LUIS REY’S “EYEBALLS” PAINTING may not have been quite as effective as his previous three contributions, but it ended his association with the series and rounded out a run of four covers that, so far as I am concerned, represent the indisputable high point of Best New Horror’s design and packaging.
With an Introduction running to forty-eight pages and a twenty-one page Necrology, the non-fiction elements of the book were finally becoming as important as the fiction. This time I looked at the decline in horror publishing during the second half of the 1990s, and predicted a resurgence in the genre with the new millennium.
In retrospect, horror never did return to the dizzy heights of popularity it achieved in the 1980s, but after the boom-and-bust years it did finally re-establish itself as a viable publishing niche before the next cycle began to decay again.
The twenty-four stories included a final contribution by the late Karl Edward Wagner (“Final Cut”) and marked the first of two appearances to date of literary writer Iain Sinclair (“Hardball”). Volume Eight was one of those rare occasions in the series where I didn’t use a story by Ramsey Campbell, so the book was – belatedly – dedicated to him instead.
Until then I had succeeded in limiting the contributions (except for collaborations) to one story per author in each volume. However, the publication of Terry Lamsley’s second remarkable collection of short stories, Conference with the Dead: Tales of Supernatural Terror, forced me to break my own rule and finally accept two stories by a single author. His darkly humorous “Walking the Dog” opened the book, while the even more disturbing story that follows memorably closed the eighth edition of The Best New Horror . . .
INSTEAD OF GETTING UNDRESSED straight away, as Gran had told him to, Danny pulled aside one of the curtains she had drawn together and peered out again at the jetty, on the edge of the harbour to the right of him, to see what the men on the boat were doing. The little craft, a fishing smack, had docked five minutes earlier, and he had watched with admiration as the men aboard had manoeuvred it into place as easily as if they were parking a car. The sky was getting darker and the sea was flat, black and shiny, except for the white lace of tiny waves tacked along the edge of the beach. He could no longer make out the shape of the hull of the vessel, but the jetty was built of pale, slightly yellow stone against which he could see, in silhouette, the top of the boat and the activities of the two sailors on board.
They had pulled a cumbersome object, a box of some kind, up from the deck with a winch operated by a third man, above them on the jetty. He had been waiting for them, staring out to sea, for some time before they had arrived. Danny had asked his Gran to open the top window because it was an oppressively warm evening and the hotel room had a flat, earthy smell, like the inside of a greenhouse in winter. Through it he could hear the rattle of the hoist’s cranking chain as the box lurched into the air, and the barking shouts of the man operating it. He was a very big man, dressed in heavy, unseasonable garments that made him look like a bear. He moved like a bear as well, Danny thought, with rolling, lunging motions, and seemed to have trouble keeping his balance.
When the box rose to the level of his shoulders the man pulled it around with a rope attached to the top of the hoist, then slowly lowered it onto the jetty. It must have slipped its chains at the last moment because Danny saw it suddenly drop a few inches, and heard it land with a sound that made him think it was very heavy, and made of wood. The bear-like man walked around it quickly, inspecting it, then shouted sharply down to the others on the boat. At once, a light came on in the cabin at the front of the smack. The engine started clunking, the third man cast off the ropes, and the vessel curved away out into the bay beyond, leaving a widening ark of crumpled tin-foil foam in its wake.
“Danny – please. It’s so late, and you’ve not even got into your pyjamas!”
Gran didn’t seem at all cross, as his mother would have been, but she sounded strained and disappointed in him. Danny hadn’t heard her come in, but she always moved like that – so quietly and carefully, like a phantom. He dropped the edge of the curtain and, feeling slightly ashamed of himself, took the tray bearing a mug of chocolate and some toast she had brought him for supper, and set it down on the table beside his bed.
“I’m not tired, Gran,” he lied, then yawned hugely, giving the game away. “I was watching the sea,” he explained, somewhat inaccurately.
“You’ve got all week for that,” Gran said, folding a triangle of quilt tidily back away from his pillow to display how temptingly comfortable the bed beneath it looked.
Danny said, “I like the boats. There’s hundreds in the harbour. Will we be able to go for a trip on one?”
“I can’t take Grandad, and I mustn’t leave him behind, but perhaps you could go on your own, if I think it’s safe.”
“Is Grandad ill?” Danny asked, plugging the sink and twisting the taps to run water for his evening wash. When Gran didn’t answer he turned back to her and added, “He looks all right. I can’t see anything wrong with him.”
“He’s not exactly ill, like you were last winter, with your chest. It’s just that, recently, he’s got a bit . . . forgetful.”
“Yes,” Danny agreed, “I’ve noticed that,” and saw his Gran’s face darken. “I mean, sometimes, he looks at me as though he doesn’t know who I am. When I met you both at the station, and you left me with him and went to get a magazine, he asked me what my name was.”
“Oh dear,” said Gran, poking nervously at the grey curl that dangled down over her right eye, “did he really?”
“Then, when I told him, he just shook his head, as though he’d never heard of me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault,” Danny said generously. “He got my name right later.” He began to brush his teeth.
Pleased to be presented with this enforced curtailment of the conversation, when she had been thinking how she could change the subject without arousing in Danny an alarming suspicion that her husband was worse than he really was, Gran decided to make an exit.
“Breakfast is at eight-thirty,” she said, after kissing Danny goodnight on the top of his head.
“Can I go on my own, or must I wait for you?”
“No, you’re big enough now to make your own way down, I think.”
“Of course I am,” Danny agreed. “I was last year, when we went to Brighton, but you wouldn’t believe me.”
Gran smiled, but she didn’t seem to agree with him. “Into bed now, Danny,” she insisted. “I’ll look in soon to make sure you’re asleep.”
When she had gone Danny sipped the chocolate and pulled a face. It didn’t taste anything like it did at home, when his mother made it.
He poured the drink down the sink, ate the toast quickly, got into his pyjamas, then could not resist taking one more peep out the window before getting into bed.
The man on the jetty was still there. He was pushing the big heavy box towards the shore with great difficulty. He was bending behind it, almost on all fours, looking more than ever like a fat black bear. Although obviously pushing with all his strength, he was only managing to move it inches at a time. After two or three strenuous efforts he stopped, leaned against the box as though exhausted, then strained to shove it a couple of times more. It made a harsh crunching sound as it moved, as if it was sliding across a surface scattered with broken glass. The box was still only a few feet from where it had landed. At that rate, Danny thought, it would take the man all night to reach the end of the jetty!
He could hear the box sliding and grinding along every now and then as he lay in bed, but it didn’t sound as if it was getting any nearer. He felt sorry for the man. Why didn’t he get someone to help him? He had looked somehow very lonely out there, and the way he had spoken to the men on the fishing boat, and they to him, had not sounded at all friendly. It occurred to Danny that it was likely that the man was not nice to know, and had no friends.
When Gran peeped in, twenty minutes later, she could tell from his breathing that he was asleep. She was closing the door again when she heard the sound of the huge box being moved outside, and went to the window. By mistake, she had only brought her reading glasses on holiday with her, but was just able to see what Danny had seen and, like him, watched and speculated about the man on the jetty. At that moment he was leaning on the far edge of the box and his white blob of a face was looking up towards the hotel, or seemed to be. He remained in this pose for only a few moments, then suddenly bent down, shuffled his legs back a little, and began to push. His body appeared to compress as he increased his effort then, though Gran’s faulty vision could detect no movement, the box grated on the stone surface of the jetty as it jerked a few inches closer, and the figure behind it elongated. This happened three times, then the man stood up, stretched his back, arced his arms above his head, and glanced up towards the hotel again.
Gran stepped away from the window and closed her eyes for a moment as a harsh, cold light shone in on her. She realized it was the headlights of a car turning off the promenade, up into the town. She suddenly felt an unexpected evening breeze from somewhere, that made the edges of the curtains flutter, and caused her to twitch and clench her teeth and shudder.
Because of that, and because she didn’t want Danny woken up by any noise, she shut the window before she left the room.
Someone knocked on the door. Danny opened his eyes, registered the dim daylight beyond the curtains, and waited. Gran never needed inviting. When, after a static silence, whoever it was knocked again, Danny sat up and called, “Come in.” A young woman in a pale blue overall stepped sideways into the room. Still holding the door handle she showed him a sketch of a smile and said, “G’morning. Tea or coffee?”
Danny had not been expecting this. Hotels he had stayed in in the past had provided equipment for guests to make their own refreshments. He asked for tea and, while the girl was busy at a trolley he could see parked on the corridor outside, hauled himself up out of the last few yards of sleep, feeling obscurely embarrassed and slightly irritated.
The girl placed the tea by his bed and gave it an extra stir. She said, “Sleep well?” in a distant sort of way.
“Mmm, yes. Very, thank you.”
“Good,” the girl acknowledged, and bent down over him and began fussing with his pillow. Danny made some effort to sit up. The girl must have thought he was having difficulty doing so, as she reached behind his head with her right hand and supported the upper part of his back. It was a gentle, helpful movement, but Danny didn’t like it. The girl’s fingers were thin and hard against his spine and there was something investigative about the way she touched him that made him uneasy, as though she was literally weighing him up, and testing the quality of the flesh beneath his pyjamas.
He reared up away from her hand and shook his shoulders. The girl’s thumb and fingers rested for a moment on the top of his arm, almost squeezing, before she turned away to open the curtains with a flourish, revealing rain-spotted windows and, beyond, the grimy grey sky of the disappointing day outside.
“They say it will clear up later,” the girl assured him, and the edgy smile shifted briefly across her face again. Danny couldn’t understand why he didn’t like her. There was nothing about her looks to upset him. She had a sharp, but almost pretty face, and she was obviously trying to be nice. She couldn’t help having hard, bony fingers.
After she had gone Danny snuggled down into the bed again until he remembered the man on the jetty the night before. He played a game in his mind, laying bets with himself about how far the man had moved the box. In the end he decided there would be no sign of it. Someone would have been to collect it, and taken it away.
He hopped out of bed to check, and saw the box still on the jetty, not far from where he had last seen it. A large sheet of dark green tarpaulin, tied in place with a strand of rope, had been draped over it. A puddle of rain had formed on top of it. There was no sign of the man. The jetty was otherwise empty.
Danny found that if he stood on tiptoe he could just see over the roofs of the hotels on the street below him onto the beach to the left of the jetty. It too was deserted now, except for piles of deckchairs and a solitary dog, jumping and jerking in the foam at the waters edge, tugging savagely at something, probably a strand of black seaweed, that glistened like a hank of wet, soapy human hair. From time to time the dog dropped the weed, held up its head, and snapped its jaws open and shut.
Realizing his window had been closed, because he couldn’t hear the creature barking, Danny climbed onto the sill and opened it. Cold damp air straight off the sea surged into the room. He could hear the sloshing breakers of the turning tide, slightly baffled by the veils of wind-blown rain that were sweeping across the town, and the urgent, worried yapping of the dog, sounding much further off than it really was.
He washed, dressed quickly in a new T-shirt and jeans, and set out to find the dining room. The hotel was full of the smell of breakfast, and he hoped he could find his food by following his nose. He soon took a wrong turning, however, and wandered into a half-lit, grey painted room full of wheelchairs and pale-blue, uncomfortable looking furniture.
There was a large mural on the wall depicting, in faded primary colours, what he thought must be heaven, with naked sexless angels leading stooping elderly humans, in white togas, through an English rural landscape, drawn in such a way as to suggest a vast perspective.
At the top of the picture other angels, with tiny golden wings, flew through the sky, pulling strings of smiling old people along behind them. Yet more of the heavenly hosts, playing musical instruments, rested on cotton wool clouds beneath a beneficent, smirking sun, while a multitude of ancient mortals hovered around them, listening to their concert with obvious gratitude and appreciation.
At first Danny thought he was alone in the room, then he noticed, scattered along the walls, a number of elderly people, seemingly asleep in their seats and wheelchairs. They were lolling sideways, backwards, or forward, like inanimate puppets. One old man, his liver-spotted head quite bald on top, with an aura of pearly curls of unbrushed hair stretching up from the back of his neck to above his ears like coral or fungus, lay stretched out face down on the table in front of him.
Danny, chilled by the atmosphere of the room, froze on the spot for a few moments. Nobody moved, or showed in any way they were aware he was there, until a voice to his left called out, “Nurse! Is it you? Can you prop me up? My cushion slipped. I’ve lost it.”
Danny turned towards the sound and saw an incredibly thin old lady leaning at a sharp angle out of a wheelchair. She was resting on one arm, with her elbow in her lap, and stretching so far forward, she seemed to defy gravity. Her other arm dangled, limp as a bell rope, by her side. She had had to lift her head right back to see him, and her toothless mouth hung open wide, as dark inside as a railway tunnel. A pair of red-rimmed glasses rested slightly askew on her nose. Behind them, it seemed, her eyes were shut.
At the sound of her voice some of the other old people began to stir. A man’s tremulous voice called out insistently, “I’m hungry.” Someone started to cough and spit, another to moan, as though suddenly in pain, and a woman protested tiredly, “Mrs Grange has wet herself again. When are you going to do something about her?”
Danny stared at the floor below the person closest to the old lady who had spoken last, and saw, under her chair, a dark stain on the carpet.
The woman who had complained that she had lost her cushion repeated her plea for help, now sounding cross. Danny moved towards her and must have stepped into her line of vision because she said fiercely, “Who are you? You’re just a boy! Are they sending children, now, to look after us?”
Danny snatched up the cushion and thrust it towards the woman, who whined, “That’s no good to me, unless you pick me up and pull me back. Can’t you see that if it wasn’t for the strap, I’d have fallen on my face? You can’t leave me like this . . . I can hardly breathe . . .” and her voice died away, as though she were indeed expiring.
Danny saw she was held in place by a thick white belt tied tight around her waist and the back of her chair. She was so thin, the belt buckle on her stomach was only a couple of inches from the fabric of the chair against her spine.
Danny placed his hand on the top of her chest, that felt like a bird cage under his palms, and tried to push her upright, but he was not tall enough, and must have done something painful, because she gave a shriek and shouted, “What are you doing, child? What are you doing? Let go, for God’s sake . . . you’re hurting me.”
Some of the other old people started to shout abuse at him then, and he felt his eyes flood and his throat constrict, and knew he was going to cry.
A man’s voice, coming from just behind Danny, said, “What’s the matter Betty? You are making a fuss. The young gentleman is only trying to help.”
The scrawny woman said, “Where have you been Kelvin? Where’s our breakfast? You’re ever so late.”
“No I’m not,” the man said. “I’m just on time.”
“You’re a bloody liar,” the woman suggested peevishly. “What do you mean by sending bits of kids to look after us?”
“He’s not on the staff, Betty, he’s a guest,” the man explained, easily hauling the woman upright and adjusting her limbs so she sat in a comfortable, balanced position.
“Then why is he here? This is no place for kids.”
“I don’t know.” The man, who was dressed in a white jacket, like the Chinese who worked in Danny’s local chip shop wore, gave him a curious, slightly angry look that was only partly disguised by the shadow of a smile he managed to force across his face. He had a bony, narrow head, with dark hair brushed back tight against his scalp, and a large nose under which sprouted a pencil moustache. His smile reminded Danny of the girl who had brought him tea half an hour earlier, who had also seemed to find it hard to form her features into a good humoured expression for more than a second.
“I expect he’s got lost,” the man continued. “Is that right, young man?”
Danny, choking back tears, wiped his fingers under his nose and nodded.
“I expect you were looking for the dining room?”
Danny didn’t stop nodding.
“This is the Twilight Lounge. The room you want is on the floor below. You should have kept on walking, down another flight of stairs.”
The man clasped Danny’s shoulder unnecessarily hard and steered him out of the door. Two or three of the old people shouted, “Nurse, nurse!” in protest at being left alone again.
“Back in a tick,” the man yelled, with an edge of irritation. His voice was so loud, Danny looked up at him, startled. Noticing this the man explained, in a more moderate tone, “They’re deaf, sonny. Most of them are deaf,” and led Danny to the top of the stairs and pointed the way to the dining room.
Danny, no longer crying, and bursting with curiosity now, said, “Those old people back there . . . they thought you were a nurse, didn’t they?”
“That’s what I am.”
“But this is a hotel, not a hospital!”
“It’s a bit of both,” the man said, after a short pause.
“Oh,” Danny said, totally confused.
Back in the lounge the old people were cackling and calling for Kelvin, who gave Danny a horrible wink that briefly distorted the whole of one side of his face, then retreated to join them.
A portly woman pushed a heated trolley reeking of bacon out of the lift and across the corridor into the Twilight Lounge. She was greeted with a tiny, ironic ovation from the residents.
Danny ran down to the dining room, which was almost empty. He had left his room at exactly eight-thirty, and the incident in the lounge had only lasted two or three minutes.
He sat alone at a table close to a rain-flecked window that looked out to sea. He could see the box on the jetty and, through a gap between two of the buildings below, a slice of the promenade and the beach beyond. The box looked bigger and somehow heavier from the lower level. The wind blew up under the tarpaulin draped across it, causing the hanging sides of the covering to flap mournfully. It looked as though someone inside the box was reaching about through holes in the sides with their hands, trying to find some way out.
When, fifteen minutes later, Gran and Grandad came to join him, Danny had almost finished breakfast. He wondered if he should have waited and eaten with them, but Gran said nothing about that. Perhaps she hadn’t noticed. She had a preoccupied, anxious look on her face that Danny was getting used to seeing there. She kept half an eye on Grandad all the time, was aware of every move he made, and turned to give him her full attention whenever he spoke. Something about the way she treated her husband made Danny feel quite grown up, as though he and Grandad had changed places.
The room filled up with old people. Danny looked out for anyone his age, but there was only one girl, a couple of years older and four inches taller than him, who pulled a tight face when he smiled at her, and didn’t look up from her plate again.
When Grandad had finished eating he asked Gran what day it was. She told him Sunday, but a little later he asked the same question and, when she tried to get him to remember the answer she had given him earlier, he said he hadn’t asked her before, and if she didn’t know what day it was, why didn’t she just admit it?
Gran put her hand on his arm and, very quietly, said she had told him, and not long ago. Grandad insisted she hadn’t, in a high, strange voice, and Danny thought he looked worried, even frightened.
A waitress came to clear the table and Grandad said to her, “My wife has forgotten what day it is. Perhaps you can enlighten her?”
The girl arched her eyebrows, looked from Grandad to Gran and back, and tried to smile.
Why is it nobody at this place can smile for more than a second? Danny thought, and for the first time began to wonder if he was going to enjoy the holiday.
The girl looked unsure of how to respond to Grandad’s request for such basic information, hoping, but doubting, it was a joke. To avoid her embarrassment, Danny looked out of the window, towards the box on the jetty.
A big bird was standing on top of it. As Danny, watched the bird started strutting backwards and forwards, half-opening and closing its long, slender wings. It was just some kind of gull, Danny supposed. It was that sort of shape, but he had no idea they could grow so big and he had never seen one that dark before. Perhaps it had been caught in an oil slick? Suddenly, it launched itself off the edge of the box and soared into the sky.
Danny turned back to the table when the waitress said, “It’s Sunday, of course. All day.”
Grandad said, “Thank you very much”, and gave Gran a silly, mocking shake of his head.
Anger, embarrassment, and some other indefinable pain registered on Gran’s face. She got to her feet. As she did so, Grandad automatically rose from his chair, only more slowly, with less agility.
Danny jumped up to help him. “What are we going to do today?” he said. “It’s raining. Do we have to stay in?”
“We will,” Gran said, “for now. But you can go for a walk, to explore, if you want to.”
“Definitely,” Danny said. “It’s dead boring here.”
Gran gave him the first real smile he had received all day. “Don’t catch cold though, and ruin your holiday.”
“No problem. I’ll be alright.”
As Danny moved around the table to follow his grandparents, something moved out of the grey clouds beyond the window next to him, and descended towards him. The oversized gull he had seen landed on the balcony a yard from the window. It folded its wings with an air of deliberation and craned its neck. It turned sideways on awkward, stumbling feet, cocked its head at an angle, and stared at Danny down one side of its beak.
The beak was grimy yellow, like a heavy smoker’s teeth. The bird stretched forward and screamed, as though announcing its presence, then stood motionless, watching him. It was at least four times as big as any gull Danny had seen before, and he thought he had been right about the oil slick, because its inky plumage had a glossy sheen, like the wet tarpaulin on the box it had been standing on when he had first noticed it.
“Danny!”
Gran’s voice. She and Grandad were waiting for him at the door. Everyone in the room turned towards him.
They’re all so old, he thought.
He knew Todley Bay was popular with elderly people, and owed its reputation to what it had to offer that age group. His mother had told him all that weeks ago, and explained that the holiday was intended as a break for Gran and Grandad, and that he had to be on his best behaviour all the time, and not give them any worries.
So he knew the resort would be their sort of place, with probably not much going for kids, but he had not expected to see so many old people. Most of them looked really ancient. There was hardly anyone in the room under – what? He wildly guessed . . . seventy? Eighty?
Except for the waitresses, and the girl he had noticed, he was the only young person present. He looked for the girl again, and saw she was watching him, like the others. She gave him a withering look that actually made him shudder. There was something about her, he decided, which set her among the old people. She looked used up, done in, worn out. Then he realized she was probably very ill, and felt sorry for her at once.
He hurried to the door, but looked back before stepping out. The gull hadn’t moved. It was still there, glaring in through the window.
Danny was keen to get spending. He’d been saving up his pocket money for weeks and couldn’t wait to drop some of it into slot-machines, or buy sticks of his favourite pineapple rock and things to play with on the beach.
But the shops were disappointing. They were dingy and dark, with a lot of old stock that no one would ever buy, and the proprietors watched him all the time, as though they thought he were a thief. In one store down near the beach the rock and other sweets were covered in grey dust, and looked shrivelled-up inside their wrappers. Danny bought a stick, because he had to buy something, but it tasted worse than the pencils he was in the habit of chewing at school, so he threw it in a bin.
He wandered into the town, that sprawled almost perpendicularly up the hill behind the bay, in search of anything interesting, but soon got bored with endless rows of cream painted houses advertising BED & BREAKFAST or offering themselves as RESIDENTIAL HOMES FOR THE AGED. He passed a church that was open, with the bell ringing, but nobody went in or out. A gaunt and gloomy vicar with a lead-grey face was standing at the door, stiff as a waxwork, waiting to shake someone’s hand.
It got tiring, climbing up the steep streets, so Danny turned back. His feet wanted to run down the sharp incline towards the beach, so he let them. The soles of his trainers slapped like clapping hands on the wet, empty streets, and he began to feel exhilarated, the way you should feel on holiday.
The tide was on its way out and he ran without stopping right down the beach to the water’s edge. It was cold down there, and a wind driving off the sea carried a miserable, almost invisible mist with it, but Danny tried not to let that bother him. He threw some pebbles at a jellyfish, played tag with the waves, then trotted along until he was suddenly brought up short by the jetty, half of which still stretched out into the sea. It was about ten feet high, but there were steps up the side, which he climbed without thinking.
As he reached the top, and looked across the harbour beyond, something called out to his right, towards the town. It sounded like the voice of a demented woman screeching his name. He turned and saw, five yards away, the box, and, hovering above it, with its feet stretching down, about to land, the enormous gull. It called again, almost dancing on the tarpaulin with the tips of its claws as it carved at the air with it wings to keep itself just in flight, then settled and became motionless and silent, like a stuffed bird in a museum.
It was staring straight at Danny. There was something threatening about the creature’s posture – it looked tense, as though it was ready to burst into furious action any second. Cautiously, Danny took a few paces towards it. It side-stepped once, adjusting its position slightly in a gust of buffeting wind, but showed no fear of him, or any sign that it was about to fly away. Its position on the box put it slightly higher than Danny’s head, so its beak was just above his eyes.
The beak resembled a scaled-down sword from a fantasy film. It was at least eight inches long, and the upper section curved sharply down in a cruel, hard, hooked point. Danny thought the bird would have no trouble opening up his skull with a weapon like that on its head.
When he was a few feet away, and still beyond the gull’s reach, Danny stopped, worried about his eyes, that suddenly seemed very vulnerable. He saw that the bird had a cold and crazy look in its eyes, which reminded him of snakes and alligators.
Danny blew air out through his pursed lips, and shook his head. He realized he was afraid, and not just of the gull. There was more to it than that. The air around him felt charged and dangerous. Beyond the jetty, the town itself seemed to be watching him, poised and ready to tumble forward on top of him in a huge avalanche if he did the wrong thing. Something, he sensed, was in the balance.
For the first time he took a close look at the box. It was made of wood, bound with strips of greenish metal that could have been brass, and its unpainted surface was mottled with patches of dank, dark-emerald growth. Probably some kind of marine weed. It stood in a puddle of its own making. The wood was waterlogged, which partly explained why the man he had seen pushing it had found the task such heavy going. The lid, if it had a lid, was under the flapping tarpaulin cover, but something about the box gave Danny the impression it was locked up very tight. It looked impenetrable! Briefly he wondered what, if anything, was inside it, then hastily closed his mind to the ugly images that were trying to crawl up out of his imagination.
All at once, Danny wanted to get back into the town. The jetty was narrow, but the box took up less than half its width. He could slip past it easily, but in doing so, he would put himself well within the reach of the gull. If it attacked him, he might fall off the jetty. It was a long way down to the beach, and there were flint rocks sticking out of the sand below. He took another look at the creature’s beak. The gull glared back and nodded curtly once, as if to confirm his apprehensions.
“Look,” Danny said, without having any idea why, “I don’t want anything to do with this. I’m just here on holiday.” Then he added, “I’m sorry,” in a tone more of confusion than apology, and turned and fled back down the steps.
He didn’t stop running when he felt the sand of the beach under his feet, but continued right up to the hotel. When he had almost reached it, just as he was trotting up the drive, the sun slid out from behind the clouds above him and its light blazed down on all the town like a laser beam.
The rest of the day was showery, so the three of them didn’t stray far from the TV in the Hotel lounge. When he went to bed Danny thought he could hear the box being pushed along the jetty again, but he was so tired, even though he had done nothing much all day, he fell asleep almost at once.
Next morning, when the girl came into his room, threw back the curtains to reveal a blue, cloudless sky, and came towards him with a cup of tea, he jumped up in bed at once, so she wouldn’t have any excuse to touch him. Even so, she put one hand on his head and poked about in his hair while he sipped his drink, as though she was gently feeling for lumps.
It seemed to Danny that her fingertips were like cold, hard marbles rolling about on his scalp. He assumed it was a gesture of affection – he couldn’t think what else it could be, and resisted the urge to duck away. But, when she sat down next to him, he jumped out of bed, ran to the sink, and started washing.
In the morning he spent an hour in a drab little seafront cafe with his grandparents drinking banana milkshakes. After lunch the three of them went down to the beach. Grandad, in a boyish mood, led the way. He looked as though he was wearing someone else’s clothes, because he had lost so much weight in the last year, but Danny recognized the fawn trousers the old man had worn on the last three of their previous holidays together.
Gran, Danny noticed, seemed more anxious than ever about Grandad when he was at all boisterous, as though she was scared his behaviour might get out of hand. As soon as Grandad had put his cap on backwards, and his face had taken on the now all-too-familiar clown’s witless smile that had come to haunt it recently, Gran’s features had responded by setting into a rigid, pained expression. She looked as though she had a bad headache.
Grandad had wandered away from her twice, and the second time it had taken her half an hour to locate him. He had been with two men who were leading him away, or seemed to be. They had not spoken to her when she had reclaimed her husband, and she hadn’t liked the look of them. They looked like muggers, she said.
Danny, feeling sympathy for both his grandparents, took care to be on his best behaviour when he was with them, but he wished they’d loosen up. He was now definitely beginning to wonder what kind of holiday it was going to be!
Gran decided it was too windy to sit on the beach, so she steered Grandad into a shelter on the promenade from where they could watch Danny doing the things children do on such occasions. He made a cake-like sandcastle without much enthusiasm, because he was beginning to wonder if he was too old for such activities, then stripped down to his trunks and sped towards the sea, now quite a long way out.
In places the surface of the sand had been formed into hard ridges by the action of the out-going tide. They ran along the whole length of the beach. They hurt the soles of his bare feet if he ran, and forced him to slow down and walk carefully. To Danny, it looked as though hundreds of endless fat worms lay paralysed just below the surface.
Old Man Sand’s got wrinkles, he said to himself, and laughed at the thought, though there was something not-very-nice about the idea that he found alarming and tried to shove to the back of his mind.
After paddling for a while in the shallow sea, that was starting to warm in the sun, and taking a short, leisurely swim, he noticed he felt constrained and uneasy. Something was missing! Except for the sound of waves breaking on the shore, and the occasional scream of gulls (ordinary sized gulls, that was), the beach was strangely quiet. Conspicuous by its absence, he realized, was hubbub, pandemonium. He missed the voices of children yelling and shouting in excitement to each other, and telling their parents about what they were up to at the tops of their voices. The whole beach, the entire Bay even, though now more populated, was muffled, silent, and somehow static. Like a painting. Danny looked about him at his fellow bathers.
There were not many. Within twenty yards of him half a dozen elderly people, their trousers and skirts rolled or hitched up, wandered about ankle-deep at the water’s edge.
A beefy man with bulging eyes and purple skin, looking as though his whole body had been beaten into one huge bruise, occasionally hurled himself into deeper water further out and swam a few stiff, furious strokes.
A woman in a lime-green costume, standing in the sea close to Danny, suddenly stooped, lowered herself to her knees, sat on her heels and bowed her head in a praying attitude. Her flesh oozed out around the edges of her costume like viscous liquid when she moved. Her skin was crinkled, like the monkey’s brain in a bottle in the biology lab at Danny’s school. She seemed uncomfortable in the position she had adopted and wriggled around so she could lay back on the sand.
A wave breaking over her created the illusion that she was sliding feet first into the sea. Seconds later, when it withdrew, Danny imagined he saw something in the water, clasped around her ankles, tugging her away from the beach.
This impression was so strong he walked closer to get a better look at her. The next wave was bigger, however, and submerged her completely. She did not, as Danny expected, start up when the water covered her face, but her body yawed slightly in the drag of the tide. Her eyes were shut and her mouth was open wide. She could have been shouting, laughing or even yawning.
Baffled and alarmed, Danny thought he ought to try to help the woman, though she gave no indication that she was at all distressed. He wondered if he should ask one of the other old people for their assessment of the situation, then saw that two of them were now also kneeling down. The red-skinned man who had been swimming had vanished, but Danny was sure he had not passed him on his way back to the beach. The last time he had seen him, the man had been in the act of lunging forward in a clumsy dive.
Out in the area where the man had been standing, Danny noticed, for the first time, what looked like dark shadows under the waves. They appeared to be moving. He thought they must be weed-covered rocks, just visible at the bottom of the grey-green water.
One of the two people who were kneeling lay back in the water.
Danny suddenly looked down at his feet. He thought something had touched his right ankle. The sand next to it was disturbed, as though some fast-moving object had hurriedly dug down into it. He turned and ran a few yards out of the water, stood on the nearly dry sand, and looked back. The tide must be coming in fast, he thought, as there was no sign of the woman in the green costume. He could no longer see some of the other people who had been paddling, but a handful more had stumbled forward off the beach into the sea. He realized that none of them had nodded to him, or given him so much as a glance.
He shrugged, and jogged back to where Gran and Grandad were sitting in the shelter. Gran looked more relaxed, perhaps because Grandad was asleep. She held a finger to her lips to warn Danny to keep his voice down, and asked him if he was enjoying himself. Danny didn’t want to upset her by telling the truth about how he did feel at that moment, which in any case would be difficult to explain, so he just nodded. He asked for money for an ice cream.
As Gran fumbled in her purse, Danny noticed a man sitting on the bench on the other side of Grandad was watching him. He was heavily built, with a bald head and heavy jowls and was dressed in old, dark, working clothes. He could have been a fisherman. He had one arm along the bench behind Grandad’s head. Two fingers of his hand rested on Grandad’s shoulder. As Danny looked back at him, he lifted the fingers and curled them back towards his palm.
Danny got ice creams for himself and Gran, and hurried back. The bald man had gone, so Danny sat in the vacant place.
“Who was that man, Gran?” he asked.
“Which man?”
“The one who had his arm around Grandad.”
“Danny, what do you mean? I’m sure he wasn’t doing anything of the kind.”
“He was,” Danny insisted. “I think he wanted Grandad to go with him.”
Gran, hearing the conviction in his voice, leaned forward and turned to look at him.
“This is a funny place, isn’t it?” Danny continued.
“Todley Bay? Don’t you like it here?”
“Not as much as Brighton.”
“I think it’s very nice.”
“There’s no kids.”
Gran smiled. “There must be some.”
“I can’t see any.”
Gran pushed her glasses up her nose and looked around. “Not here, at the moment, perhaps,” she conceded, “but on the beach . . .”
Danny swallowed the last of his ice cream and wiped his mouth. “No. It’s all old people, everywhere.”
“You’re exaggerating. What about that girl who’s staying at our hotel. She’s about your age. Why don’t you try to get to know her?”
“She’s sick. I bet she never leaves the hotel.”
“Um,” Gran agreed thoughtfully, “she doesn’t look well. I expect she’s convalescing.”
“I think she’s dying,” Danny said, matter-of-factly.
“Danny!” Gran said loudly, causing Grandad to twitch out of his doze, “I’m sure that’s not true. What has got into you?”
“What’s the trouble?” Grandad demanded. “What’s got into who?”
“Danny, Harry. I don’t think he’s enjoying himself. He’s in a very strange mood.”
“Danny?” said Grandad, looking at his grandson as though he were a total stranger.
The grim look returned to Gran’s face. She glanced at her watch. “Good heavens, look at the time. We’d better start back for the evening meal,” she said, rising from her seat. Grandad rose up with her, like a Siamese twin joined to her at the shoulder.
Danny was surprised how easy it was to get lost in the hotel. The corridors and public rooms were decorated uniformly throughout, which made it hard to get your bearings, but even so, it didn’t explain why he lost his way quite so often. He kept finding himself on the wrong floor! He’d carefully count the turns in the flights of stairs, so he was sure he knew exactly where he was, only to discover he was one, or even two, floors out.
He noticed quite a few of the old people wandering around in even deeper bafflement than usual from time to time, which made him feel better, because it suggested he wasn’t the only one experiencing this peculiar disorientation.
A couple of times Danny bumped into Kelvin, the nurse with the thin pencil moustache, who told him how to get to where he wanted to go. He wasn’t exactly unfriendly, but he must have been a very busy man, because he hardly stopped long enough to give the necessary directions before he blustered off again.
On the third night of the holiday, after leaving his grandparents in the TV Lounge, Danny searched about down wrong corridors for ten minutes before he found his room. He complimented himself – he was getting better. The night before it had taken twice that long to get his bearings.
As he was putting on his pyjamas, he heard the big box being shoved along the jetty. A shining mist that had crawled up off the sea with the onset of darkness had vanished when he looked out of the window. The air was clear, and he could see the man had nearly got the box to the end of the jetty. Danny was very interested to see what would happen next, because he knew there were two steps up from the jetty to the promenade and the street beyond, and he couldn’t see how one man could possibly get the box up them without help.
He got into bed and pretended to be asleep when Gran came, so she only stayed a moment. (He felt bad about it, but he had become fed-up with her company that evening, because she was wearing herself out fussing over Grandad, who was definitely going ga-ga. They were both getting visibly worse daily. A lot of the time it was a pain being with them.)
When Gran had gone, Danny got up again and looked out the window. The box was about a foot from the steps, and the man had gone. He watched for a while, but nothing happened, so he slid back between the sheets, feeling let-down and disappointed, and fell asleep. Later, something woke him up. Noises, coming from the direction of the jetty. Different noises! He trotted to the window and looked out.
The man was back. He had set a lantern on the edge of the top step, and had placed a long metal tube or roller, four or five inches in diameter, at the base of the box, on the side closest to the steps. He was lifting the box with a jack.
When it was the right height he kicked the roller under it on one side, let the box drop, then went around to the far side to repeat the process. When the roller was under the full length of the leading edge of the box, he went behind it and began to push. After a struggle, it moved a short distance towards the steps, and the side of the box above the roller rose a little higher. After giving three huge shoves the man got another, thicker roller from somewhere and laid it in front of the first one he had positioned. Then he went behind the box, and pushed and pushed.
The front edge of the thing was soon higher than the bottom step and, in twenty minutes, after the man had put more rollers in place and done a lot more heaving, it was hovering a good distance above and beyond the top of the second. Then the man hit a problem. Because it was inclined at an angle, he was finding it increasingly difficult to move the box. He was having to push it up, as well as forward. He seemed to give up then, and went and sat on the top step and stared down at the box.
Danny watched the slumped figure for a while until he got bored. He thought the man might have gone to sleep. He was just about ready to return to bed when he saw movements on the beach below him. The tide was almost in, and a man was walking off the narrow strip of sand, diagonally out into the sea.
The small, thin, stooping figure, dressed in dark clothes, was just visible against the inky water, moving slowly and regularly, as though setting out for a stroll on the ocean bed. When the sea was in up to his waist he stopped, sank back into the water and disappeared from sight. Danny thought – no, he knew – the person, whoever he was, had stretched out on the sand, like the woman in the green costume he had seen the day before.
There were a few deckchairs left out on the beach, Danny noticed, spread about near where the now presumably drowning man had been when he’d first sighted him. To his amazement he could see shapes that could only be people, sprawling in some of the chairs. Danny peered at his watch. It was almost midnight – it had been dark for almost two hours!
They’re moon-bathing, he thought, and smiled uneasily in the dark, aware that the people didn’t look at all funny.
As he looked back out the window he saw something scuttle up out of the sea, across the beach, in among the parked deckchairs. It moved like a spider. It clung close to the sand, had no definite shape, and at first Danny thought it was dead seaweed, broken loose from its roots, washed ashore, dried in the sun, and blowing in the wind. Until he realized there was no wind to speak of, certainly not enough to set in motion anything more substantial than a scrap of paper.
What he could see was moving of its own volition, and soon demonstrated that it had considerable strength! A section of its edge blended with the outline of one of the occupied chairs, which lifted and tumbled over on its side, tipping the person seated on it onto the sand. The figure lay motionless for as long as it took the mobile shape to dart around and attach itself to an outstretched arm, the part of the body closest to the sea. The body twitched once, then slid smoothly to the tide line and into the waves beyond, where it, and the thing pulling it, sank out of sight. Then, for a time, nothing moved on the beach that Danny could see, though his eyes were alert for the slightest motion.
It was a sound from the end of the jetty that grabbed his attention next – a loud grunt of pain or effort, or both. He turned just in time to see the bear-like man heave the box almost into the air and up onto the edge of the promenade. The action seemed to have spent the last of his energy. He flopped around picking up the rollers and tucking them under his arm like a man at the last extreme of exhaustion, then staggered off towards the harbour. Danny watched him shrink away into the darkness, then realized he was stiff with standing still, and crawled into bed.
He fell asleep wondering what the man, who was awake most nights, did in the daytime.
It was very hot next day. So much so that Gran and Grandad sat on the beach for the first time. They couldn’t walk far in the sand, because of Gran’s feet, so Danny put up deckchairs for them at the bottom of the steps that led to the promenade. He sat with them for a while, watching the beach fill with elderly holidaymakers then, for something to say, because the old pair were not inclined to talk in the heat, he mentioned that he had seen people on the sands late at night.
“I expect they were workmen tidying up all the litter,” Gran said.
“The tide does that,” Danny said, “when it goes in and out. No, they were sitting in chairs, like we are, or walking into the sea.”
“Danny, you were dreaming. They’d have caught their deaths of cold.”
Danny wanted to say he thought they were dead, or looked it, but knew that Gran would say he was talking nonsense and get cross with him.
Even so, he couldn’t help saying, “I wish we had gone to Brighton. This place is weird.”
“I think it’s very pleasant,” Gran said, “and restful. There’s none of the noise and fuss you get at so many holiday places nowadays. And people are so nice and polite.”
“You didn’t like those men who tried to walk off with Grandad,” Danny observed.
“You were probably wrong about them. Perhaps they thought Grandad was lost and they were taking him to a policeman.”
Danny didn’t answer, because he had just spotted, not far away along the beach, one of the deckchairs he had seen someone slumped in last night. He knew it was the same one, because it was in exactly the same position in relation to a stack of chairs next to it as it had been when he had seen it from his bedroom window.
It was facing away from him but he could tell it was occupied because the canvas seat was bulging down and back. He was about to go and take a look at it and its occupant when something made him change his mind. There was a cloud of flies swarming above the chair, dozens of them, big black ones, he thought he could almost hear them buzzing. No one else had set up their deckchairs for a good distance all around that particular one, Danny noticed.
“Look at all those flies, Gran,” he said.
“What?”
“Over there – look.” He pointed. “Above that chair.”
“I can’t see flies, Danny, if they land on me. My eyes aren’t good enough. I can only just see the chair.”
For some reason this remark made Danny rather anxious. He felt suddenly isolated and vulnerable. Looking around he discovered he was, as far as he could see, the only child on the beach.
He shut his eyes then, and pretended to sunbathe, but he couldn’t settle. His mind was swirling with vague apprehensions.
For the first time all week he found he was missing his parents. At first, he had been relieved to get away from them. They had been so grumpy and depressing recently, though they had continued to treat him as kindly as they had always done. Nevertheless, life at home had been different since his father had received the letter telling him his job would no longer exist in ten weeks, and his parents had taken to endless grinding arguments about money. Danny heard them late at night in the room below his, their voices rasping on like two blunt saws taking turns to cut through a particularly thick, hard log.
They were worried about Gran and Grandad too, and Danny could understand why now. He realized that the whole family had problems. He had problems! Suddenly he wanted to talk to his parents very badly, but he knew he wouldn’t see them until the end of the week.
After half-an-hour he went and got some drinks. Grandad insisted on coming with him, somewhat to Danny’s relief. He tried not to listen to Grandad’s talk, because he seemed to think Danny was someone he had worked with years ago in Canada. That was unnerving, but he felt glad he was not walking alone.
The way to the cafe took them past the huge, brass-bound box parked on the promenade. Even in bright sunlight it looked sinister Danny thought, though other passers-by seemed unawed by it. The wood had dried out a lot, and was beginning to crack, and the mossy weed clinging to it had turned grey and ash-like. A heat-haze shimmered over the tarpaulin.
There was no sign of the great gull but, when Danny looked up into the sky, he saw, very high up, a black dot that was growing larger as it descended fast towards the ground. Danny grabbed Grandad’s hand to hurry him along. He had a vision of what the bird could do with its beak if it hit someone after descending at that speed from that height.
He made sure, when they returned to Gran with their drinks, they went by a roundabout way along the beach, keeping well clear of the box. The route took them past the deckchair that had been shrouded with flies. It was empty now. Danny got the impression that a small group of youngish men in overalls, moving down the beach towards the sea, were carrying something they had lifted from the chair but, in the confusion of people, it was hard to be sure. He went quite near the chair and saw there were still a few flies on duty there, hovering over a wet, red-brown stain on the canvas seat.
It seemed to be a bad day for insects. Early in the afternoon millions of tiny silver and brown flies with thin bodies and long legs appeared from nowhere on the beach. They hopped rather than flew, and got all over Danny’s bare legs and arms. They were strangely dry and weightless, like the congregations of corpses that gather on window ledges in empty houses in the summer, and seemed almost without substance. They didn’t bite or sting. They were just disgusting. Danny had soon had enough of them. He asked Gran if he could go for a boat trip around the bay.
“You said I could, and if I don’t go soon, the holiday will be over,” he pleaded.
“There’s still three more whole days,” Gran said, but she agreed he could do as he had asked. They left their beach-bag and Danny’s towels on their chairs because Gran said she was sure there were no thieves about, and the three of them made their way to the harbour.
One of the two boats that did trips was out beyond the headland, just visible in the distance, and the second was almost full and ready to go. It was a big, wide boat that Gran declared quite safe, so she gave Danny some money and told him to get on board. He found a seat at the front and waved at his grandparents with his handkerchief for a joke. Gran waved back, and Grandad copied her movements exactly, a sight that made Danny laugh aloud.
A teenage boy in sun-bleached denim jumped onto the boat and began collecting money and handing out tickets, then a man stepped quickly down from the harbour, started the engine, and grasped hold of the wheel.
It was the bear-like man who Danny had seen moving the box. There was no mistaking his rolling movements, and he was wearing the same clothes as he had been the night before. Danny could tell by the shape of him. The only difference was that at night the man wore a cap and now had nothing on his bald head. Danny got a good look at his face, and not for the first time. He was sure the man had been sitting next to Grandad the day before, with his arm around the back of Grandad’s chair and his fingers on the old man’s shoulder.
Danny jumped up to get off the boat just as, with a grinding growl of the engine that echoed off the hill behind the town, it cut away from the harbour wall. The man glanced sharply at him and the teenager asked him to get back in his seat. Danny did so at once, and tried to make himself small and inconspicuous.
The man, at the front of the boat, was facing away from Danny. He made an announcement about safety procedures as he steered the vessel out through the maze of moored pleasure-craft to the harbour mouth, then handed the wheel over to his young mate when they reached the open sea. He turned around, sat down, and lit a little cigar. As he blew out smoke he raised his head and glanced quickly around at his passengers. When he saw Danny, he took another sharp drag at his cigar and seemed to shake his head slightly. The gesture had no clear meaning that Danny could interpret, but it frightened him because he felt he had been singled out, perhaps even recognized.
He remembered when he had been watching the man pushing the box along the jetty he had got the impression that the fellow had looked back up at him on a number of occasions, though there was no chance he could really have seen a small boy standing some considerable distance away in the dark, half-hidden behind a curtain. Unless he had remarkable eyesight! He certainly had remarkable eyes, which stared through Danny as though they were focused on a point a million miles behind his head.
Danny thought of the huge black seagull then, that had been so high in the sky above the box when he had passed close to it with Grandad just a couple of hours earlier. The bird must have good eyesight too – it had dropped down at once when it had seen him approach, or so it had appeared to Danny.
Why? Did it think he was going to do some harm to the box, that it seemed to be guarding? Danny couldn’t believe that. He hadn’t the means or strength to damage it, even if, for some crazy reason, he’d had the inclination to do so. He wasn’t bothered about the box – he wanted nothing to do with it, as he had told the bird when he had come close to it on the jetty two days ago. At the time it he had felt foolish talking to a seagull, but not so now. He just wished he had said more. He was afraid he had not made himself understood.
When, after a quarter of an hour, the boat turned its prow into the Bay again for the return trip, Danny was glad the ride was half over. He’d been too confused and anxious to enjoy himself and imagined he was seasick, his stomach felt so queasy. He was very glad when the man, whose hard, unfriendly gaze had returned to him every few minutes, got up to take over the wheel again as they approached the harbour.
Gran was waiting for him on the promenade, holding onto a railing at the very edge of the harbour. Danny waved, but he knew she wouldn’t see him. He doubted if she could even see the boat, but she knew what time he was due to return, and was just being there for him.
Grandad sat on a bench a few feet behind her, talking to a man seated next to him. His conversation was animated – he waved his arms and at one point stood up and made a gesture, incomprehensible to Danny, to illustrate some point he was making. Danny guessed he thought his companion was someone from years back in his past, when his life had been exciting, and that they were sharing some adventure together.
As Grandad, in his enthusiasm, took a few steps away from the bench, another man, who Danny had not noticed, but who must have been standing near by, screwed up some paper he had been eating out of and tossed it into a bin. Then he sidled closer to Grandad as though he were on wheels, in a sliding, gliding movement that arrested Danny’s attention completely, and totally altered his understanding of the scene he was witnessing.
The man on the bench got up, stood next to Grandad, and pointed inland to somewhere in the town. When Grandad turned to look, the man took his arm, and began, with a certain amount of force, Danny thought, to lead him away. The second man, moving as though he were sliding on ice, fell in behind them.
Gran, still peering myopically out to sea, was obviously unaware of what was going on behind her. The boat was coming in to dock now, and Danny could see her bland, smiling face staring out at the blur of the world in front of her.
He half stood up and shouted at her, and made jerking movements with his hand intended to make her look behind. As he rose to his feet some of the other passengers thought he was getting ready to disembark and also started to get up off their seats. Perceiving this, the man who was steering the boat turned and yelled something to his mate, who jumped onto a chair and called to everyone to be seated. In the confusion of people bobbing up and down Danny lost sight of Gran, but he was careful to keep an eye on Grandad, who was being led slowly uphill into the town.
Not a purposeful walker at the best of times, Grandad liked to stop and start when the urge took him, and the two men were plainly having trouble getting him to go where they wanted him to, and were making slow progress.
The boat bumped against the harbour wall and the teenager skipped ashore to fasten the ropes. The bear-like man took his place next to the couple of steps up the side of the vessel and helped his frail, nervous passengers onto dry land by steering them across the short gangplank, whether they wanted him to or not.
Danny tried to squeeze forward in the queue, getting a few sharp comments from some old ladies as he did so. When his turn to disembark came he tried to avoid the hands of the man by almost running off the boat, but without success. He felt fingers like tentacles curl around his upper arm to stop him in mid-stride.
The man lifted him effortlessly and half-turned him so they were face to face. Danny could smell cigar smoke on his breath, and other more strange odours that he had never come across before. There was a scrap of tobacco on the man’s lip that must have irritated him, as he flicked it with his tongue, and spat it out over Danny’s shoulder with a toss of his head. The action reminded Danny of squirrels he had seen in the park at home, standing on their hind legs and spitting out indigestible fragments of nuts they were eating.
Not that there was anything cute or squirrel-like about the man’s appearance. His heavily-featured face with its sharp, down-curving nose, and receding, almost horizontal forehead was set hard in an ambiguous mask of contempt and vague curiosity, as though Danny were a not-very-fine example of something that, had it been of better or different quality, would perhaps have interested him. Either his head was unusually small, or it seemed so in proportion to the bulk of his vast, barrel-like body. His little gimlet eyes bore in on Danny’s like nails. In the irises of each of them Danny could see tiny reflections of his own frightened face.
The man loosened his grip on Danny’s arms and ran his hands down them to the wrists, pressing with his finger tips, feeling for the bones beneath the flesh. He held the joints of Danny’s wrists between his thumbs and fingers and lifted them to the height of his shoulders, so the boy’s hands hung in front of him like a half-animated puppet’s.
Danny squirmed and looked back over his shoulder. Gran was just behind him on the promenade. He could tell from the confusion and apprehension on her face that she was close enough to see what was happening to him.
He tried to get away from the man’s grasp, and yelled out, “Grandad’s gone. They’ve taken him away again. Get after him. He’s gone up into the town.”
The man moved then, and held Danny out so he was hanging by his wrists over the side of the boat next to the little gangplank. The vessel was about twelve inches from the harbour wall and rocking slightly, up and down and from side to side, in the wake of other boats passing beyond. Danny thought if the man let go and he fell he might be crushed between the wall and the side of the boat.
The water below his feet, the colour of boiled cabbage, and marbled with rainbow-tinted whorls of diesel fuel, looked deep, thick and viscous, like glue. Darker shapes moved below its surface. It somehow looked hungry too. Danny imagined his broken body being sucked down into it, dragged under the keel, and pulled out to sea by swirling undercurrents.
He was only suspended thus for a few seconds before the man stretched out over the side of the boat and lowered him slowly onto the edge of the harbour and released him, but they were long seconds, and terrible while they lasted. Some of the elderly people waiting their turn to go ashore thought the man had played an amusing joke on Danny, and squawked with laughter as he ran shouting to his grandmother.
By this time she had discovered her husband’s absence, and, as soon as Danny’s toes touched the ground, went stumbling away on her arthritic feet to look for him.
“Up the hill,” Danny yelled, “they’ve taken him up the hill.”
Gran turned to him with a hopeless look, already out of breath and concerned about her hammering heart.
“Don’t worry,” Danny said as he overtook her. “Wait here. I’ll get him back.”
The streets were full of old people drifting back and forth from the beach. They reacted too slowly to get out of Danny’s way so he had to run a zig-zag course around them. He lost sight of Grandad from time to time but knew he must soon catch up with him because the trio had come to a stop halfway up the hill.
They seemed to be arguing. They were standing just inside an alleyway between two decrepit-looking red-brick Victorian hotels. The man who had been seated on the bench next to Grandad had had hold of his sleeve. He wasn’t actually tugging at it, but was making it impossible for the old man to retreat.
The other would-be abductor, with the smooth, oily movements, was gliding around the pair of them, talking all the while, and making calming gestures with his outstretched hands. Danny could hear Grandad’s voice. He was bellowing at the two men that he had had enough of their nonsense. He was going to arrest them. Didn’t they know he was a member of the Mounted Police? He was back in the past in Canada again. His face looked more worried than he sounded, but brightened when he saw Danny, who assumed he had been recognized for once.
The two men, following the old man’s gaze, turned to see Danny running towards them. The one with peculiar movements detached himself from the tableau and slid towards Danny like a skater. He was dressed in a tight black jacket and shiny trousers, like a waiter’s. Danny couldn’t be sure, but it seemed that the man’s feet, encased in narrow patent-leather shoes, hardly moved, and never quite touched the floor – as though he were suspended a fraction of an inch above the pavement. Perhaps because he was, nevertheless, coming at Danny fast, his form seemed slightly blurred, his features indistinct. When they were almost touching they both side-stepped to avoid each other in the same direction, and collided.
Danny expected to get hurt. He heard himself shout to Grandad to get away as he made contact, then automatically shut his eyes to protect them. He felt a sensation as though he had run into a large, soft mattress that gave to the slightest pressure. There was no indication that what he had hit was anything like a human body that contained flesh and bones, and whatever it was gave way on contact and spread out alarmingly, as though it had come apart. Danny thought he had run right through it and somehow come out the other side.
He opened his eyes and saw what looked like a two-dimensional drawing of a bloated human figure expanding above and in front of him. It was floating away, and waving its flattened arms and legs slowly, like someone drowning in a dream, and clawing desperately at the air with its hands. Almost at once its fingertips appeared to grasp onto something invisible – a hard thin edge of reality, perhaps – and dug in and held on. Then, with an obviously painful effort, it pulled itself back together, contracted, shrunk into itself, and reformed.
All this happened very quickly and, almost before Danny had time to think, the man was hovering in front of him again, with a mildly expectant look on his bland, undistinguished face, exactly like a waiter lingering at a table in expectation of an order. It was as though he were silently challenging Danny to believe that the astonishing metamorphosis he had just observed had indeed happened, and was trying to suggest, by his unconcerned expression and the shear ordinariness of his appearance, that it could not have done.
But Danny knew. He knew what he had seen. He knew a great deal all of a sudden, and what he didn’t know he guessed.
He flung himself at Grandad, latched onto his arm, and pulled the old man sideways down the hill with all his strength. They tottered along like the contestants in a three-legged race, barging into a number of ancient holidaymakers who they were not able to brush aside, and stumbling and almost falling on the steep incline.
Gran was waiting for them on the promenade. She looked as though she was going to cry when she saw Grandad’s face. It was blank and empty, like a paper mask before the features have been painted on it.
Gran said, “Where were they taking him, Danny? What did they want him for?”
Danny couldn’t bring himself to say what he thought he knew. He pretended to be more out of breath than he was, and stammered something about muggers. He could see Gran was terribly distraught, but knew this was because of the state her husband was in, and because he had nearly been stolen from her. Thankfully, she could not have seen what occurred when he, Danny, collided with the man in the waiter’s outfit, so he wouldn’t be called upon to give an explanation of that. On the other hand, he realized, if she had seen, she would at least be more aware of what they were up against.
He looked back up the hill to see if the men had followed him, but there was no sign of them. Suddenly his stomach lurched, and he felt a surge of dizzying nausea, a return of the seasickness that had started half an hour earlier when he had been on the boat, now exacerbated by his recent experiences.
“Gran,” he said, “I’m ill. Let’s get away from here. This is a terrible place.”
Misunderstanding him, thinking he merely wanted to return to the hotel, Gran nodded emphatically. She put her arm around her husband’s shoulder and steered him away. The old man walked like an automaton, staring down at the pavement just in front of his dragging feet and saying nothing. Danny dawdled behind all the way to the hotel, to keep the couple in his sight.
Danny looked even worse than he felt when the three of them got together in the dining room for their evening meal. Gran led Grandad in by the elbow. His walk had developed an aimless, twisting tendency that had to be corrected every few steps, and his eyes looked empty and uncomprehending, like a blind man’s, or someone concussed. The old man would eat nothing, and Danny couldn’t.
Gran stuffed some meat into her mouth and made a show of chewing it to encourage him to do the same, but the smell and appearance of what was on his plate convulsed his stomach and he had to get up and away. Gran’s face took on an even more concerned expression when he explained how sick he was. He hated to put this extra burden on her, but he had no alternative. She dug in her bag for some pills, instructed him on the dosage, and told him to get to bed. Danny said “Good night” to Grandad, who made no response at all.
“He’s lost his tongue,” Gran said, trying to make a half-angry, desperate joke of it, but sounding instead, strangely, much younger than her years, and on the edge of tears again.
Danny dragged himself up the wide blue-carpeted stairs feeling dizzy and disorientated. The spaces around him seemed much wider than he knew they were, as though the hotel had expanded in all directions – a process that appeared to be obscurely continuing out at the edge of his vision. He counted flights from floor to floor grimly, passing hand-over-hand on the stair rail like a man hauling himself along a rope to safety. It occurred to him to take the lift, but he knew his stomach wouldn’t stand for that.
On the second floor corridor he heard a confusion of hushed sounds behind him, and somebody called out sharply for him to step aside.
Two men in white jackets were approaching him, pushing a grey painted metal stretcher-bearer. On it was a slender human form half wrapped in a loose-knit white blanket. The lower part of the face of this person was encased in a plastic mask attached by a tube to a cylinder slung below the stretcher. A pink tube curled up from the blanket to what looked like a brown bladder on a stick one of the men was holding above his head.
Danny realized the figure on the stretcher was the young girl he had seen in the dining room a few times. She was lying on her side with her eyes wide open. The transparent mask had a black rim that underlined and isolated her eyes. They looked like two shiny purple holes drilled into her almost bald head. Her little white ears stuck out like toadstools from the sides of her scalp that looked as though it was made of scrubbed white wood. Danny realized that normally she must wear some kind of wig.
She stared at him hard as she passed, giving him an even worse version of the withering look he was used to seeing on her face, and rose up and turned as she passed to keep him in view. Danny found he was pressing his back against the wall to get away from her.
The power of her gaze had a negative force strong enough to repel him physically. It felt like a protracted bomb blast.
She struggled to keep her eyes on him, to keep up the pressure, and tried to sit up. As she did so the blanket slid down from her shoulders to her waist and Danny saw what looked like black shadows, just beneath the skin, sliding down over the ribs of her flat white chest to take shelter under the blanket over her belly. It was as though they were afraid of the light.
The shapes moved hastily, but with purposeful, controlled caution, like fish seeking the safety of deeper, darker waters. The girl kept her purple-black eyes on Danny until one of the men pressed her back down and pulled the blanket up to her chin. They stopped the stretcher at the service lift and Danny, released from the repulsive attraction of the girl, turned his back on them and staggered away.
He found his room at last, wriggled clumsily out of his clothes, pulled the curtains across the open window to hold back the early evening sunlight, clambered into bed and fell, sweating and squirming, into feverish sleep.
Suddenly, Danny was staring into the dark. His eyes had clicked open with a snap that was almost audible. His whole body was rigid with tension. His senses were as alert as a hunter’s and, when at last he moved, he moved stealthily. He peeled the quilt smoothly back off the bed and stood up. As he did so the sound that had woken him was repeated somewhere out beyond his window. It was a sliding sound similar to the noises he had heard earlier in the week, but not quite the same. It was a lighter, easier sound. The box was moving faster.
Danny crept to the window and edged the curtain to one side just far enough to give him a view of the section of the street visible between two hotels at the lower level. The sound seemed to be coming from down there.
Seconds later he heard it again, as a long corner of shadow stretched out to his left along the street below. It was followed by the blunt black end of the box, which slid swiftly into full view and came to rest at a point halfway between the hotels. But only for a moment – the bear-like man behind it hardly paused for rest before pushing it on out of sight. The box was only briefly visible, but Danny noticed that the tarpaulin had been removed from the top, and that an upper section seemed to be slightly askew, as though the lid had been lifted and not properly replaced.
Something has been taken out, or has come out, Danny thought. Either that or the box has been opened in preparation for something that was going to be put into it. Or was going to get into it . . . For a second Danny had a dim vision of something huge and dark clambering out to make way for something frail and white that was desperate to clamber in. He shut his eyes and shook his head to shatter the fantasy, and went and sat on his bed.
He almost went back to the window to take a look at what, if anything, was going on on the beach, but decided against it. He was still feeling ill. He was weak and cold, though his skin was damp with sweat. The pills Gran had given him had helped, but their effect had worn off. But he knew she had more in her bag.
He went into the corridor, and tapped on the door of his grandparents’ room. No answer. He tapped again, louder, then tried the handle. The door wouldn’t move when he pushed it. It must be earlier than he thought, he decided, if it is locked. Gran and Grandad always went to bed at ten. They must be somewhere down stairs, probably in the television lounge.
He set off at a trot along the corridor and ran down the stairs. It wasn’t so easy to get lost going down into the hotel because you just kept on going until you reached the bottom, then you stopped. Or so he had assumed. It had worked before.
Nevertheless, he misjudged where he was, and found he had wandered into the Twilight Lounge. It was pitch-dark in there, but he knew where he was, because of the sharp, faint smell of urine. He stood for a moment just inside the door and heard a rustling noise, like paper being slowly crumpled, then someone sighed, and he thought he heard liquid dripping. A wheelchair creaked. They’re waking up! Danny thought, and hurtled off without bothering to shut the door behind him.
When he found the Television Lounge it was unoccupied. The big set in the corner was still on, filling the room with jumpy silver light and swirls of romantic music from the ancient black and white costume drama that was showing. Danny noticed the clock on the video player below the TV said 01:47. In the morning, that was. He’d never been awake at that time before that he could remember. It wasn’t surprising there was nobody about, but why weren’t his grandparents in their room? In the past Danny had often had a feeling that grownups did things after their children had gone to bed that they never talked about. It had only ever been a vague suspicion before, but now the idea played on his mind. Where were the adults . . . what were they up to? He would have to find out.
Whenever he had gone in and out of the hotel before there had always been someone at the reception desk, but now even that post was deserted. It seemed that the only people other than himself in the building were the ancient residents in the Twilight Lounge and, young as he was, Danny knew he couldn’t expect help or advice from them. They had their own problems.
His only hope of finding his Gran and her medication was to contact a member of staff, and ask them to take him to her. Then he remembered he had seen a big sign that said
STAFF QUARTERS
Staff Only Beyond This Point
PLEASE
on a door at the rear of the hotel. Surely, he would find assistance there!
He ran down the silent corridor towards the kitchens, found the door, and saw with relief that it was half-open. Beyond it, grey-carpeted stairs led down to the basement. He could her music thumping somewhere below, so someone must be awake down there. He glanced again at the off-putting sign on the door, then ventured cautiously onto the stairs. He felt that what he was doing was probably wrong, but guessed that if people were cross with him for venturing where he should not go, they wouldn’t do him any harm, and would take him to his grandparents just to get rid of him.
Everything in the staff quarters was smaller and shabbier than on the floors above. The corridors were narrow, illuminated by dim, unshaded yellow bulbs, and the drab carpets were worn and hard. He passed lots of numbered doors, some of them split and cracked, as though the locks had been forced, or they had been punched or kicked. He kept walking, without trying to rouse anyone who might be beyond them, because he could tell, from the increasing volume of the music, he was getting closer to its source. In fact, when he turned the fir st corner, he walked right into it. Two doors, one marked STAFF and the other RECREATION, stood open wide and he found he had gatecrashed a party in full swing.
There were about two dozen people in the long, low-ceilinged room, and most of them were sitting at a couple of trestle tables covered by white paper tablecloths. The air was murky with what at first he thought was smoke, then realized was a thin damp mist, like fog.
A couple were dancing, away to one side, and a girl in a black, tight, silky outfit twirled somewhat awkwardly to the music, alone in the centre of the available space. She stopped when she saw Danny, and stared at him as though he were an apparition. He recognized her as the girl who had brought him tea in bed each morning, and at once began to feel uneasy.
The girl came and crouched down in front of him, on tiptoes, with her knees bent. She stayed like that for a while, without speaking or moving, weighing him up with her eyes. The calculating quality of her gaze chilled Danny’s blood. He wanted to speak, but his lips had gone stiff and his tongue felt like leather. He was aware that other people in the room beyond had become aware of his presence, and were also watching him. Someone with an old man’s voice gave a creaky laugh that was echoed by a woman’s shrill, mirthless cackle. A man, shouting over the music, said something he didn’t catch, then most of them laughed. Danny was just thinking of running off when the girl reached out and took his left elbow in her hand. Then she said sharply, “What are you doing here?”
As she waited for his answer her thin fingers massaged the bones of his elbow and her thumb pressed painfully into his inner arm. He mumbled something about his grandparents that was inaudible to the girl, who shook her head to indicate she could not hear him.
Then, desperately, he shouted, “I’ve lost my Gran. I want someone to help me find her.”
As he did so, the rock music tape that had been playing ended abruptly, and he found himself shouting into total silence. His voice sounded like a scream. It frightened him.
The girl moved her head back slightly under the impact of it. She rose up again, still holding Danny’s arm, and pulled him further into the room towards the tables. A man on a bench moved to one side to make way for him. The girl, by manipulating his arm, forced him to sit in the vacant space. The man next to him gave him a toothy smile. It was Kelvin, the moustachioed nurse who had rescued him from the people in the Twilight Lounge at the start of the holiday. He still looked reasonably friendly.
Danny recognized a few of the faces of the people seated around him. To his horror, he saw, opposite him across the table, the man in a waiter’s uniform – the one with the strange, sliding locomotion, who had tried to lure his grandfather away, and who Danny had run literally right into. The man looked very solid now however, and seemed amused to find Danny in his present predicament.
Danny licked his dry lips and tried to avoid looking anyone in the eye by looking down at the paper cloth on the table in front of him. It was bare except for dishes of nuts and crisps, a couple of big cut-glass decanters almost full of what looked like tomato juice, and a quantity of glasses containing drinks of this liquid. The people around him lifted these glasses to their mouths from time to take a sip, then their eyes would roll and they pursed and smacked their lips with almost ecstatic satisfaction. It was obvious they relished their refreshments.
Danny liked tomato juice himself, but he couldn’t understand why anyone should make such a fuss about it. It was nothing special. Last Christmas his father had drunk lots of it with vodka, and there had been a row between his parents when his Dad had fallen from his chair when they had guests round, but there was no sign of any vodka on the tables now. Yet the people at the party, if that was what it was, seemed to think tomato juice was the finest drink in the world!
The man opposite him, the one dressed like a waiter, poured a fresh glass of the liquid and handed it to Danny. The drink had a funny smell, not a bit like tomato juice, that Danny detected as soon as he had taken the glass, and he looked at it suspiciously. He raised it to his lips and sniffed. As he did so, the girl, who still had hold of his arm, increased the pressure of her grasp on his elbow.
Danny saw, out of the corner of his eye, that the girl’s face was flushed and excited and . . . hungry-looking. The tip of her tongue appeared briefly against her upper lip, and her brow arched up as her eyes stretched wide. He could tell she wanted him to try the drink. She wanted him to try it very much. And so did all the other people. They were all watching him with sharp, intense anticipation.
Danny held the glass a couple of inches from his mouth. His hand was not quite steady.
“What is this?” he asked. “It’s not tomato juice, is it?”
“Did we say it was?” someone said. “Did anyone say it was?”
Everybody shook their heads.
“It’s a fine drink,” the girl said softly. “A rare old vintage. Something you won’t have tasted before. But once you’ve tried it, you’ll want more of it. There’s no doubt about that.”
“I don’t like the smell,” Danny said nervously.
“Never mind that. It’s not the taste or the smell that matters, it’s what it does for you,” the girl insisted.
Danny said nothing.
“It won’t harm you,” someone said. “We drink it all the time, and look at us. We’re lucky here, we get plenty of it.”
“The fine old stuff,” the girl repeated, almost singing, as though she was quoting a popular song, “the rare old vintage.”
Danny lowered his mouth to the glass and took a sip. The drink was thick and flat and metallic and slightly warm. It was neither good nor bad. He drank some more, and found he was suddenly thirsty. He emptied the glass slowly and put it down.
“Well?” asked the girl.
“It’s okay,” Danny said, unenthusiastically.
“Would you like some more?”
Danny was a polite boy. “Not at the moment, thank you,” he said, and for some reason most of the people seated around him started to laugh. It was relaxed, good-humoured laughter. Danny noticed the girl had released her hold on his arm at last and, when the laughter had subsided, he repeated his request to be taken to his Gran. Someone made a joke that made no sense, about taking Gran to Danny, then Kelvin got up and told Danny it was too late to disturb Gran now, but he would take him back up to his room in the service lift. Danny would have to sort his other problems out in the morning.
To Danny’s surprise, the entrance to the lift was at the back of the room they were in. Kelvin went and leaned on the button and, high up in the hotel, the lift lurched and groaned as it begun unsteadily to descend. When it arrived Kelvin had trouble pulling the slightly rusty, cage-like bars of the metal outer door open, then cursed as he bent to tug up the inner door that rose and slid back somewhere at the top of the lift. A cloud of the cold, steamy looking mist Danny had noticed earlier wafted out of the lift shaft, surged across the floor, then floated up towards the ceiling on a cushion of warm air.
Danny saw at once that the lift was not empty. The huge brass-bound box he had seen so many times before was in there, taking up most of the space.
It had been pushed up tight against one wall and there was just a narrow gap vacant to one side of it. Kelvin motioned to Danny to get in beside it. Danny shook his head and backed off a little way. He saw that the lid of the box was now in place, but could tell it was loose, unsealed. The dry wooden structure had finger-wide splits in it, and its sides were warped and slightly concave. In places, the wood had sunk away from the brass to reveal sections of the ancient, primitive nails that held it together. The seaweed that had been growing on it had shrunk, withered and turned colourless, like old wreathes in a graveyard.
Kelvin gave Danny a look that the boy recognized as the expression Todley Bay people sometimes put on their faces when they wanted to smile. It was probably meant to be encouraging, but Danny thought it had an impatient edge to it. Kelvin was in a hurry. Probably he wanted to get back for more of the red juice before the others drank it all.
Kelvin said, “What’s the matter? Get in. I’ll get you to your room in no time.”
Danny pointed to the box. “What’s that?”
“This?” Kelvin stepped forward and thumped the lid of the box with his fist. “Nothing for you to worry about, anyway. Not for a long time, I shouldn’t think. You needn’t trouble yourself about that.”
“Is it empty?”
“I expect so.” To placate Danny, Kelvin lifted the lid slightly, and peered inside. He took a long, hard look.
“Are you sure,” Danny insisted nervously.
“Well,” Kevin said, lowering the lid, “it’s not quite empty, but don’t go bothering yourself about that.”
“What’s in there?”
“If you really want to know, sonny, I’ll show you. I’ll lift you up so you can take a look inside, if you think it’ll make you happy. But I wouldn’t recommend it.”
“I don’t want to see inside. I don’t want to go near it. I don’t want anything to do with it.”
“You don’t have to like it, son,” Kevin said, now definitely irritable, “but if you want me to show you to your room, you’re going to have to ride up with it. So get in.”
Danny waited for a long moment, and stared at the box. Something could be hiding in there, observing him, staring back at him through the cracks in the sides. But, if there was, he didn’t feel it was necessarily out to harm him, it could be that it was just . . . curious about him. If there was anything in there, it wasn’t him, Danny, it was after – or so, for no clear reason, he began to believe.
He decided to test his theory, since he could see no other option, and stepped quickly into the lift before he could think about his situation any more. He suddenly wanted to get to bed more than anything else he could think of.
Kelvin followed Danny onto the floor of the lift, shut the outer gates, pulled down the inner door, squeezed in along the side of the box beside the boy, and pushed a button. A stump of fluorescent tube set in the roof flickered and almost died. Something high in the building squealed as it took the strain. The sheet metal panels on the walls creaked all around them, and the lift juddered – hesitated – lurched – then began to rise slowly, swinging slightly from side to side because it was out of balance.
Danny kept as far away from the box as he could in yellow-green gloom that was almost darkness, and gulped to relieve his dry throat and mouth, that now seemed to be full of imaginary dust.
Kelvin saw him swallowing air, and said, “What’s the trouble?”
“I’m very thirsty,” Danny admitted.
“Well, yes, you will be. It’s only to be expected. But you’ll get used to it. That’s the way it is.”
“I don’t understand,” Danny complained.
The lift shuddered to a halt.
“You will,” Kelvin said, and stooped to pull up the door. He said something else as he tugged aside the doors of the metal cage, but Danny couldn’t hear him over the clanging of the iron bars. Kelvin stepped onto the corridor and pointed to a door a little way away that Danny recognized at once as his own, leading to his room.
“You get to bed now,” Kelvin ordered, “and don’t go looking for your Gran any more tonight.”
In his room Danny drank at least a pint of water out of the tap at the washbasin. It was warm, and tasted slightly ferric, like the drink he had been given in the basement. He realized then that he hadn’t felt at all ill since he had taken that crimson drink. In fact, it had made him feel very good – he was almost glowing with health inside. But he was tired out.
He flung himself into bed and slept at once.
Someone was moving quietly about in his room. Danny knew from the quality of the light it was early morning, so assumed the girl had let herself in to deliver his tea. Good, because he still had a thirst like an ache in the back of his throat. He didn’t want to talk to her, however, for obvious reasons, so kept his face under the quilt.
Then, whoever was in the room sat down on his bed. Someone big and heavy. He knew this, because the whole bed sank in the middle, whereas it had only dipped slightly when the girl had perched on it on previous occasions.
A big person had come into his room, uninvited, and was sitting on his bed! An image of the bear-like man carved into his mind and filled him with fear. He’s come for me, or he’s come for the box, or he’s come for both, Danny thought, and he nearly stopped breathing.
Then the someone cleared his throat and said, “Danny, I know you’re awake. It’s me, don’t worry.” It was his father’s voice.
Danny sat up with a jerk. “Dad! What are you doing here? What’s wrong?”
His father’s face was crumpled and tired, and his usually immaculately combed hair stuck up in bristles in a dozen places. His eyes looked sore and the flesh below them was flaky and grey. He was wearing his best suit over a white shirt that looked grimy at the collar, as though he’d worn it one day too many, and his tie was loose and askew.
“Danny, I’m sorry, but the holiday’s over. Something’s happened, so your mother and I came down here overnight. The car broke down. It’s been very difficult, but we’re here now, so . . .”
“Has something happened to Grandad?” Danny asked, thinking he could see the light. “Have they got him then? Has he disappeared?” He jumped out of bed, went to the sink, and drank more warm washing water from his tooth-mug.
His father looked confused. “No, he’s okay. Your mother is with him now. It’s Gran, I’m afraid. You’re going to have to know . . . I’m sorry Danny, but she passed away, during the night.”
“Passed away?”
Realizing the euphemism was above and beyond Danny, his father explained that Gran was dead.
Three hours later Danny, his parents, and Grandad were waiting in the hotel foyer for a taxi to take them to the station. The manager of the establishment, a razor-thin, crop-haired woman in a black and white check blouse and grey suit, was commiserating with his mother, who was crying softly all the time that she was speaking. Danny heard part of the conversation, but didn’t understand much of what was said.
“—terribly sad time – everything done that could be done – first-rate staff who are used to dealing with death – see it all the time -we’ve taken care of the body – leave everything to us – unfortunately, another guest in extremis, even now, as I speak – and so young, just a girl – but of course, we prefer to deal with older people – the more mature person – ripe old age is our speciality – you understand?”
The manageress sounded as though she had been reading from a publicity handout and had suddenly discovered that the last page was missing. She took a dive into sudden silence. Her sympathetic expression, set in stone, seemed only to affect her face below her eyes, which were empty and uninvolved. She and Danny’s mother were seated on two gold-painted chairs, facing each other almost knee to knee.
“It was meant to be a break for them both,” Danny’s mother said, glad of a silence to break. She pushed her nose into her handkerchief and wiped her eyes. “She only had six months to live. That’s what they told her, and she was so worried about leaving my father behind. He has Alzheimer’s disease, so she was hoping to find somewhere here in Todley Bay where he could spend what time he has left in comfort. He could last years. She wanted to leave him in good hands.”
The manageress nodded and clucked her tongue.
“She insisted on bringing the boy, because it would be their last chance of a holiday together, though I didn’t think it was right. But you can’t argue with someone who’s going to die soon, can you? Especially if it’s your own mother, so I let him come.”
The manageress nodded and looked about her for some excuse to get away. No obvious opportunity presented itself.
“It’s so terribly sad, that she should be denied those last few months they promised her,” Danny’s mother said, and hid her face in her hands.
Danny was keeping an eye on Grandad. The old man was quite oblivious to his wife’s death. He had a loopy half-smile on his face, and was rubbing his hands together a lot, as though they were cold, or he were washing them. He kept strolling off, and Danny kept leading him back to his parents.
Danny used these opportunities to buy soft drinks from a machine in the bar. He could feel them all sloshing about in his stomach, but he still wanted more. Or perhaps he wanted something else. It was a funny kind of thirst he had, that would not be quenched, and there didn’t seem to be anything he could do about it.
He had tried to explain his other worry to his father and mother, about the people who had attempted to lure Grandad away, but his mother had started to get angry with him, and told him that this was no time for him to talk rubbish.
It was obvious his father thought he was fantasizing too. He had shaken his head at Danny when the boy had mentioned the man who travelled across the ground without moving his feet, like a skater. So Danny shut up. He realized there was no point in trying to get through to his parents, who were both up to their ears in troubles of their own, so he gave himself the job of protecting Grandad. He was delighted when his father told him the four of them were returning home by train at once, that very morning.
When the taxi came Danny sat in the back with Grandad and his mother, who was now overwhelmed with grief. He held her hand, but got the impression she was unaware that he was there. Strangely, he had no feelings at all about Gran’s death. It meant nothing to him yet. He was more concerned with the torrent of weeping beside him, and alarmed at his mother’s inconsolable condition. He felt Grandad was safe now.
As the taxi drove along the seafront Danny saw the great bulk of the box ahead of them on the edge of the promenade. Someone had started to push it back towards the jetty, but hadn’t got very far. The oily-black, overgrown gull was perched on top of it, standing in perfect balance on one leg. Its head was set at an angle. It seemed to be carefully scrutinizing the traffic moving towards it.
The taxi, travelling slowly because a number of elderly people were dawdling and doddering across the road to get to the beach, came almost to a stop less than ten feet from the box. Danny slid down in his seat and turned away, trying to make himself invisible, just as the driver saw a gap ahead and accelerated into it, taking the vehicle some way beyond the box and the bird. Danny, thinking and hoping he had got by unobserved, couldn’t resist turning around and sticking his head up over the top of the back seat to take one last look out the rear window at the gull.
The bird was riding the air a few inches above the boot of the taxi. Its beak dipped down towards the glass of the rear window, and it stared with one dead-reptile eye straight into both of Danny’s. It retained this pose for a moment, then broke away from the taxi with a single tug of its wings that took it soaring into the air.
Danny expected it to follow the vehicle, but it didn’t. It climbed up to a vast height at incredible speed, as though it had seen a hole in the sky it was afraid was due to close. Then it seemed to change its mind. It plummeted back towards the town and disappeared behind the roofs to the right, ahead of the taxi.
Danny’s father, sitting next to the driver, looked at his watch and remarked that they might miss the train. The driver shrugged, indicated towards the clutter of old people crossing the road ahead, and said he was doing his best.
When they got to the station there was no queue at the ticket office. Even so, Danny’s father had to write a cheque, and seemed to take an age doing so.
Danny bought a tin of Coke, gulped it down, then stood with the other two and a little heap of luggage at the ticket barrier, ready to assault the platform to get to the train the instant they were free to do so.
When his father emerged running with the tickets Danny grabbed some of the baggage and shot past the ticket inspector right behind him. His father, with one arm around his still distraught wife, scuttled awkwardly alongside the train looking for an empty compartment. They were halfway along the platform before Danny thought to look back to see where Grandad was. There was no sign of him.
Danny stopped and looked all around. Except for himself and his parents, the platform was empty. He shouted to his father, and felt the eyes of dozens of passengers on the train turn to stare at him curiously from behind the dusty carriage windows. His father understood what had happened at once.
“We’ve got to find him Danny. Go back. You take the right and I’ll go left. He can’t be far.”
Danny shed his baggage and pelted back through the barrier again. He saw Grandad almost at once, standing by a newspaper kiosk, talking to the man in waiter’s uniform. The man was half-hidden in a doorway. His face was just visible, and only his arms protruded. They undulated in beckoning, luring movements, like the tentacles of an octopus. Grandad, shifting from foot to foot, was rubbing his hands and smacking his forehead in gestures of wild indecision. He also seemed to be laughing anxiously, like a donkey, with his mouth wide open. The man in the doorway slid back a few inches, like a man on roller skates, and Danny could see his feet were definitely not touching the ground. His body even seemed to float up a little way as he receded, and Danny remembered that he had no bones, no substance.
Danny shouted wordlessly at Grandad, who froze. The man in the doorway glanced at Danny, sneered, and vanished. He went out in an instant, like a fused light.
Danny grabbed Grandad’s arm and yanked him away, almost pulling the old man off his feet. He seemed to get the idea for once, however, and, to Danny’s surprise, started running quite fast. So fast in fact, the boy found it hard to steer him. He urged him in the right direction by pushing and pulling, a procedure that constantly threatened to entangle their legs and trip them both.
The man at the barrier, who had watched the whole performance with some amusement, let them through and signalled to the guard at the far end of the station that the train could go.
It started moving almost at once, sending Danny into a panic. There was no sign of his parents or the luggage, so he assumed that they had got on board. One of the doors of the nearest carriage was hanging invitingly open. Danny urged Grandad towards it, then trotted alongside as the old man climbed up the step to the corridor. As he did so he glanced back and saw his mother struggling towards him clutching the luggage. Behind her, running desperately through the ticket barrier, was his father, his face purple with unaccustomed effort. Both his parents looked very angry.
For a moment Danny thought he was going to start to scream and cry in protest against the waves of confusion and frustration that were sweeping over him.
He turned to pull Grandad back. It was obvious that his parents would not reach the train in time to get aboard, since the carriage next to him was now moving at running speed. He shouted to Grandad to get down, then realized that it would be very dangerous if he did try to disembark. Nevertheless, the old man turned and appeared to make some confident attempt to get back off the step.
As he did so an arm reached out from the carriage door and the big hand at the end of it took firm hold of Grandad’s shoulder and started to pull him in. A second hand emerged to take a grip on the other shoulder and Grandad was lifted up off his feet altogether and hauled into the darkness beyond the door. Then a figure leaned out for the handle of the door and quickly pulled it shut. Danny saw the hawk-like nose and receding forehead of the bear-like man for just a second, peering out at him from behind the window at the upper part of the door, then the train gathered speed, retreated along the line, and snaked away out of the platform.
Then Danny did begin to scream and cry. He cried even louder when his mother caught up with him and started to blame him for what had occurred. Her face was a damp, white puffy blotch of grief and anger. His father, when he joined them, tried to calm things down.
“We can phone ahead, down the line, and get someone to go on the train at the next stop and bring him off,” he said, but his wife didn’t seem to hear him.
“He’s senile,” she protested. “He doesn’t know where he is or what he’s doing. He might just open a door and walk out while the train is moving. Anything could happen.”
“It’s not just that,” Danny yelled, now quite beside himself. “One of those men was in the carriage. They’ve got him now. They’ve been trying to get him all week.”
“What men, Danny?” his father said, trying to conceal his impatience.
“The ones I told you about,” Danny said, “but you wouldn’t listen.”
On the very edge of anger, his father said, “And why would these men want an old man like Grandad, for God’s sake?”
“For his blood,” said Danny, “and some of them want his bones.”
Then his mother dropped all the luggage that she was carrying and stepped very close to Danny. “How could you talk such rubbish?” she yelled. “At a time like this . . . on the day of my mother’s death?”
She spluttered to a halt, overwhelmed with indignation and rage.
A surge of intense and actually painful thirst, a craving for a drink that was not available, a liquid he could not obtain, cut into Danny, and made him gag. He put his fingers into his mouth to touch his tongue to see if it was as dry as it seemed to be. It was.
His father, alarmed by the expression on Danny’s face, asked him what was wrong.
“I’m drying up inside Dad,” Danny said, suddenly afraid to hear his own words. “I’ve got a terrible . . .” his tongue clicked against his palate, “. . . a terrible, awful thirst.”
His mother regained her voice then. Her face was wet, wild, and dangerous, like a storm at sea. She howled at Danny wordlessly, and held her shaking hands, half-clenched like claws, in front of her face. “What are you trying to do to me?” she screamed at last. “How can you stand there and . . . talk . . . such . . . nonsense? After all that’s happened, at a time like this, you stand there whining about your thirst!”
Danny, shattered, feeling quite alone, stood grey-faced and devastated by the injustice of it all. Something in his expression must have pushed his mother over the edge of her patience at that moment, because, for the first time in her life, she slapped Danny hard across the face. Her ring cut the flesh of his cheek.
Danny broke away and ran. His mouth gaped open in a scream that only he could hear. Warm blood trickled down his cheek and into his mouth. The taste of it was at once familiar. It was like, but not quite the same as, what he was seeking. What he needed to quench his thirst.
Thinking about the dying girl back at the hotel, Danny ran right out of the station into the slowly moving holiday crowds passing back and forth along the front of Todley Bay. He darted through them like a wraith. Nobody seemed to notice him. He moved so fast, he thought he might be invisible.
He hoped the staff back at the hotel would understand, and be kind to him.
When he got there he found they were only too happy to receive him. They took him in, concealed him, and urged him to be patient.
The feast, they told him, though not of the rare old vintage of the night before, was almost ready. It would soon be served.
So, for the present, Danny had to content himself with that.
WITH VOLUME NINE the publisher decided that Best New Horror needed a new look. Unfortunately, it got one. But at least the trite Photoshopped image that finally appeared on the cover was not as garish as the version they originally wanted to use.
They also decided that, in the UK at least, the series should be folded into Robinson’s very successful series of “Mammoth Book” titles, which they (not unreasonably) believed would give the volume a higher profile amongst booksellers and readers. Carroll & Graf obviously needed a bit more persuading and, as a result, only the British edition was retitled The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror.
By now the Introduction had reached sixty-two pages and the Necrology was hovering around twenty-eight. For the ninth volume I concentrated my ire on those practitioners of so-called “extreme horror”.
I find most literary “movements” slightly incestuous and cliquey anyway, but this loosely connected band of misogynistic and gratuitous horror writers belonged to a club that I certainly had no interest in joining. Like the “Splatterpunks” a decade before them, I predicted that they were destined to end up as a marginal footnote in the history of the genre. I’m delighted to say that it looks as if I was correct.
Champions of the equally pointless “New Weird” please take note . . .
The book featured just nineteen stories – the lowest number since the series began. However, this was partially due to the inclusion of Douglas E. Winter’s satirical novella “The Zombies of Madison County”.
Veteran 1960s author John Burke was also represented, as was David Langford, a former contributor to the Fontana and Armada horror anthologies who is better known for his multiple Hugo Award-winning non-fiction.
Every year I read countless vampire or Cthulhu Mythos stories for possible inclusion in Best New Horror. Rarely do they achieve anything new or different within their respective sub-genres (this statement obviously excludes Kim Newman’s ongoing Anno Dracula series, about which more later). There usually has to be something very special about such stories for me to even consider including them in the anthology.
With Caitlín R. Kiernan it is all about the language. “Emptiness Spoke Eloquent” is a sequel to Bram Stoker’s Dracula (or, as the author readily admits, Francis Ford Coppola’s uneven 1992 movie adaptation). “Eloquent” is the right word to describe Caitlín’s first contribution to Best New Horror, which supplies an answer for those readers who – like the author – ever wondered what happened next to Mina Harker . . .
LUCY HAS BEEN AT the window again, her sharp nails tap-tapping on the glass, scratching out there in the rain like an animal begging to be let in. Poor Lucy, alone in the storm. Mina reaches to ring for the nurse, but stops halfway, forcing herself to believe all she’s hearing is the rasping limbs of the Crape Myrtle, whipped by the wind, winter-bare twigs scritching like fingernails on the rain-slick glass. She forces her hand back down onto the warm blanket. And, she knows well enough, that this simple action says so much. Retreat, pulling back from the cold risks; windows kept shut against night and chill and the thunder.
There was so much of windows.
On the colour television bolted high to the wall, tanks and soldiers in the Asian jungle and that bastard Nixon, soundless.
Electric-white flash and almost at once, a thunderclap that rattles the sky, and sends a shudder through the concrete and steel skeleton of the hospital and the windows and old Mina, safe and warm, in her blanket.
Old Mina.
She keeps her eyes open, avoiding sleep, and memories of other storms.
And Lucy at her window.
Again she considers the nurse, that pale angel to bring pills to grant her mercy, blackness and nothingness, the dreamless space between hurtful wakings. Oh, if dear Dr Jack, with his pitiful morphine, his chloral and laudanum, could see the marvels that men have devised to unleash numbness, the flat calm of mind and body and soul. And she is reaching then, for the call button and for Jonathan’s hand, that he should call Seward, anything against the dreams and the scritching at the window.
This time she won’t look, eyes safe on the evening news, and the buzzer makes no sound in her room. This time she will wait for the soft rubber-soled footsteps, she will wait for the door to open and Andrea or Neufield or whoever is on duty to bring oblivion in a tiny paper cup.
But after a minute, a minute-and-a-half, and no response, Mina turns her head, giving in by turtle-slow degrees, and she watches the rain streaking the dark glass, the restless shadows of the Crape Myrtle.
June 1904
The survivors of the Company of Light stood in the rubble at the base of the castle on the Arges and looked past iron and vines, at the empty, soulless casements. It seemed very little changed, framed now in the green froth of the Carpathian summer instead of snow, ice, and bare grey stone.
The trip had been Jonathan’s idea, had become an obsession, despite her protests and Arthur’s and in the end, seeing how much the journey would cost her, even Van Helsing’s. Jack Seward, whose moods had grown increasingly black since their steamer had docked in Varna, had refused to enter the castle grounds and stood alone outside the gates. Mina held little Quincey’s hand perhaps too tightly and stared silently up at the moss-chewed battlements.
There was a storm building in the east, over the mountains. Thunder rumbled like far-off cannon, and the warm air smelled of rain and ozone and the heavy purplish blooms hanging from the creepers. Mina closed her eyes and listened, or tried to listen the way she had that November day years before. Quincey squirmed, restless six, by her side. The gurgle and splash of the swollen river, rushing unseen below them, and the raucous calls of birds, birds she didn’t recognize. But nothing else.
And Van Helsing arguing with Jonathan.
“. . . now, Jonathan, now you are satisfied?”
“Shut up. Just shut the bloody hell up.”
What are you listening for, Mina?
Lord Godalming lit his pipe, some Turkish blend, exotic spice and smoke, sulphur from his match. He broke into the argument, something about the approaching storm, about turning back.
What do you expect you’ll hear?
The thunder answered her, much closer this time, and a sudden, cold gust was blown out before the storm.
He’s not here, Mina. He’s not here.
Off in the mountains, drifting down through passes and trees, a wild animal cried out, just once, in pain or fear or maybe anger. And Mina opened her eyes, blinked, waiting for the cry to come again, but then the thunder cracked like green wood overhead and the first drops of rain, fat and cold, began to fall. The Professor took her arm, leading her away, mumbling Dutch under his breath, and they left Jonathan standing there, staring blankly up at the castle. Lord Godalming waited, helpless, at his side.
And in the falling rain, her tears lost themselves, and no one saw them.
November 1919
Fleeing garish victory, Mina had come back to Whitby hardly two weeks after the armistice. Weary homecomings for the living and maimed and flag-draped caskets. She’d left Quincey behind to settle up his father’s affairs.
From the train, the lorry from the station, her bags carried off to a room she hadn’t seen yet; she would not sleep at the Westenra house at the Crescent, although it was among the portion of the Godalming estate left to her after Arthur Holmwood’s death. She took her tea in the inn’s tiny dining room, sitting before the bay windows. From there she could see down the valley, past red roofs and whitewash to the harbour pilings and the sea. The water glittered, sullen under the low sky. She shivered and pulled her coat tighter, sipped at the Earl Gray and lemon in cracked china, the cup glazed as dark as the brooding sky. And if she looked back the other way, towards East Cliff, she might glimpse the ruined abbey, the parish church, and the old graveyard.
Mina refilled her cup from the mismatched teapot on the table, stirred at the peat-coloured water, watching the bits of lemon pulp swirl in the little maelstrom.
She’d go to the graveyard later, maybe tomorrow.
And again the fact, the cold candour of her situation, washed over and through her; she had begun to feel like a lump of gravel polished smooth by a brook. That they were all dead now, and she’d not attended even a single funeral. Arthur first, almost four years back now, and then Jack Seward, lost at Suvla Bay. The news about Jonathan hadn’t reached her until two days after the drunken cacophony of victory had erupted in Trafalgar Square and had finally seemed to engulf the whole of London. He’d died in some unnamed village along the Belgian border, a little east of Valenciennes, a senseless German ambush only hours before the cease-fire.
She laid her spoon aside, watched the spreading stain it made on her napkin. The sky was ugly, bruised.
A man named MacDonnell, a grey-bearded Scotsman, had come to her house, bearing Jonathan’s personal things – his pipe, the brass-framed daguerreotype of her, an unfinished letter. The silver crucifix he’d worn like a scar the last twenty years. The man had tried to comfort her, offering half-heard reassurances that her husband had been as fine a corporal as any on the Front. She thought sometimes that she might have been more grateful to him for his trouble.
She still had the unfinished letter, carried with her from London, and she might look at it again later, though she knew it almost by heart now. Scribblings she could hardly recognize as his, mad and rambling words about something trailing his battalion through the fields and muddy trenches.
Mina sipped her tea, barely noticing that it had gone cold, and watched the clouds outside as they swept in from the sea and rushed across the rocky headland.
A soupy fog in the morning, misty ghosts of ships and men torn apart on the reef, and Mina Harker followed the curve of stairs up from the town, past the ruined Abbey, and into the old East Cliff church yard. It seemed that even more of the tombstones had tumbled over, and she remembered the elderly sailors and fishermen and whalers that had come here before, Mr Swales and the others, and wondered if anyone ever came here now. She found a bench and sat, looking back down to where Whitby lay hidden from view. The yellow lantern eyes of the light houses winked in the distance, bookending the invisible town below.
She unfolded Jonathan’s letter and the chilling breeze fingered the edges of the paper.
The foghorns sounded, that throaty bellow, perplexed and lonesome.
Before leaving London, she’d taken all the papers, the typed pages and old notebooks, the impossible testament of the Company, from the wall safe where Jonathan had kept them. Now they were tucked carefully inside the brocade canvas satchel resting on the sandy cobbles at her feet.
“. . . and burn them, Mina, burn every trace of what we have seen,” scrawled in that handwriting that was Jonathan’s, and also surely no one’s she’d ever met.
And so she had sat at the hearth, these records in her lap, watching the flames, feeling the heat on her face. Had lifted a letter to Lucy from the stack, held the envelope a moment, teasing the fire as a child might tease a cat with table scraps.
“No,” she whispered, closing her eyes against the hungry orange glow, and putting the letter back with the rest. It’s all I have left, and I’m not that strong.
Far out at sea, she thought she heard bells, and down near Tate Hill Pier, a dog barking. But the fog made a game of sound and she couldn’t be sure she’d heard anything but the surf and her own breathing. Mina lifted the satchel and set it on the bench beside her.
Earlier that morning she’d stood before the looking glass in her room at the inn, staring into the soft eyes of a young woman, not someone who had seen almost forty-two years and the horrors of her twentieth. As she had so often done before her own mirrors, she’d looked for the age that should have begun to crease and ruin her face and found only the faintest crow’s feet.
“. . . every trace, Mina, if we are ever to be truly free of this terrible damnation.”
She opened the satchel and laid Jonathan’s letter inside, pressed it between the pages of his old diary, then snapped the clasp shut again. Now, she thought, filled suddenly with the old anger, black and acid, I might fling it into the sea, lose these memories here, where it started.
Instead, she hugged the bag tightly to her and watched the light-houses as the day began to burn the mist away.
Before dusk, the high clouds had stacked themselves out beyond Kettleness, filling the eastern sky with thunderheads, their bruise-black underbellies already dumping sheets of rain on a foamy white sea. Before midnight, the storm had reared above Whitby Harbour and made landfall. In her narrow room above the kitchen, framed in wood and plaster and faded gingham wall paper haunted by a hundred thousand boiled cabbages, Mina dreamed.
She was sitting at the small window, shutters thrown back, watching the storm walk the streets, feeling the icy salt spray and rain on her face. Jonathan’s gold pocket watch lay open on the writing desk, ticking loud above the crash and boom outside. MacDonnell had not brought the watch back from Belgium, and she’d not asked him about it.
Quick and palsied fingers of lightning forked above the rooftops and washed the world in an instant of daylight.
On the bed behind her, Lucy said something about Churchill and the cold wind and laughed. Chandelier diamond tinkling and asylum snigger between velvet and gossamer and rust-scabbed iron bars.
And still laughing, “Bitch . . . apostate, Wilhelmina coward.”
Mina looked down, watching the hands, hour, minute, second, racing themselves around the dial. The fob was twisted and crusted with something dark.
“Lucy, please . . .” and her voice came from very far away, and it sounded like a child asking to be allowed up past her bedtime.
Groan and bedspring creak, linen rustle and a sound wetter than the pounding rain. Lucy Westenra’s footsteps moved across the bare floor, her heels clocking, ticking off the shortening distance.
Mina looked back down, and Drawbridge Road was absurdly crowded with bleating sheep, soppy wool in the downpour, and the gangling shepherd, a scarecrow blown from the wheat fields west of Whitby. Twiggy fingers beneath his burlap sleeve, driving his flock towards the harbour.
Lucy was standing very close now. Stronger than the rain and the old cabbage stink, anger that smelled like blood and garlic bulbs and dust. Mina watched the sheep and the storm.
“Turn around, Mina. Turn around and look at me and tell me that you even loved Jonathan.”
Turn around Mina and tell
“Please, Lucy, don’t leave me here.”
and tell me that you even loved
And the sheep were turning, their short necks craning upwards and she saw they had red little rat eyes, and then the scarecrow howled.
Lucy’s hands were cool silk on Mina’s fevered shoulders.
“Don’t leave, not yet . . .”
And Lucy’s fingers, like hairless spider legs, had crawled around Mina’s cheeks, and seized her jaw. Something brittle and dry, something crackling papery against her teeth, was forced past her lips.
On the street, the sheep were coming apart in the storm, reduced to yellowed fleece and fat-marbled mutton; a river of crimson sluicing between paving stones. Grinning skulls and polished white ribs, and the scarecrow had turned away, and broken up in the gale.
Lucy’s fingers pushed the first clove of garlic over Mina’s tongue, then shoved another into her mouth.
And she felt the cold steel at her throat.
We loved you, Mina, loved you as much as the blood and the night and even as much as
Mina Harker woke up in the hollow space between lightning and thunderclap.
Until dawn, when the storm tapered off to gentle drizzle and distant echoes, she sat alone on the edge of the bed, shaking uncontrollably and tasting bile and remembered garlic.
January 1922
Mina held the soup to the Professor’s lips, chicken steam curling in the cold air. Abraham Van Helsing, eighty-seven and so much more dead than alive, tried to accept a little of the thin, piss-yellow broth. He took a clumsy sip, and the soup spilled from his mouth, dribbling down his chin into his beard. Mina wiped his lips with the stained napkin lying across her lap.
He closed his grey-lashed eyes and she set the bowl aside. Outside, the snow was falling again, and the wind yowled wolf noises around the corners of his old house. She shivered, trying to listen, instead, to the warm crackle from the fire place, and the Professor’s laboured breath. In a moment, he was coughing again, and she was helping him sit up, holding his handkerchief.
“Tonight, Madam Mina, tonight . . .” and he smiled, wan smile, and his words collapsing into another fit, the wet consumptive rattle. When it passed, she eased him back into the pillows, and noticed a little more blood on the ruined handkerchief.
Yes, she thought, perhaps. And once she would have tried to assure him that he would live to see spring and his damned tulips and another spring after that, but she only wiped the sweaty strands of hair from his forehead, and pulled the moth-gnawed quilt back around his bony shoulders.
Because there was no one else and nothing to keep her in England, she’d made the crossing to Amsterdam the week before Christmas; Quincey had been taken away by the influenza epidemic after the war. Just Mina now, and this daft old bastard. And soon enough, there would be only her.
“Shall I read for a bit, Professor?” They were almost halfway through Mr Conrad’s The Arrow of Gold. She was reaching for the book on the nightstand (and saw that she’d set the soup bowl on it) when his hand, dry and hot, closed softly around her wrist.
“Madam Mina,” and already he was releasing her, his parchment touch withdrawn and there was something in his eyes now besides cataracts and the glassy fever flatness. His breath wheezed in, then forced itself harshly out again.
“I am afraid,” he said, his voice barely a rasping whisper slipped into and between the weave of the night.
“You should rest now, Professor,” she told him, wishing against anything he might say.
“So much a fraud I was, Madam Mina.”
Did you ever even love?
“It was my hand that sent her, by my hand.”
“Please, Professor. Let me call for a priest. I can not...”
The glare that flashed then behind his eyes – something wild and bitter, a vicious humour – made her look away, scissoring her fraying resolve.
“Ah,” he sighed, and “Yes,” and something strangled that might have been laughter. “So, I confess my guilt. So, I scrub the blood from my hands with that other blood?”
The wind banged and clattered at the shuttered windows, looking for a way inside. And for a moment, the empty space filled with mantel-clock ticking and the wind and his ragged breathing, there was nothing more.
Then he said, “Please, Madam Mina, I am thirsty.”
She reached for the pitcher and the chipped drinking glass.
“Forgive me, sweet Mina . . .”
The glass was spotty, and she wiped roughly at its rim with her blue skirt.
“. . . had it been hers to choose . . .” and he coughed again, once, a harsh and broken sound, and Mina wiped at the glass harder.
Abraham Van Helsing sighed gently, and she was alone.
When she was done, Mina carefully returned the glass to the table with the crystal pitcher, the unfinished book, and the cold soup. When she turned to the bed, she caught her reflection in the tall dressing mirror across the room. The woman staring back could easily have passed for a young thirty. Only her eyes, hollow, bottomless things, betrayed her.
May 1930
As twilight faded from the narrow rue de l’Odéon, Mina Murray sipped her glass of Chardonnay and roamed the busy shelves of Shakespeare and Company. The reading would begin soon, some passages from Colette’s new novel. Mina’s fingers absently traced the spines of the assembled works of Hemingway and Glenway Wescott and D. H. Lawrence, titles and authors gold or crimson or flat-black pressed into cloth. Someone she half-recognized from a café or party or some other reading passed close, whispering a greeting, and she smiled in response, then went back to the books.
And then Mlle Beach was asking everyone to please take their seats, a few straight-backed chairs scattered among the shelves and bins. Mina found a place close to the door and watched as the others took their time, quietly talking among themselves, laughing at unheard jokes. Most of them she knew by sight, a few by name and casual conversation, one or two by reputation only. Messieurs Pound and Joyce, and Radclyffe Hall in her tailored English suit and sapphire cuff links. There was an unruly handful of minor Surrealists she recognized from the rue Jacob bistro where she often took her evening meals. And at first unnoticed, a tallish young woman, unaccompanied, choosing a chair off to one side.
Mina’s hands trembled, and she spilled a few drops of the wine on her blouse.
The woman sat down, turning her back to Mina. Beneath the yellowish glow of the bookstore’s lamps, the woman’s long hair blazed red-gold. The murmuring pack of Surrealists seated themselves in the crooked row directly in front of Mina, and she quickly looked away. Sudden sweat and her mouth gone dry, a dull under current of nausea, and she hastily, clumsily, set her wine glass on the floor.
That name, held so long at bay, spoken in a voice she thought she’d forgotten.
Lucy.
Mina’s heart, an arrhythmic drum, raced inside her chest like a frightened child’s.
Sylvia Beach was speaking again, gently hushing the murmuring crowd, introducing Colette. There was measured applause as the writer stepped forward, and something sarcastic mumbled by one of the Surrealists. Mina closed her eyes tightly, cold and breathing much too fast, sweaty fingers grip ping at the edges of her chair. Someone touched her arm and she jumped, almost cried out, gasping loud enough to draw attention.
“Mademoiselle Murray, êtes-vous bon?”
She blinked, dazed, recognizing the boy’s unshaven face as one of the shop’s clerks, but unable to negotiate his name.
“Oui, je vais bien.” And she tried to smile, blinking back sucking in vertigo and dismay. “Merci . . . je suis désolé.”
He nodded, doubtful, reluctantly returning to his windowsill behind her.
At the front of the gathering, Colette had begun to read, softly relinquishing her words. Mina glanced to where the red-haired woman had sat down, half expecting to find the chair empty, or occupied by someone else entirely. She whispered a faithless prayer that she’d merely hallucinated, or suffered some trick of light and shadow. But the woman was still there, though turned slightly in her seat so that Mina could now see her profile, her full lips and familiar cheekbones. The smallest sound, a bated moan, escaped from Mina’s pale lips, and she saw an image of herself, rising, pushing past bodies and through the bookstore’s doors, fleeing headlong through the dark Paris streets to her tiny flat on Saint-Germain.
Instead, Mina Murray sat perfectly still, watching, in turn, the reader’s restless lips and the delicate features of the nameless red-haired woman wearing Lucy Westenra’s face.
After the reading, as the others milled and mingled, spinning respectful pretensions about Sido (and Madame Colette in general), Mina inched towards the door. The crowd seemed to have doubled during the half hour, and she squeezed, abruptly claustrophobic, between shoulders and cigarette smoke. But four or five of the rue Jacob Surrealists were planted solidly – typically confrontational – in the shop’s doorway, muttering loudly among themselves, the novelist already forgotten in their own banter.
“Pardon,” she said, speaking just loudly enough to be heard above their conversation. “Puis-je . . .” Mina pointed past the men, to the door.
The one closest to her, gaunt and unwashed, almost pale enough to pass for an albino, turned towards her. Mina remembered his face, its crooked nose. She’d once seen him spit at a nun outside the Deux Magots. He gave no sign that he intended to let her pass, and she thought that even his eyes looked unclean. Carrion eyes, she thought.
“Mademoiselle Murray. Please, one moment.”
Mina matched the man’s glare a second longer, and then, slowly, turned, recognizing Adrienne Monnier; her own shop, the Maison des Amis des Livres, stood, dark-windowed tonight, across the street. It was generally acknowledged that Mlle Monnier shared considerable responsibility for the success of Shakespeare and Company.
“I have here someone who would very much like to meet you.” The red-haired woman was standing at Adrienne’s side, sipping dark wine. She smiled, and Mina saw that she had hazel-green eyes.
“This is Mademoiselle Carmichael from New York. She says that she is a great admirer of your work, Mina. I was just telling her that you’ve recently placed another story with the Little Review.”
“Anna Carmichael,” the woman said, eager and silken-voiced, offering Mina her hand. Detached, drifting, Mina watched herself accept it.
Anna Carmichael, from New York. Not Lucy.
“Thank you,” Mina said, her voice gone the same dead calm as the sea before a squall.
“Oh, Christ no, thank you, Miss Murray.”
Not Lucy, not Lucy at all, and Mina noticed how much taller than Lucy Westenra this woman was, her hands more slender, and there was a small mole at the corner of her rouged lips.
Then Adrienne Monnier was gone, pulled back into the crowd by a fat woman in an ugly ostrich-plumed hat, leaving Mina alone with Anna Carmichael. Behind her, the divided Surrealists argued, a threadbare quarrel and wearisome zeal.
“I’ve been reading you since ‘The White Angel of Carfax’, and last year, my God, last year I read ‘Canto Babel’ in Harper’s. In America, Miss Murray, they’re saying that you’re the new Poe, that you make Le Fanu and all those silly Victorians look—”
“Yes, well,” Mina began, uncertain what she meant to say, only meaning to interrupt. The dizziness, sharpening unreality, was rushing back, and she leaned against a shelf for support.
“Miss Murray?” And a move, then, as if to catch someone who had stumbled, long fingers alert. Anna Carmichael took a cautious step forward, closing the space between them.
“Mina, please. Just Mina.”
“Are you—?”
“Yes,” but she was sweating again. “Forgive me, Anna. Just a little too much wine on an empty stomach.”
“Then please, let me take you to dinner.”
Lips pursed, Mina bit the tip of her tongue, biting hard enough to bring a salted hint of blood, and the world began to tilt back into focus, the syrupy blackness at the edges of her vision with drawing by degrees.
“Oh, no. I couldn’t,” she managed. “Really, it’s not . . .”
But the woman was taking her by the arm, her crescent-moon smile baring teeth like perfectly spaced pearls, every bit the forceful American. She thought of Quincey Morris, and wondered if this woman had ever been to Texas.
“But I insist, Mina. It’ll be an honour, and in return, well, I won’t feel so guilty if I talk too much.”
Together, arm in arm, they elbowed their way through the Surrealist blockade, the men choosing to ignore them. Except her gaunt albino, and Mina imagined something passing between him and Anna Carmichael, unspoken, or simply unspeakable.
“I hate those idiot bastards,” Anna whispered, as the door jangled shut behind them. She held Mina’s hand tightly, squeezing warmth into her clammy palm, and surprising her self, Mina squeezed back.
Out on the gaslit rue de l’Odéon, a warm spring breeze was blowing, and the night air smelled like coming rain.
The meal had been good, though Mina had hardly tasted the little she’d eaten. Cold chicken and bread, salad with wild thyme and goat cheese, chewed and swallowed indifferently. And more than her share from a large carafe of some anonymous red Bordeaux. She’d listened to the woman who was not Lucy talk, endless talk of Anna Carmichael’s copious ideas on the macabre and of Mina’s writing.
“I actually went to the Carfax estate,” she’d said, and then paused, as if she had expected some particular reaction. “Just last summer. There’s some restoration underway now, you know.”
“No,” Mina answered, sipping her wine, and picking apart a strip of breast meat with her fork. “No, I wasn’t aware of that.”
Finally, the waitress had brought their bill, and Anna had grudgingly allowed Mina to leave the tip. While they’d eaten, the shower had come and gone, leaving the night dank and chilly and unusually quiet. Their heels sounded like passing time on the wet cobble stones. Anna Carmichael had a room in one of the less expensive Left Bank hotels, but they walked together back to Mina’s flat.
When Mina woke, it was raining again, and for a few uncounted minutes she lay still, listening, smelling the sweat and incense, a hint of rose and lilac in the sheets. Finally, there was only a steady drip, falling perhaps from the leaky gutters of the old building, and maybe from the eaves, striking the flagstones in the little garden. She could still smell Anna Carmichael on her skin. Mina closed her eyes, and thought about going back to sleep, realizing only very slowly that she was now alone in the bed.
The rain was over and the drip – the minute and measured splash of water on water, that clockwork cadence – wasn’t coming from outside. She opened her eyes and rolled over, into the cold and hollow place made by Anna’s absence. The lavatory light was burning; Mina blinked and called out her name, calling
Lucy
“Anna?”
drip and drip and drip and
“Anna?” and her throat tightened, whatever peace she’d awakened with suddenly leached away by fear and adrenaline. “Anna, are you all right?”
did you call for Lucy, at first, did I
drip and drip and
The floor was cold against her feet. Mina stepped past the chiffonier, bare floorboards giving way to a time- and mildew- and foot-dulled mosaic of ceramic polygons. Some of the tiles were missing, leaving dirty liver-coloured cavities in the design. The big tub, chipped alabaster enamel and the black cast iron showing through, lion’s feet claws frozen in moulded rictus, grappling for some hold on the slick tiles.
Lucy Westenra lay, empty again, in the tub filled almost to overflowing. Each drop of water swelled like an abscess until its own weight tore it free of the brass faucet, and so it fell, losing itself in the crimson water. The suicide’s wrists hung limply over the sides, hands open; her head tilted back at a broken angle. And there were three bright smiles carved into her flesh, all of them offered to heaven, or only to Mina.
The straight razor lay, wet and its blade glinting sticky scarlet, on the floor where it had fallen from Lucy’s hand. And, like the dripping water, Mina stood until gravity pulled her free, and she fell.
October 1946
After the war and the ammonia antiseptic rooms where electrodes bridged the writhing space between her eyes with their deadening quick sizzle, after the long years that she was kept safe from herself and the suicidal world kept safe from her, Mina Murray came back to London.
A new city to embrace the mop-water grey Thames, changed utterly, scarred by the Luftwaffe’s fire storms and aged by the twenty-four years of her absence. She spent three days walking the streets, destruction like a maze for her to solve or discard in frustration. At Aldermanbury, she stood before the ruins of St Mary’s and imagined – no, wished – her hands around Van Helsing’s neck. His brittle, old bones to break apart like charred timbers and shattered pews. Is this it, you old bastard? Is this what we saved England for?
And the question, recognizing its own intrinsic senselessness, its inherent futility, had hung nowhere, like all those blown-out windows framing the autumn-blue sky, the hallways ending only in rubble. Or her reflection, the woman a year from seventy looking back from a windowpane that seemed to have somehow escaped destruction especially for this purpose, for this moment. Mina Murray was a year from seventy, and she almost looked it.
The boy sitting on the wall watched the woman get out of the taxi, an old woman in black stockings and a black dress with a high collar, her eyes hidden behind dark spectacles. He absently released the small brown lizard he’d been tormenting, and it skittered gratefully away into some crack or crevice in the tumbledown masonry. The boy thought the woman looked like a widow, but better to pretend she was a spy for the Jerries on a clandestine rendezvous, secrets to be ex changed for better secrets. She walked in short steps that seemed like maybe she was counting off the distance between them. In the cool, bright morning, her shoes clicked, a coded signal click, possibly, Morse-code click, and he thought perhaps he should quickly hide himself behind the crumbling wall, but then she saw him, and it was too late. She paused, then waved hesitantly as the taxi pulled away. Too late, so he waved back, and, there. She was just an old woman again.
“Hello,” she said, fishing about for something in her handbag. She took out a cigarette out, and when he asked, the widow gave him one, also. She lit it for him with a silver lighter and turned to stare at the gutted ruins of Carfax Abbey, at the broken, precarious walls braced against their inevitable collapse. Noisy larks and sparrows sang to themselves in the limbs of the blasted trees, and further on, the duck pond glinted in the sun.
The woman leaned against the wall and sighed out smoke. “They didn’t leave much, did they?” she asked him.
“No, Ma’am,” he said. “It was one of them doodlebugs last year that got it,” and he rocket-whistled for her, descending octaves and sticking a big rumbling boom stuck on the end. The woman nodded and crushed her cigarette out against a raw edge of mortar, ground it back and forth, the black ash smear against oatmeal grey, and she dropped the butt at her feet.
“It’s haunted, you know,” the boy told her, “Mostly at night, though,” and she smiled, and he glimpsed her nicotine-stained teeth past the lipstick bruise of her lips. She nodded again.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes. I guess that it is, isn’t it?”
Mina killed the boy well back from the road, the straight razor she’d bought in Cheapside slipped out of her purse while he was digging about for bits of shrapnel to show her, jagged souvenirs of a pleasant autumn afternoon in Purfleet. One gloved hand fast over his mouth and only the smallest muffled sound of surprise before she drew the blade quick across his throat, and the boy’s life sprayed out dark and wet against the flagstones. He was the first murder she’d done since returning to England, and so she sat with him a while in the chilly shade of the tilted wall, his blood drying to a crust around her mouth.
Once, she heard a dog barking excitedly off towards the wreck that had been Jack Seward’s asylum such a long time ago. There was a shiver of adrenaline, and her heart skipped a beat and raced for a moment because she thought maybe someone was coming, that she’d been discovered. But no one came, and so she sat with the boy and wondered at the winding knot of emptiness still inside her, unchanged and, evidently, unchangeable.
An hour later, she’d left the boy beneath a scraggly hedgerow and went to wash her hands and face in the sparkling pool. If there were ghosts at Carfax, they kept their distance.
August 1955
The cramped and cluttered office on West Houston was even hotter than usual, the venetian blinds drawn shut to keep the sun out, so only the soft glow from Audry Cavanaugh’s brass desk lamp, a gentle incandescence through the green glass shade. But the dimness went unheeded by the sticky, resolute Manhattan summer. The office was sweltering, and Mina had to piss again. Her bladder ached, and she sweated and wrinkled her nose at the stale, heavy smell of the ex pensive English cigarettes the psycho analyst chain-smoked. A framed and faded photograph of Carl Jung dangled on its hook behind the desk, and Mina felt his grey and knowing eyes, wanting inside her, wanting to see and know and draw reason from insanity.
“You ’re looking well today, Wilhelmina,” Dr Cavanaugh said, then offered a terse smile. She lit another cigarette, and exhaled a great cloud into the torpid air of the office. The smoke settled about her head like a shroud. “Sleeping any better?”
“No,” Mina told her, which was true. “Not really.” Not with the nightmares and the traffic sounds all night outside her SoHo apartment, and not with the restless voices from the street that she could never be sure weren’t meant for her. And not the heat, either. The heat like a living thing to smother her, to hold the world perpetually at the edge of conflagration.
“I’m very sorry,” and Dr Cavanaugh was squinting at her through the gauze of smoke, her stingy smile already traded for familiar concern. Audry Cavanaugh never seemed to sweat, always so cool in her mannish suits, her hair pulled back in its neat, tight bun.
“Did you speak with your friend in London?” Mina asked. “You said that you would . . .” and maybe the psychoanalyst heard the strain in Mina’s voice because she sighed a loud, impatient sigh and tilted her head backwards, gazing up at the ceiling,
“Yes,” she answered. “I’ve talked with Dr Beecher. Just yesterday, actually.”
Mina licked her lips, her dry tongue across drier lips, the parched skin of dead fruit. There was a pause, a moment if silence, and then Audry Cavanaugh said, “He was able to find a number of references to attacks on children by a ‘bloofer lady’, some articles dating from late in September, 1897, in The Westminster Gazette and a few other papers. A couple of pieces on the wreck at Whitby, also. But, Mina, I never said I doubted you. You didn’t have to prove anything.”
“I had those clippings,” Mina mumbled around her dry tongue. “I used to have all the clippings.”
“I always believed that you did.”
There was more silence, then, and only street sounds ten storeys down to fill the void, Dr Cavanaugh put on her reading glasses and opened her yellow stenographer’s pad. Her pencil scritched across the paper to record the date. “The dreams, are they still about Lucy? Or is it the asylum again?”
And a drop of sweat ran slowly down Mina’s rouged cheek, pooling at the corner of her mouth, offering an abrupt tang of salt and cosmetics to tease her thirst. She looked away, at the worn and dusty rug under her shoes, at the barrister shelves stuffed with medical books and psychological journals. The framed diplomas and, almost whispering, she said, “I had a dream about the world.”
“Yes?” and Audry Cavanaugh sounded a little eager, because here was some thing new, perhaps, something novel in old Mina Murray’s tiresome parade of delusions. “What did you dream about the world, Wilhelmina?”
Another drop of sweat dissolved on the tip of Mina’s tongue, leaving behind the musky, fleeting taste of herself and fading too soon. “I dreamed that the world was dead,” she said. “That the world ended a long, long time ago. But it doesn’t know it’s dead, and all that’s left of the world is the dream of a ghost.”
For a few minutes, neither of them said anything more, and so there was only the sound of the psychoanalyst’s pencil, and then not even that. Mina listened to the street, the cars and trucks, the city. The sun made blazing slashes through the aluminium blinds, and Audry Cavanaugh struck a match, lighting another cigarette. The stink of sulphur made the insides of Mina’s nostrils burn.
“Do you think that’s true, Mina?”
And Mina closed her eyes, wanting to be alone with the weary, constant rhythm of her heart, the afterimages like burn-scar slashes in the dark behind her vellum eyelids. She was too tired for confession or memory today, too uncertain to commit her scattered thoughts to words; she drifted, and there was no intrusion from patient Cavanaugh, and in a few minutes she was asleep.
April 1969
After she’s swallowed the capsules and a mouthful of plastic-flavoured water from the blue pitcher on her nightstand, after Brenda Neufield and her white shoes have left the hospital room, Mina sits up. She wrestles the safety bar down and her legs swing slowly, painfully, over and off the edge of the bed. She watches her bare feet dangling above the linoleum floor, her ugly yellowed toenails, age spots and skin parchment-stretched too tightly over kite-frame bones.
A week ago, after her heart attack and the ambulance ride from her shitty little apartment, there was the emergency room and the doctor who smiled at her and said, “You ’re a pip, Miss Murray. I have sixty-year old patients who should be glad to look half so good as you.”
She waits, counting the nurse’s footsteps – twelve, thirteen, fourteen, and surely Neufield’s at the desk by now, going back to her magazines. And Mina sits, staring across the room, her back to the window, cowardice to pass for defiance. If she had a razor, or a kitchen knife, or a few more of Neufield’s tranquillizer pills.
If she had the courage.
Later, when the rain has stopped and the Crape Myrtle has settled down for the night, the nurse comes back and finds her dozing, still perched upright on the edge of her bed, like some silly parakeet or geriatric gargoyle. She eases Mina back, and there’s a dull click as the safety bar locks again. The nurse mumbles something so low Mina can’t make out the words. So, she lies very still, instead, lies on those starch-stiff sheets and her pillowcase and listens to the drip and patter from the street outside, the velvet sounds after the storm almost enough to smooth the edges off Manhattan for a few hours. The blanket tucked rough be neath her chin and taxi wheels on the street, the honk of a car horn, a police siren blocks away. And footsteps on the side walk below her window, and, then, the soft and unmistak able pad of wolf paws on asphalt.
“The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned . . .”
– W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”