was not a father, but he tried to put himself in the shoes of those people now. They’d be more stressed than him, that was for sure. At least he could have a nap this afternoon when fatigue [lassitude, enervation] inevitably caught up with him. They would undoubtedly be asked to move their pitch to one of the neighbouring camps where families were tolerated. He’d help them relocate if that was the case. Everything would be fine.

  He was a little out of breath by the time he broke through the far stand of trees into full sunlight. Since observing the climbers on Craig y Cilau Salter had seen no other people. He craved that sense of being alone, the illusion of the last man on Earth, to the extent that he felt cheated and disappointed [crestfallen, despondent] whenever he spotted a figure clinging to rock, or a car winding along the A465, or the peal of a distressed child in a badly constructed tent. Now though, he was here for a different reason. Mo. Though he couldn’t work out the impulse for it. Could it just be as simple as a need to tidy up the strands of his life now that he was closer to the end than the beginning? For so many years he had avoided coming to the Brecons, but why? It was not as if he could remember much about his sister. He felt that those memories he did have of her were informed by the photographs in his parents’ old albums; Kodacolor prints he had picked through only once since their death. Invariably, the photographs of Mo displayed a toddler with long, fine blonde locks (from birth until her death, they had not cut her hair), her hands outstretched, begging a hug, or for someone to pick her up. Salter was never in these pictures, which was another reason why he felt a buffer between himself and his grief, if grief was what it could be called. How could you grieve for what you had never consciously known? How did you love a sister who had been in your life for only two years?

  He stood at the edge of the trees and opened his arms, opened himself to a feeling that would not come. They had been twins, but there was never any of that rumoured synergy. No telepathic communion. No phantom muscle recollection. The breath in the trees intensified as if in sympathy. He watched the canopy wave. The moment moved on; he came to his senses, feeling self-conscious, foolish.

  Three sheep paused in their cropping to watch as he picked a route across stony ground. He angled through another field, though a sign on the gate asked that ramblers restrict themselves to the edges. Lines of blue mould in a cracked plastic bathtub drew a map of a world he didn’t understand. He’d always felt apart, on the edge of things, as if life was filled with codes he didn’t have the key to access. He resented his parents for that, believing their withdrawal from the public eye in the wake of Mo’s death had included him too. Their protection of him became smothering, but he never felt it was motivated by true love, more out of guilt, or some misplaced effort to atone [expiate, recompense]. His father had slapped him across the face when he suggested it was a little too late for that.

  They used Mo as a stick with which to beat him. So many times over the years to the point where they no longer had to use euphemisms to suggest that if any child should die, it ought to have been
him. It was in the cast of their faces; the language of their ever more stooping bodies.

  Salter had trained to become a teacher, anticipating that spending time with children might help him cope with his suite of insecurities, but all it did was trap him in a prison of “what if?”. He daydreamed elaborate fantasies in which he somehow managed to rescue Mo, prevent her from falling into the pond rather than being the one to find her. He set his class exercises and then watched as they frowned over their books, wondering if Mo might have grown up to talk like Susan Webb, or laugh like Debra Barker, or would she have been naughty, like Kathy Bowden?

  He mythologised the discovery of her body, unable to remember what had happened, conscious [aware, sentient] only that he had discovered her because of second-hand stories, heavily censored by parents who did not want him to have to deal with the trauma. Instead he internalised it, torturing himself with any number of death scenes. It was a wonder he didn’t drown too; the pair of them were little older than two, relatively new to the task of walking.

  The image that stuck in his mind more than any—which persuaded him to believe it was authentic [bona fide, genuine]—involved the slow roll of Mo’s head in the blue/black water of the pond as her face returned to the surface. Her fine hair was arranged around her like glass noodles left too long to soak. Her mouth and eyes were open, and he always recoiled from that part of his recollection, the infant part of his mind upset that she was swallowing dirty water and would get a poorly tummy. Her arms were outstretched; even in death she was keen for a cuddle.

  Salter exhaled in the silence and it was a ragged, unnerving sound. He gazed back in the direction of the campsite and saw the route he had carved through the deep grass, a dark green oblique bisecting the field. Beyond that he could just make out the small parallelogram tents peeking over the tops of the trees. He could see now that his quickening breath was as much to do with the gradual incline he was ascending, as any delayed childhood shock. The early morning sunlight persisted, but grey cloud, like the edifices of stone they towered over, was gathering. He would walk as far as the river and then return for breakfast and a reckoning with Davis. He shook his head clear of unpleasantness; enough thinking about Mo for now.

  He stretched his legs and strode hard along a path under the rock-face, enjoying the heat building at his back. Muscles in his legs sang; he knew they would ache later, but it would be a good ache, telling of honest exercise. His thoughts returned to the classroom. He’d brought a little marking with him that he would enjoy: stories by his pupils written without fear, something he found common to primary school children in the main. Something that sadly would be unlikely to last as self-consciousness kicked in and distractions mounted. There were some children who had natural skill [expertise, adroitness], a real feel for words, as he had done as a boy. He remembered being teased for taking a dictionary with him on a school trip. His peers nicknamed him “The ’Saurus” because he was constantly getting his pupils to come up with synonyms, a habit that he couldn’t shake himself; he was often consulted in the staff room regarding a crossword clue, or a letter that needed to be precisely worded.

  He reached a stile almost fully concealed by bright green lichen. Over that, a field of what looked like stubbled barley dipped away to a barn in the far corner. By the time he reached the building—little more than a weather-thrashed lean-to built from asbestos cement and corrugated iron roofing—it had begun to rain. Now he could see a series of single-storey outbuildings hopscotched amid the green beyond. Salter pulled up his hood and watched the thick grey clouds spend themselves. Black nets of rain hung across the sky like dirty curtains in a terrace filled with secrets. The only sound was a stippling against his waxed jacket. It felt as if he was at a moment of poise, or pause. It felt as if something would develop imminently: he was tensed for the explosion of wings as a heron broke through the tree line or a rabbit shot out of clover. Nothing like that transpired, but the feeling remained and his heart rose to meet it.

  The sound of running water turned his head. For a moment he thought the downspout from the gutter was blocked with hair, but it was only water, hurtling from the mouth in a shock of white. Thin veils of cloud sank from the top of the mountain and removed sense, softened edges. A cow despondently chewing its cud became a sepia stain on blotting paper. Cold found its way past the toggles of his jacket; he wished he’d taken the time to prepare a flask of coffee, but anger had ushered him from his tent. It was time to go back. The sun had threatened enough and retreated quite possibly for the rest of the day given the thickening shroud and the absence of any breeze to shift it along.

  A single magpie ducked and fluttered, washing itself in a dip in the barn’s concrete apron. The ancient shadow of an oil-puddle. Rust ghosts in the wall told of machinery grown old, defunct, removed. There was an old wheel-barrow inside the barn, and a tyre torn through to its steel belts. Dead nests of things long gone. Water lipped troughs and gutters. It spanged off the metal roofs.

  Salter did not drink water; not in its purest state, not any more. It had to be blended with some other beverage: tea or coffee, an ice cube in his gin and tonic. His parents had to fool him into imbibing water by disguising it in a cordial of some kind, or topping up his cocoa from the kettle. They had always shielded him from the truth, perhaps believing that to protect him in this way gave them licence to take their anger, frustration and guilt out on him. Not that they would ever admit as much. How could they? How could any parent acknowledge such an egregious transfer? He trudged back, raking the burning embers of his resentment; every little spiteful episode. The pointed fingers. The heated asides.

  His route took him alongside the river, now swollen and fast, groaning under the weight of itself. It was unlikely to remain clear for much longer as the muddy banks were encouraged to became part of the flow. For now, though, he could see into the heart of the river, and the reeds trapped there, like slender arms waving in the current.

  She could not say his name. Trevor. He seemed to remember her trying, but she got the name twisted in her mouth. Rover, she used to say. That was it. Rover. “Mo,” he said now, in response to that memory, and the simplicity of it, the stark snap of it in the relative quiet shocked him. He had not uttered her name in twenty years, at least. The trees murmured again, as if he’d spoken too loud. Already he suspected he might have done. His breathing would not settle; he could feel, see, even, the torment of his heart in the materials layered across his chest. That sense of imminence. Perhaps he was anticipating thunder in some lizard chamber of his back brain, as other animals were able. But there was no such rumour in the colour or shape of these clouds. Panic gnawed at him. Heart attacks were a shadow in his bloodline. He had stumbled upon a dead rabbit on one camping trip, its splintered [fragmented, spillikin] ribs splayed to allow access to the soft vitals within; it was too easy to imagine himself become much the same. Perhaps under the beak of that magpie, and whatever else hunkered in the undergrowth with a nose for carrion. Please don’t let me die out here, alone. The hiss of the trees. Had he spoken aloud again? Despite everything, he laughed.

  He came back along the bank until he could avoid it no longer and strode into the stand of trees. Gloom and sullen silence under the canopy now. Odour of petrichor. He felt swaddled, but there was no comfort in it. When he reached the edge of the trees he saw his tracks in the field again, those deep green furrows, but now they had been supplemented by another set of narrower tracks, weaving in and around his determined pattern like those of a dog, or a small child. The rain intensified and he couldn’t understand if it was the hiss of that he was hearing or those incessant trees. A sharp intake of breath at the witnessing of atrocity. The cusp of something. It was like that game he had played as a child. When someone hid something and you went looking for it. Warm, warmer, colder, cold. Hot now. Very hot. Boiling.

  Nothing had ever been cut and dried in his life. There was always doubt [uncertainty, confusion, hesitancy]. It might have had somethi
ng to do with his never marrying. He didn’t feel comfortable taking that risk with someone, a person he could never know as well as himself. And the fact he didn’t know himself all too well meant that any chance of intimacy was stymied from the start. “Buggered every which way”, as his dad had been fond of saying.

  He stumbled into a clearing. He knew this place. This arrangement of wood and water. The peculiar sweep of land. He saw the pond and cried out at the pale oval turning slowly within it. But it was only a soft glancing of light finding its way between the cradle of branches. He heard the cry of the child again, and knew there was no such thing. There was no child on the campsite.

  “Dad,” he said, and steadied himself against the bole of a tree. It was as if, viewing it all again, fifty years on, a match had been made in his head, like a copy on tracing paper aligned with the original. “Mum.”

  Dead a dozen years now. He was the last of the Salters. And their name would die with him.

  He crouched and placed his hand in the cold water, wishing his infancy back, a crucial few seconds in which he might have made a difference. Everything could have changed since that pivot in time. All of those holidays he remembered since Mo’s death. The sham of their routines. The jokes. The games. They were told and played behind masks. Nobody was who they had been before. He had hated these holidays. Yes, he had hated them. The last sweet for Mo? He had eaten them all.

  He thought of the way his parents regarded him as he grew up. That barely concealed mixture of revulsion and guilt. Laced with something else, he thought now. Fear, was it? What if? What if?

  He heard movement in the undergrowth. That moment opening up again. That bubble of imminence. He dredged his hand through the water, ruining the calm of the pond. He fancied he felt something winding itself around his fingers, but when he pulled them clear, there was nothing to see. He stood up. All his life he had been pushing people away. Always pushing people away. Always pushing. He didn’t have a word for what he had done.