BACK IN THE DUNES
by
Terry Lamsley spent most of his childhood in the south of England. He has been living in Buxton, in Derbyshire, where many of his stories are set, for seventeen years. For some time he’s been employed by social services, working with disturbed adolescents and their families. He has recently had stories published in All Hallows, Ghosts & Scholars, Dark Terrors: The Gollancz Book of Horror, Shivers for Christmas, Year’s Best Horror, Best New Horror, and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. His self-published collection, Under the Crust, was nominated for the World Fantasy Award and the title novella won the award in 1994. The book, out of print before the award was given, will be reprinted in a new limited edition by Ash-Tree Press. His second collection, Conference With the Dead, was recently published by the same press. A third collection of tales should be complete by 1997 and Lamsley is currently finishing his novel Dominion of Dust.
A trip to the seaside would seem like the perfect way to spend a vacation in peace …
Nathan was on the lookout for the woman most of the time now. She didn’t turn up while he was eating his late breakfast on the front steps of the caravan but after he washed the dishes, he saw her sitting on the sea wall, with her legs dangling over the edge. He watched her for a while through the cracked window that overlooked the beach. She was so still. He wanted her to turn round and look for him, to see if he was there. If she didn’t want to see him, to talk to him, why did she come and sit so close? No one else lived in the caravan. He was the only tenant.
He glanced at his watch and saw it was after ten. He had to go out to buy food soon. The little shop at the back of the dunes was only open for a couple of hours in the morning, and he couldn’t remember if it closed at eleven or twelve. If he missed it, it meant a long walk to the nearest village with a grocery store, and he didn’t feel like venturing far that day. He planned to sit in the sun as much as he could. In little more than a couple of weeks he’d have to return to work: nearly a third of that time had already passed – had slipped by almost unnoticed.
He knocked on the window with his knuckle to see if the girl would respond. She was only about ten yards away, so she must have heard him. As far as he could tell, she didn’t even twitch. He took a coin out of his pocket and tapped the edge of it hard against the glass, but to no effect.
He returned to the back of the caravan and shaved quickly. Even on holiday, he didn’t like stubble on his face. The jeans he’d washed last night and hung to dry out of the shower-room window were not quite dry, but he put them on anyway. They felt cold and uncomfortable at the waist and crotch at first, but they soon warmed up. He checked his hair in the mirror, stuffed paper money in his pocket, thrust his arms and head through the holes in a T-shirt, and sauntered out to speak to the girl.
He looked down at her, with the smile he thought women found most appealing ready on his face, in case she should turn to him.
The sun-bleached denim jacket she always wore (she’d been hanging around for the last three days) was rubbed thin at the cuffs and elbows. Under it she had on an equally faded knee-length floral dress. She looked like a waif, except that her face was too old for the part. It was her posture and the way she moved, when she moved, that made her seem young.
‘Another good day,’ he said, squinting up towards the sun as he sat down beside her.
‘They are all good days,’ she said, without looking at him, or moving anything except her jaw.
‘All yours might be. Some of mine aren’t.’
‘You’ve been lucky so far.’
‘The weather’s been OK,’ Nathan admitted.
‘What more do you want?’
‘I don’t know. Company? This is a lonely place.’ He wondered if she’d take the hint.
She didn’t. She said, ‘Surely you knew that before you came?’
No: he’d had no idea what to expect when he’d hired the caravan four days earlier. He’d seen it advertised in a local newspaper someone had left in a picnic spot just outside the town, when he’d pulled in to eat a sandwich. Whoever it was had dropped the paper on the bench closest to him as he’d climbed out of his car, and had driven off at once. Nathan had picked it up out of curiosity when he’d finished his snack, flicked idly through it, and seen the advertisement for a holiday caravan for hire, made conspicuous by the paper’s previous owner, presumably, with a surrounding square of heavily drawn blue felt tip. Nathan had decided it was just what he wanted and needed. The description of the accommodation offered seemed good enough, and he decided to go for it at once, if the person who had marked the paper had not beaten him to it.
It had been late in the day and he’d desperately needed somewhere comfortable to sleep. The previous two nights he’d spent sprawled uncomfortably along the back seat of his car, and that had not done his back any good. The pain in his spine had lasted all day.
And, after all, he was supposed to be on some kind of a vacation!
He told himself he’d been touring, but drifting was a better word to describe his passage up the west coast into Wales and away from the wreckage of his umpteenth relationship. He’d been in no hurry, because he had no specific destination, and had stopped off at various towns along the way for hours on end, aimlessly snooping around the strange and unfamiliar streets. Nowhere had taken his fancy particularly, and he wandered on until, at last, partly because whatever compulsion had driven him on had exhausted itself, he’d come to a stop.
And the caravan was still available, he had been told when he’d dialled the number given in the advertisement. The man at the other end of the line had seemed surprised by the enquiry, as though he’d half forgotten the caravan existed. Nathan would have to leave his car in the town, the man had explained apologetically, because there was nowhere to park among the dunes close to the site, but that hadn’t troubled Nathan. He hadn’t given the matter another thought. He’d taken the caravan until the end of the week, with an option to stay longer if he wished.
At first, he’d been content enough. The town, he’d soon discovered, wasn’t up to much, but was curiously familiar: to his surprise he felt almost at home there, and seemed, instinctively, to know his way about. As he’d explored the streets, he kept turning corners he seemed to have turned before, which was disconcerting. But he supposed most small towns along that stretch of coast had a lot in common, and he had vague memories of spending time in that part of Wales as a child.
‘I didn’t even bother to look the place up on the map,’ he explained to the woman in the denim jacket. ‘I needed somewhere to flop, and this seemed as good a place to stay as any.’ From his tone, however, it was obvious he was not entirely happy with his present situation.
She moved then; turned her face towards him slightly. ‘You’re disappointed?’
‘Well …’ He shrugged, and decided to try again. ‘To tell the truth, it’s a while since I was on my own for any length of time.’
‘And you don’t like it?’
‘No. It seems not. Not any longer. It makes me uneasy. How about you? You like solitude?’
‘I can put up with it.’
He almost asked her why she felt she had to, when he was around, but instead he said, ‘I’ll be moving on in a couple of days, I guess.’
He got the impression she found this remark amusing for some reason. He thought she smiled. It was the first time he’d seen her do that.
‘You live here, I suppose,’ he observed.
‘Not exactly.’
‘But close by? You’ve been here some time.’
‘Some time,’ she agreed, and turned away to look out to sea, as though she didn’t want him to pursue that line of enquiry. After a moment, though, she added, ‘Long enough.’ She made it sound like too long. She took one of her narrow hands out of the pocket of her jacket and reached for a pebble among the dozens on the ground beside her. Then she said, ‘I’ll be going away myself, very soon. I’ll be leaving you to it.’
There was something that struck him as slightly odd about her last sentence, but she was a peculiar girl. Or woman, he reminded himself. There was nothing youthful about the way she spoke, either: she had a weary voice.
‘Well, I’m OK here for a while,’ he said. ‘It’s a change. It’s nothing like home, that’s for sure.’
Most people, he reflected, would have asked him about himself, and where home was. If she had, he’d have been pleased to tell her, because he wanted to talk about the self he had been alone with recently. But she didn’t react the way he’d hoped she would. She never did. She said nothing.
She rolled the pebble she’d picked up on her palm, then closed her hand over it. The frayed sleeve of her jacket fell back to reveal her pale, thin wrist, which reminded Nathan of dried-out driftwood, as she held back her arm and hurled the stone out across the empty beach in front of her. Then she stared out towards the distant sea again, pointedly ignoring him.
Piqued, he jumped forward off the wall and dropped on to the beach. ‘I have to get food from the shop,’ he said, trying to make it sound as though he was about to set out on an interesting expedition. ‘The cupboard’s bare. Want to come along?’
‘No thanks,’ she said.
‘It’s not far.’
‘I know.’
‘I shan’t be long. Will you be here when I get back?’
‘Maybe. I won’t be far away.’
He looked up at her. Her thin face, wedged between her hunched shoulders, was mostly hidden behind her fine, long, wind-blown hair that fluttered across her face like a curtain in an open window. All he could see of her features was the tip of her nose and her wide, wry, slightly down-twisted mouth. He couldn’t be sure if he found her attractive or not. He wasn’t sure about this one.
‘Christ,’ he thought, ‘maybe! Where else has she got to go? I’m wasting my time: she’s not interested. It’s not me she comes to see. She must have some other reason for hanging round the caravan.’
He murmured ‘See ya,’ and walked away quickly along the beach towards the footpath that led to the shop.
The way took him past a number of the other widely spaced caravans and chalets that were scattered along the sea-front. Most of them were empty, but some were occupied. The family in the chalet next door were setting up wind breaks and laying down towels in preparation for a day’s sunbathing. The father, who was moving about energetically in spite of being overweight, was about Nathan’s age, and the oldest of the three children must have been ten or more. The sight of them made him feel he was missing out on something. The children, who were noisy but otherwise unobjectionable, recognised him, and greeted him when they saw him. Their mother, a figure in cutoff denims and nothing else, waved lazily at him too. He waved back and smiled, then quickly looked away when he realised he was staring at her small, sugar-white breasts.
As he walked on he thought, ‘Why don’t I have a wife and kids like that? Or a wife at all?’
But he’d never really wanted children, though he’d had wives and scores of lovers. And lost or run out on every one of them.
At last he turned sharp right off the beach, on to the path that wound its way inland between high sand dunes. Sparse, scruffy, yellowish grass sprouted from the top of these mounds, like hairs on an old woman’s chin. Sand got in his trainers so he took them off, joined the laces, hung them round his neck and waded on barefoot, looking out for shards of broken glass. This part of the beach was ugly with litter: from picnics, he assumed, earlier in the season. Nobody was in among the dunes now, however, except for a bunch of kids he could hear but not see, somewhere just in front of him. Their jeering, taunting voices depressed him slightly with their edge of unkindness.
He was relieved to find the shop open. It was little more than a large shack, with a green-painted corrugated iron roof and a flap at the front through which were sold tea, soft drinks and sandwiches. The proprietor, a flabby man in a full-length grey overall, was crouching low down outside the shack, scratching at some scrawled black graffiti with a pan scourer. His position made it impossible for Nathan to enter without interrupting him. To attract his attention, since his feet had made no sound in the sand, Nathan said, ‘Glad I caught you open,’ fairly loudly.
The man stiffened, half turned, and squinted at Nathan, who was standing between him and the glare of the sun. Nathan grinned down at the man’s unhandsome, unhappy face and said, ‘Need a few things. Won’t take a minute. Don’t bother to get up.’
If the proprietor heard this remark, he chose to ignore it. He stuck the scourer into his pocket with an irritable gesture and pulled himself clumsily upright by reaching hand over hand up the edge of the door frame. When he was vertical he gave Nathan another glance, without registering recognition, though Nathan had visited the shop twice before during the previous days, then stomped into the hut and stood behind the little counter. He had an obstinate look, like a man standing his ground under difficult circumstances. On the shelves around him were piled tins and packets of instant food. As Nathan, reaching out on either side of the shopkeeper, made his selection from this store, he said, ‘Having a bit of trouble out there, I see.’
The man didn’t answer.
‘Bloody kids,’ Nathan said provocatively, and shook his head. ‘Do they give you a lot of problems?’
‘They don’t bother me,’ the man said. ‘They don’t come in here.’
Nathan wondered who bought the ice creams and the soft drinks in that case. ‘You wouldn’t get adults scribbling like that on the walls though, would you?’ he observed.
‘Who said anything about adults?’
Nathan stooped down to inspect some boxes of shrivelled oranges and bananas. He chose a small bunch of the latter, and dumped them on the counter alongside his other purchases. He added some tins of Coke to his hoard, and reached in his pocket for money. ‘Anyway, there’s a bunch of kids up to something out there, back in the dunes,’ he said. ‘Fighting, I should think. They’re making quite a racket.’
‘They’re always at it,’ the shopkeeper said.
‘Perhaps they’re the ones who have been writing on your wall?’ Nathan suggested.
The man straightened up and looked Nathan in the eye for the first time, but only for a second. Then he reached out quickly for the twenty-pound note Nathan was offering him, and said, ‘Comes to eight pound thirty-nine. Have you nothing smaller?’
‘Sorry, no.’
‘Well, I can’t change that.’
Nathan could see that apart from a few more twenty notes, a couple of ten-pence pieces and some copper, the till drawer was empty. He suspected some kind of scam, and felt slightly annoyed. He said, ‘Can you trust me to pay next time I come – tomorrow, maybe?’
The man gave him an astonished look. ‘No, I can’t.’
‘Well, perhaps you can give me my change tomorrow?’
‘Could do, I suppose.’
Nathan frowned, to let the man know he wasn’t a fool who was easily duped, and said, ‘I’d like a bag for these then, please.’
The shopkeeper slapped a flimsy plastic carrier on the counter, stowed the twenty-pound note away in the till, then followed Nathan to the door.
It was comparatively dark inside the shop, and Nathan stumbled against a display of dusty beach games as he moved towards the door. He tripped and half-fell out of the shack so didn’t get more than a momentary glimpse of the figure he had disturbed by the noise he had made, that scurried away round the side of the hut as he exited. Whoever it was was dressed in some kind of loose, dark, flapping top; probably a baggy T-shirt.
‘There you are, I told you: kids,’ he said, as the proprietor emerged into the sunlight. Nathan pointed to some new graffiti on the wall just above that which the man had been trying to eradicate earlier.
The shopkeeper muttered something sharp under his breath, pulled the scourer from the pocket of his overall and, before Nathan could read what, if anything, was written there, rubbed angrily at this new evidence of hooliganism.
‘If I see them on the way back, I’ll have a word with them about this,’ Nathan said, but the man, obsessively scrubbing, was ignoring him again.
Nathan set off back the way he’d come. He soon heard the harsh bickering voices again, away to his left. He looked over in that direction but the hunched dunes, crested with quivering quills of primitive grass, appeared deserted as far as he could see. To get a better view of the surrounding landscape he climbed up the nearest hummock of sand, but found the only advantage he had gained was a glimpse of the distant sea and the tips of the roofs of some of the nearest caravans. The hollows among the dunes close by were all empty of life, though he could still hear rowdy voices not far away, and, once, what he thought was the sound of breaking glass.
Rather than go back along the path, he decided to make his way diagonally across the tops of the dunes towards his caravan. He’d not gone far when something flew through the air behind him and landed at his feet. It hadn’t missed him by much. At first he thought it was a large pebble, but closer inspection revealed it to be a chunk of badly burnt meat containing a number of small bones. He reached down to prod it with his finger, got a whiff of the way it smelled, then, with his hand over hs nose, quickly stepped back to breathe some fresher air.
Someone close by laughed. A high, loutish voice cackled derisively, as though at something contemptible. Nathan spun round towards the sound that came from his left, but he couldn’t see anyone anywhere. The dunes were still uninhabited as far as he could see.
He scampered a few paces to his left, towards what he perceived to be the source of the sound, and stumbled and almost fell. Something cold in the sand touched his right foot and slid up round the back of his ankle. He experienced no pain on the instant, and only realised he had been cut when he felt the blood begin to flow. He looked down behind him and saw the neck-end of a broken Coke bottle sticking up out of the sand.
Nathan swore, flopped down on his backside and drew his bare foot round to get a good look at his injury. It looked bad, with a six-inch vertical gash up the back of his leg that started under the sole of his foot. A sliver of skin bulged up under a cushion of oozing blood. He cursed, grabbed his foot, and wondered what to do next. He wasn’t used to being hurt and couldn’t remember the last time he so much as stubbed his toe. Even as a child he’d managed to avoid breaking an arm or leg, unlike most of his contemporaries, because he’d never shared their delight in risk-taking and adventure. And, being a hypochondriac, he was immediately out of his depth when his body presented him with any kind of problem.
Anyway, there wasn’t a great deal of pain; nowhere near as much as he would have expected.
He gritted his teeth and sat and watched as what looked like quite a lot of blood dripped off his heel. With vague, first-aidish thoughts about the necessity for some kind of tourniquet, he tied his handkerchief tight round his leg just above the wound, and nervously got to his feet again. He found there was less pain if he kept his foot pulled up at an angle towards his leg, with his toes curled under. He tried half hopping along like this for a few yards, but it wasn’t easy or comfortable in the uneven, shifting sand, and he soon found he had to put the front of his injured foot back in contact with the ground, to enable him to keep his balance. Perhaps he looked ridiculous then, as he hobbled off, because behind him there was more laughter.
The sound chilled him now, rather than annoyed him. There was unkindness, even cruelty in the voices (there was more than one person amused by his predicament, it seemed) and no humour that he could detect. Realising he was almost defenceless, and sensing he was possibly threatened – at risk, even, of being attacked, though he had no idea why – he stumbled on without turning to look at his tormentors. He couldn’t be sure, from their voices, if they were merely children: suddenly, they sounded more like stupid, or even drunk or demented, youths, he thought.
He had to stop at last, to catch his breath and because he was beginning to hyperventilate, or so he imagined. Apart from his own panicky gasps, it had gone very quiet. There was no sound of pursuit. Without really intending to, he risked a glance over his shoulder. He caught just a glimpse of two figures, some yards back, as they must have ducked down behind the dunes closest to them. To Nathan, whose eyelids and lashes were soaked in sweat, they seemed to flicker and fall away to nothing, like dark, extinguished flames. He thought they must both have been dressed in extra-large and probably torn black T-shirts and narrow jeans. He got an impression that their limbs were short, but skinny. And he was sure they were wearing dark masks of some kind, or woollen helmets, over their heads.
He thought, ‘Christ – what is this?’ then shouted, ‘What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?’
It was not a wise question to ask, and one that rarely receives a satisfactory answer, so he wasn’t surprised when he got no response.
Except, perhaps, for a stifled snigger from somewhere round ahead of him, a long way from the spot where he had seen the two figures. He began to be concerned that he was being surrounded.
The pain from his cut was worse now, and spreading up his leg. He had been standing in the same spot for just a few seconds but there was a pool of blood seeping away into the sand under his foot. After trying but failing to tighten the handkerchief round his calf, he hobbled on again, faster than before, driven on by fear that felt like an acute disorder of the stomach.
He was pleased when, at last, he could see the roof of his caravan, but not by how far away it looked. He realised he had somehow managed to hang on to his heavy bag of provisions, and decided to throw it down to enable him to go faster, and because its contents might create a diversion to delay his pursuers. He dropped the lot, then forced himself, with one last burst of energy, to cover the descending stretch of ground between him and what he hoped would be a place of safety, running on both feet now, since he was sure his wound was full of sand anyway.
Half way down the final slope he stumbled again, lost his balance and rolled, arms and legs flailing ignominiously, ten feet down the steep side of the dune closest to the back of his caravan. Dazed, he lay still for a moment, then got to his feet, astonished he was able to do so easily – that he had not, at last, snapped a limb.
The pain in his foot as he made his way towards the door of the trailer, reminded him of the injury which he had momentarily forgotten. He groaned aloud, and swore vehemently.
The woman was still there, more or less where he had left her. She was standing now, and, for once, had her back to the sea. She was looking towards him, her long hair swirling behind her in the off-shore breeze. Her face was almost expressionless, with just a hint of what he hoped was concern, but that could have been mere curiosity, suggested by her slightly raised eyebrows. He remembered his final fall, and his subsequent tumble, and suddenly felt foolish. And he remembered how afraid he had been. His stomach was still queasy. He looked back the way he had come, but there was no sign of those who had been following him, if, in fact, they had still been in pursuit during the final stretch.
Perhaps in an attempt to regain a little dignity, he gestured down towards his bloody foot and fixed a brave smile on his face. When the woman failed to respond, he said, ‘Had a bit of an accident,’ and hobbled nearer to her to give her the advantage of a closer look at his injury. ‘Cut myself on a broken bottle,’ he explained.
She glanced at his foot, but didn’t look concerned or impressed in any way.
Peering down himself, he realised the cut didn’t seem so long and deep any more, and that the blood had almost stopped flowing. He must have plugged it with sand.
‘I’m not a nurse,’ the woman said. ‘I can’t help you.’
‘Well, thanks,’ he thought, and said, ‘It may sound crazy, but I think I was almost mugged just now, back there among the dunes.’
‘Surely not,’ she said dismissively. ‘That’s most unlikely.’
‘Maybe,’ Nathan agreed, ‘but it nearly happened.’
‘Why should anyone bother?’ she said. ‘Dressed like that, you don’t look worth the trouble. You obviously aren’t carrying anything worth stealing.’
‘There was a gang of – well; they were little more than boys – back there, and they seemed to have it in for me. Don’t ask me why.’
This did have some effect. The woman’s face registered a small measure of interest.
‘How many boys?’
At first Nathan didn’t want to admit, just two, or maybe three, but in the end he did.
‘What did they look like?’
He described them as best he could. ‘I think they were masked, or hooded,’ he said, to explain his inability to provide any information that might identify them, ‘and there was nothing special about the way they were dressed.’
Nevertheless, the woman seemed satisfied with what he had told her, and he felt she believed his account of what had occurred. Her readiness, now, to accept his story led him to ask, ‘You don’t have any idea who they might have been, I suppose?’
The woman shrugged and said nothing.
However, Nathan got a distinct impression she was pleased with the scant information he had given her, as though she had been half expecting it, or even hoping to hear it. Could it be that these were the people she had been waiting for in her vigils outside his caravan? Perhaps they were her own children, even, and she had been waiting for them to return?
But, no: she certainly didn’t look old enough to be the mother of three teenagers, and there was nothing maternal about her response to his story. Just the satisfaction of someone enjoying the confirmation of some expectation; a pleasure he felt she was attempting, for some reason, to conceal.
The woman turned away to continue her contemplation of the sea. Nathan hauled himself into his caravan. There was a first-aid kit above the sink, containing a tiny bottle of disinfectant. He filled a bucket with water, put it out on the steps, sat behind it, and prepared to bathe his foot. He poured disinfectant into the bucket and stirred his foot around in the mixture. The sand fell away from his cut, and wisps of blood issued from the wound. There were bandages in the first-aid kit, too, most of which he wrapped inexpertly round his ankle. Then he forced his foot into one of his trainers, after removing the lace, because it seemed like a sensible idea. And it worked: he felt more comfortable at once.
While he had been tending his wound, the woman had wandered off among the dunes. He could see the top half of her body above him, as though she were partly buried in the sand. She was gazing inland, looking for someone, he thought.
A couple of hours later Nathan ventured cautiously out of the caravan, where he had been dozing. There was no sign of the woman.
Hungry, he was thinking about the food he had so hastily thrown away. He decided to go to see if it was still there, because, apart from half a loaf of stale bread, he had nothing to eat. Walking slowly and carefully, and keeping an eye out for anyone who might be nearby, he made his way towards the place where he had flung down the contents of his bag. He found the stuff easily, and nothing had been taken.
This fact made him feel small and stupid, and he wondered at the foolish panic he had felt earlier. Had it all been for nothing? Had he imagined the whole thing? He was beginning to think so when he saw footprints among his scattered groceries: his own, of course, but also other people’s. The surface of most of the sand was smooth, so he could clearly see where he had been earlier by his lop-sided prints, but there were two other sets almost parallel with his own, heading in the same direction, and these looked equally peculiar, in their way.
They were definitely shoe prints, but they were oddly misshapen, with uneven outlines, as though the shoes had been badly damaged, or were falling apart. One of them seemed to have no toes at all on the left foot.
He wondered for a moment if he was confused; if they were in fact his prints, but was soon sure they were not. Nothing like. His were the reverse – toe without heel, that he’d tried to keep from touching the ground – and of course, he’d injured his right foot. The sight of these shoe prints depressed him for some reason, and he began to feel uneasy again, and to glance nervously about at the dunes around him.
The two other tracks wound away from the route he had taken, not far from where he was standing. Following them for twenty yards or so, he found they led him to what he at first assumed was the site of a bonfire or the remains of an ambitious beach party, perhaps, that had got out of hand. Limping slightly, he walked on to the bed of ashes, through which the harsh grass and a few determined yellow-flowering weeds were sprouting. It was an old fire, therefore, and probably from the previous summer. As he strolled further on he realised the area affected was greater than he had originally thought. He began to suspect he had come across the remains of a building, and quite a large one at that, that had burned down. He found the brick foundations of what must have been wooden walls, and the charred remains of a door. He scraped away some of the ashes and realised there were concrete floors under the impacted mess in the centre of the affected area. The fact stirred something at the back of his mind: a fragment of something almost totally forgotten surfaced there to tantalise him, then fell back down into the chaos of his past. Frustrated by this lack of access to his own recollections, he stood still, with his eyes half shut, and tried to take his memory by storm, and force it to recall whatever it was that eluded him – but without success.
There was an unexpected motion some yards ahead of him. Nathan tensed, opened his eyes wide, then relaxed. A freak breeze had flung a handful of ashes up into a rising spiral that sneaked towards him, like the fanatical soul of a whirling dervish. Travelling swiftly, it nevertheless seemed to pick its way among the heaps of burned rubbish almost fastidiously as it drew closer.
At the last moment, just before it reached him, it flickered away to one side and drifted off towards the sea, but Nathan was already on his way out of there because all around him, in three or four places, people were laughing at him again, or making sounds like forced, joyless laughter.
Invisible people. He was reminded of the staccato bursts of strained ‘canned’ laughter behind the action in dismal, unfunny TV sitcoms.
He forced himself to stoop and recover his discarded food as he passed the spot where he’d flung it down. The ugly, scornful sounds did not have quite the same effect on him this time, and did not unnerve him as much as they had done previously. They had not been completely unexpected, and, he reasoned, if anyone did intend him harm, they’d had ample opportunity to attack him while he had been wandering about in the ruin. If those who were taunting him were so reluctant to show themselves, it could be they had good cause to remain concealed. Perhaps they were not as dangerous as they would have him believe? He had no doubt they intended to scare him for whatever reason, but he was beginning to suspect they were less of a threat than he had feared.
He even turned back, because it occurred to him to shout something in defiance at them – to call them cowardly something-or-others – but he discovered he hadn’t confidence enough for that. He sneered, though, showing his teeth, and spat back in the direction he had come, towards the continuing sounds.
Later, sitting in the sun eating warmed-over tinned stew, he wished he hadn’t done that. He thought of himself as a mild man – a lover, not a fighter. His actions had been completely out of character.
And, in retrospect, seemed unnecessarily provocative.
When the heat got too much for him he went back inside his caravan, feeling lethargic, goofy, and half drowned in sunlight. He flipped the top of one of the tins of Coke he’d recovered, which he’d left cooling in the sink, and sat on the bed.
There was no TV or radio and he was beginning to realise he was not good at entertaining himself. That was one thing he’d learned during the last few days: he was not as independent as he’d imagined; he needed people around him. Especially, he needed female company, of almost any kind. He grew bored easily away from the distractions of the city, where he had his work and his women, and he didn’t know what to do with his time.
Time! Time seemed to be stretching out, or shrinking. It was rubbery stuff. He was constantly surprised, when he looked at his watch, to discover how far off he was in his estimation of what time of day it was, and he seemed to have been away from home (well, not his home, but the home of the girl he’d been living with until their final bust-up) for a very long time.
And he couldn’t remember much about the argument which had brought about the split that had sent him on his travels, or about the girl he’d deserted, even when he made an effort. There had been so many girls like her in his life over the last few years.
And, fuck: what day of the week was it? He wasn’t sure. Christ! His brain must be rotting away.
Looking around for some distraction, he saw the newspaper he’d found, that contained the advertisement for the caravan. It was the only reading matter he had with him. He picked it up, sat back on his bed and began to read the first thing he laid eyes on. It happened to be the TV page. He read down the columns of programmes listed, noting those he might have wanted to watch, if he’d had the chance, until he came to a little feature about one of the soaps he followed. It previewed events in the lives of the characters that had happened ages ago, in episodes he was sure were not being repeated at that time.
He looked at the date at the top of the page, and was astonished to see it said August 18th!
No way!
He dropped the paper, leaned back, and forced himself to calculate the day’s date. He did it a couple of times, and came up with the same answer. It was August 17th – there was no doubt about it, so what was going on?
He looked again at the date on the paper and read – August 18th 1994.
But it was 1995.
Then he laughed at his own confusion, because the bloody rag was out of date by three hundred and sixty-four days! It was last year’s news. No wonder the person who had had it previously had thrown it away. He or she (he was pretty sure it had been a woman) had found it at the picnic spot, discovered it was out of date, and flung it down again. Prior to that, it had probably lain there, unnoticed, for the last twelve months.
But no: if it had been there that long, the weather would have turned it to pulp long ago, and it was like new, just off the press, except that it had been marked and folded.
He opened the paper again, at the front page, and saw big headlines proclaiming the bare facts about some now ancient local tragedy. Bad news! He didn’t want to read that stuff.
Almost angrily, he screwed the whole thing up. He got off the bed and thrust the crumpled paper into the swing-bin under the sink. The rubbish in there was beginning to stink, so he hauled the bulging bin-liner out, took it to the waste-disposal point nearby, and dumped it.
On the way back, he saw a figure up among the dunes. It was the woman in the denim jacket. She was talking to someone: he saw her lips move, and clearly heard her voice, though not what she was saying. Once, he thought he heard another woman’s voice, but she appeared to be alone – he could see nobody with her.
So – she was crazy?
That would explain a lot. Why she was able to resist his charm, for instance. Nathan smiled at his own conceit. He was sure no sane woman would have turned him down.
He ate again, and fell asleep. It was late evening when he suddenly woke up. The light was fading deep into dusk.
Noises outside the caravan had disturbed him, and they were still going on. Scuffling sounds, of someone moving about in the sand, and scratching noises from over near the closed, but unlocked, door. At first he thought someone was trying to get in but, if so, they didn’t know what the handle was for – all they had to do was turn it.
He sat up and looked at the door, half expecting someone to walk in. There was a series of bumps then, and a number of objects scraped along the sides of the caravan. The caravan rocked a little. At that point someone laughed, and another person joined in. Nathan knew at once where he’d heard those voices before.
He leapt up, turned the key in the door with an excess of energy that hurt his thumb, stumbled over to the window nearest to it, and stared out.
Four crouching figures were running away from the caravan, scrambling awkwardly up in the loose sand on the sides of the dunes. They were gawky, scrawny and oddly shaped, and their shabby clothing flapped wildly around them like black washing drying on a line in a gale. From what he could see, they were dressed in the dirty remnants of stylish teenage designer fashions, but they didn’t move like young people. They hauled themselves up the slopes like desperate old men, digging their hands into the sand to help them along. They moved as though they were in pain, or agony, even.
But they were still laughing: through the open window he could hear their cruel, unremitting cackles, which sounded almost hysterical now.
To his relief, they scuttled very quickly over the crests of the dunes and out of sight. The sound of their laughter died away.
Nathan drank two tins of Coke, adding quite a lot of rum from a bottle he had picked up on his travels, before he felt like venturing outside. He eased open the door quietly, lowered himself cautiously down the two steps on to the sand, and took a look around.
Graffiti messages had been scrawled along the sides of the caravan in huge letters. To Nathan, they didn’t make much sense, but that didn’t matter. They scared the shit out of him. One read:
WELCOM BACK WERE GOWIN TO GET YOU FUCKER
another:
GOT YOU NOW WE GOT YOU GOT YOU
another:
SMELL THE SMOKE THATS US YOU BASTERD
There were others similar. They’d been written in something like thick black chalk, as were the scrawls that had appeared on the sides of the shop he’d visited earlier, which hadn’t made any sense either.
He opened his last tin of Coke, slopped some rum in, but found he dared not drink it. If he so much as sipped it, he knew it would make him throw up.
He found that he felt safer outside the caravan than in, so he went for a stroll along the beach. He walked a good way out on to the sands, away from the dunes, and looked back into the increasing darkness behind him every few moments to make sure he wasn’t being followed.
After about ten minutes a rocky area, full of pools and slippery weed, forced him to abandon the beach and step up on to the crumbling, battered concrete promenade that led into the town. Apart from a couple walking a dog and a single figure leaning against a handrail ahead of him, he had the promenade to himself as far as he could see. Nevertheless, the sight of the solitary person gave him a feeling of unease that increased as he drew nearer. For some reason, when the figure turned, gave him a tiny wave, and started to run towards him, when it was still some ten yards away, he almost expected it. His first impulse was to turn and run himself, and he probably would have done so if the person approaching him had not been so obviously female. He could see her silhouette against the lights of the fun fair in the town behind her: she was slim, young and, he saw when she was very close, attractive.
He was not even surprised when she flung herself into his arms and kissed him wildly all over his face: in the last few seconds he had known it was going to happen. He responded in kind.
At last she said, ‘Where have you been? You’re so late, I’d almost given up hope you’d come.’
‘I fell asleep,’ he admitted, quite honestly. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Never mind,’ she said, ‘never mind,’ and began kissing him all over again.
Nathan readily submitted to this treatment. He assumed he was benefiting from a case of mistaken identity, and in no time at all he’d decided to take advantage of the situation. The girl was obviously infatuated by whoever she thought he was, and the evening was beginning to look promising. Already she was leading him off the promenade, into the dunes.
And she really was a wonderful girl: the sort he went for most, when he got the chance, which had been very often. It occurred to him that he might, in fact, know her, or may have done once. Perhaps she was one of the many of her kind he’d had affairs with, who’d recognised him, though he’d forgotten her?
‘Not that it matters, one way or the other,’ he thought, as the girl impatiently pulled him down into a dip in the dunes and stretched out beside him. Very soon they were both naked, and Nathan had given up all speculation about the identity of the girl and lost himself in the action of the moment.
Or almost lost himself. After a little while, he became distracted. He was surprised to find how cold the girl was; not emotionally, but physically. Her flesh was chilling to touch, icy even, in places, and a coolness emanated from her. The skin he caressed was dry as paper, and the muscles in her arms and body seemed strangely, unpleasantly flaccid. He became more and more preoccupied by these peculiarities, and the girl must have noticed, because she urged him to finish what they had started.
He was glad, later, to be able to roll off her body because it had become, in spite of their activities, even colder. They lay together for a while on their backs, side by side and slightly apart, on the sand. When Nathan glanced at her, after they had both remained silent for some minutes, he noticed her skin glowed slightly green in the moonlight. He shut his eyes then and, as he had in so many similar post-coital situations in the past, began to wonder what he had let himself in for.
As if commenting on his thoughts, not very far away, someone laughed.
Nathan half sat up and looked around, feeling his own body freeze. The girl clasped him in her cold arms and pulled him back with a murmur.
He lay quite still in her embrace, and listened as something came towards them across the sand. He wanted to run, but the girl’s arms held him down like ropes, and she clasped her hands across his chest to make her hold on him more secure.
Whatever was approaching was very close now, and Nathan squirmed free of the girl, finding it much easier to escape than he had anticipated, and stared into the dark towards the source of the sound.
A big grey dog was trotting towards them over the dunes. When it reached them it came to an abrupt halt, as though their nakedness had taken it by surprise, and its whole body became rigid. Its eyes were fixed on them and its nose, quivering slightly, was pointing straight towards them. Nathan recognised the creature as the one he’d seen being exercised by the couple on the promenade. Its master or mistress, who must have been responsible for the laughter he’d just heard, whistled from some way away. The dog twitched its ears, lingered as long as it dared, then bounded off towards its owners.
Nathan found he was shivering: from the chill of the girl’s body, and from tension. He felt very wound up.
The night was warm and calm, but there was a scent in the air – of wood-smoke, and something else less pleasant – that made him deeply uneasy. Also, there was an angry red glow in the sky he had not noticed moments ago, that flickered almost like lightning. He reached for his clothes and started to dress. The girl made no attempt to detain him, but she said, ‘Nathan, is something wrong? Do you have to go?’
‘Christ, she knows my name,’ he thought. ‘How can she?’
He almost said, ‘Who are you?’ but realised he didn’t really want to know. He looked down at her again. She was beautiful; there was no denying that, but now he needed to get away from her, and he hoped he would never see her again.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I do have to go.’
As he strode away, he thought she said something about, ‘The same time, at the same place,’ but he didn’t answer. He left her lying there on her side, gazing up at him. She was obviously in no hurry to get dressed, and seemed happy to stay where she was.
He went back along the promenade and down on to the beach. The tide had come in a long way, forcing him to stay close to the dunes. To his right, the smoky red glow had dwindled, but the smell remained. If anything, it was worse. Now, it was almost nauseating.
Someone shouted to him from in among the dunes: it sounded like a wordless taunt. He glanced across and saw two scrawny figures running along parallel with him, a dozen or so yards to his rear. Turning back, he discovered two more were on the beach behind him, and a lot closer. He had no doubt who they were.
He didn’t look back again. He ran almost blind, unaware of the ground he covered, trusting to instinct to find his way back to the caravan. He was painfully aware of his injured foot, that he knew had opened up again, because he could feel blood in his trainer. The whole leg was throbbing and felt stiff. That slowed him down a bit, but he tried not to think about it, and reached the caravan sooner than he expected. He fumbled in his pocket for his key, aware that his pursuers were not far behind, jerked open the door, and literally fell inside. He forced himself to his feet again, and fastened the door shut, feeling almost triumphant.
He slumped on to his bed, reached up for the switch on the wall beside him, and turned on the light.
The woman in the denim jacket was sitting in one of the two easy-chairs the caravan contained. In front of her on a little table was the newspaper he’d taken to the dump with his other rubbish earlier. He knew it was the same one because it was stained with tea-bags and tomato soup he’d discarded. The woman had made some effort to flatten it out. She turned it round towards him, so he could read the front page, and tapped it with her finger.
Wearily, Nathan pulled the paper forward. The headline read:
FIVE LIVES LOST IN BEACH HOUSE HOLOCAUST
Four young people and a care worker died last night when their holiday home burned down. Firefighters were unable to approach the building because of its inaccessible situation among the dunes near Camber Beach. Police are treating the fire as ‘suspicious’. A second care worker with the group, a young woman in her early twenties, is missing. A description of her has been issued, and police are appealing to her to contact them as soon as possible.
Nathan pushed the paper back towards the woman. ‘So what?’ he said.
She looked him straight in the eye, as though she wanted to hypnotise him. ‘They were kids from the worst part of the city,’ she said. ‘The sort who’d been in trouble all their lives. They had various handicaps and they were dangerous, sometimes, to themselves and other people. We’d brought them for a holiday, Simone and I, partly at our own expense. We came here because we thought they couldn’t do much mischief in a place like this. It’s fairly remote. And there are no bad influences, or so we thought.’
‘What has this got to do with me?’ Nathan said. ‘And how did you get in here?’
She ignored both questions. ‘We’d worked with them for a year or two, and had really got to know them. They trusted us, we trusted them, so we thought we could put up with each other’s company here for a week.
‘But we were wrong about the lack of bad influences. Simone, the girl who was working with me, was the one who went astray, not any of the kids. She fell for a man who was staying in a hotel in town.’
Nathan stretched his leg and flinched at the pain in his foot, which felt about twice as big as it should have. ‘I don’t understand why you’re telling me all this.’
The woman pointed to the lower part of the front page of the paper. ‘Read that.’
He did, reluctantly. It was a detailed description of the missing girl. When he’d finished reading he said, ‘But she’s here: I saw her tonight.’
‘I know,’ the woman said. ‘You screwed her.’
Nathan looked again into her immobile eyes, then hastily turned his attention back to the newspaper, though he didn’t read anything written there. ‘I don’t get it,’ he said. ‘If you are here, she must have been the one who died in the fire.’
The woman shook her head. ‘It was my night off. We gave each other two in the week. I went to the cinema; Simone should have remained here with the kids to see they were safe, and that they didn’t get up to anything they shouldn’t. She didn’t stay though. When she thought the boys were asleep, she went out to meet this man. Someone she’d only met three days before, but she was already besotted with him! That’s the way she was: there were some men, almost always good-looking philanderers, who she just couldn’t resist.’ Her down-twisted mouth writhed into a mirthless grin. ‘I guess you know the type?’
She waited for some response. When none was forthcoming she said, ‘It’s hard to believe, but she found you irresistible.’
Nathan still didn’t say anything. He was hardly aware what the woman was saying now because he was listening to something he could hear moving about outside the caravan.
‘You told her to do it,’ the woman continued, raising her voice, ‘you made her lock the kids in the building and come to you. And she went: she met you on the promenade beyond the dunes.
‘Sometime later one of the boys woke up and sneaked downstairs, to make some supper, I guess. When he went back to bed he must have left something burning on the gas. Most of the ground floor was on fire when I got back, just after midnight.
‘I hadn’t taken a key with me, as Simone was supposed to let me in. I broke a window but I couldn’t get through the flames and smoke that came out at me. I screamed and shouted, but nobody heard me, and I panicked.
‘My heart had been weak all my life, and it chose that moment to give up on me – just before the whole building, which was made mostly of wood, exploded into flame.’
‘Look,’ Nathan pleaded, ‘I was never here before in my life: this is my first visit. I can’t have had anything to do with all you’ve been telling me.’
‘So you say, but are you sure?’
Nathan wanted to say ‘Yes,’ but didn’t, couldn’t. He wasn’t any longer.
The woman shook her head. ‘I don’t think we can ever be absolutely sure of anything.’
‘But I’d have remembered something,’ Nathan protested, though he didn’t sound convinced or convincing.
‘I think you’re beginning to. But, then, you see, we helped you to forget. It was easy enough to do. After all, there have been so many girls like Simone in your life that you’ve completely forgotten, haven’t there? How many – fifty? – a hundred? And how many of them can you really remember, by name, even? Five? Ten? No, all we had to do was give your memory a nudge in the right direction, towards forgetfulness, to erase all recollection of Simone and what happened here last year from your mind. We had to do that, because we had to get you back. You’d not been happy here, had hated the place, and, without our intervention, you never would have returned. But we needed you, so we wrecked your life and drove you back, though no doubt you thought you were acting on your own volition. And it’s all worked out very well, because here you are, just at the right time, one year after the event, on the anniversary of our deaths.’
‘And the girl, Simone? What happened to her?’ Nathan asked, after a long silence.
‘She came back to the burning house shortly after I did, and realised at once what had happened. She found me before anyone else got there, and blamed herself for everything. Later, she walked out into the sea and drowned. Her body wasn’t recovered for days. You never knew about that, however, because you didn’t try to see her again: you left next morning.’
The woman rose out of her chair and stepped past him towards the door. Nathan tried to get up too, but his injured foot and the lower part of his leg were swollen and refused to bear his weight. Some infection must have got into the wound, and it hurt like hell. He fell down on one knee, then attempted to stand again.
He’d left the key to the caravan in the lock. He saw the woman turn it, push open the door, and throw the key far away into the dunes. She stepped back to let the others in, then went outside without looking back.
When he saw them close up, Nathan realised they weren’t wearing masks, as he had supposed. Their faces, like their hands and legs and arms, were burnt black. Their clothes were scorched and smoke-stained. All four of them watched him with their blistered, glaucous eyes as he tried to crawl away towards the back of the caravan. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought they were smiling. When he started to slide under the bed, one of them went down on all fours and bit his right ankle, attracted, perhaps, by the smell of blood and pus. He hauled Nathan back into the open with his jaws.
The other three moved in. They reached out for Nathan with the charred, charcoal-like stumps of their fingers, that they had used to write the graffiti messages on the outside of the caravan, and started to laugh. They sounded genuinely happy now, and were obviously eager to begin the anniversary celebration.