The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 17 Read online

  “Okay, John, listen, thanks for all your help. I’m going to need a few minutes here. Why don’t you go watch some TV, get yourself a coffee or something? I’ll come find you in a while.”

  I told him I’d be in the staff room. I turned away and heard him open his case. As I left I peered through the glass wall and tried to see what he was laying out on the desk. A candle, a flask, a dark book. A little bell.

  Visitor numbers are back up. We’re weathering the recession remarkably well. We’ve dropped some of the deluxe product and introduced a back-to-basic raw pine range. The store has actually taken on more staff recently than it’s let go.

  The kids are happy again. Their obsession with the ball room refuses to die. There’s a little arrow outside it, a bit more than three feet off the ground, which is the maximum height you can be to come in. I’ve seen children come tearing up the stairs to get in and find out that they’ve grown in the months since their last visit, that they’re too big to come in and play. I’ve seen them raging that they’ll never be allowed in again, that they’ve had their lot, for ever. You know they’d give anything at all, right then, to go back. And the other children watching them, those who are just a little bit smaller, would do anything to stop and stay as they are.

  Something in the way they play makes me think that Mr Gainsburg’s intervention may not have had the definitive effect everyone was hoping. Seeing how eager they are to rejoin their friends in the ball room, I wonder sometimes if it was intended to.

  To the children, the ball room is the best place in the world. You can see that they think about it when they’re not there, that they dream about it. It’s where they want to stay. If they ever got lost, it’s the place they’d want to find their way back to. To play in the Wendy house and on the climbing frame, and to fall all soft and safe on the plastic balls, to scoop them up over each other, without hurting, to play in the ball room forever, like in a fairy tale, alone, or with a friend.

  TIM PRATT

  Gulls

  TIM PRATT’S STORIES HAVE appeared in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Asimov’s, Realms of Fantasy, Best American Short Stories: 2005 and other titles.

  His first collection, Little Gods, was published in 2003, and his second, Hart & Boot & Other Stories is forthcoming. His first novel, The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl, appeared in late 2005.

  He has been nominated for the Nebula, the Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and other awards, and he co-edits the literary fanzine Flytrap with his wife, Heather Shaw. He lives in Oakland, California, where he works as a senior editor and book reviewer for Locus.

  “I grew up in North Carolina,” reveals the author, “and often in summer several of my relatives would pitch in to rent a house on the beach, two hours east. There were usually various young cousins about, and I spent a lot of time watching chocolate-smeared children running along the waves, beneath the gulls.

  “I remember one of my cousins running away, screaming, from a great cloud of gulls that had descended to snatch potato chips from his hands. The birds would swarm anyone foolish enough to offer them food, and something about the open rapacity of the gulls merged in my mind with the equally obvious greed of the tourist traps and tacky souvenir stores along the strip, and my not-entirely-charitable notions about the sort of people who stayed in the really fancy resorts, the ones with their own private beaches.

  “And, of course, playing with language is part of the point of this story; a gull is a greedy bird, but the word also means ‘fool’, and to gull someone is to deceive them.”

  GRADY RAN BOUNCE-BOUNCING down the sidewalk, flip-flops flapping, face smeared with summermelted chocosicle, and Harriet swooped down (like a bandersnatch, she thought, like the poem I read to him) and grabbed him before he could jump off the curb.

  He didn’t struggle, only goggled with mint-green eyes at Monstrous Miniature Golf across the street. That’s where he wanted to go, Harriet thought, to bat balls between Frankenstein’s legs, to climb on the papier-mâché tombstones. There were jagged fake trees (coathanger trees, she thought, all twisted and pointed) with rubber bats hanging like rotten bananas from the branches. Harriet clucked and guided Grady along, past the surf-shops and lemonade stands and not-so-discreet stripclubs. They were looking for a public beach access. Harriet’s shoulder bag was swollen with towels and sunscreen and grocery-store-checkout romances, and it thumped against her as she walked.

  Her nephew, dear Grady, sweet Grady, wanted to swim. That was all he ever wanted to do, swim or chase sandcrabs. He did that all day at the house, the rented house, crammed with relatives pitching in money to make a vacation possible. They slept six to a room in that house but none of them could have afforded it alone, and they were right on the beach. That didn’t help now. Harriet had gone shopping with her three sisters and her nephew Grady, and Grady had stomped and been bored and Harriet offered to take him swimming for the afternoon. Her sisters only talked about children and Harriet had no children so she too was bored. She was nearly forty and worry-lined and fifty weeks a year she typed things she didn’t understand and fed her cats. Now two weeks of vacation and she was at the beach, unnerved by bikinis and broken glass, surrounded by her squabbling kin who made her nervous, all but Grady, who was almost a son. Once a man had promised to marry her and give her children, but he was gone and no children though they’d done it enough, the thing that makes children, but not enough or well enough to keep him from leaving her, she supposed.

  She sweated under her floppy hat and even through tinted glasses everything flashed neon and gleamed metal. She could hardly believe there was an ocean nearby. She could have been in a beach-town theme park, otherwise in the middle of a baking desert. She giggled at the thought and Grady giggled because laughter made him happy. He was already tanned brown despite the pale promise of his yellow hair, just like his mother’s and Harriet’s (though his mother seldom laughed and never just to make Grady laugh, what sort of mother was that?). Everywhere metal now and no surf sound, only the whoosh of passing cars (too close, even holding his hand it was too close and she moved him away from the street), no salt smell just exhaust and the fried reek of fast food. Nothing to really speak of beach except the wheeling gulls, like Styrofoam gliders overhead, and they flew over other places, inland dumps and sewage treatment plants. The beach is there, she thought, craning her neck to look around buildings and dumpsters; only show me the way.

  And then a blue sign, standing up rusty and bullet-holed in a weedy gravel lot, blue with a zigzag diagram of waves and a cartoon picnic table with umbrella. There were no cars in the lot, tiny as it was and jammed between a white hotel and the bar (featuring wet T-shirt contest amateurs only) they’d just passed. “Look, Grady, the beach!” and he streaked but she held his hand and he bounced back like a paddleball. They couldn’t really see the beach, but a boardwalk stretched over the grass-covered dune, its steps drifted with fine sand. They crunched over gravel, Grady babbling excitedly about dolphins and mermaids and octopuses and crabs, and clomped over the boardwalk.

  Fifty yards of walking before the beach. A high fence of weathered wood ran along the right side, partitioning the beach for the people in the hotel. The fence ran for a distance even into the water before giving up hope of division. Harriet heard happy shouts and laughter from the other side. It was a gleaming white hotel with balconies on the back; she could see the top floors rising over the fence, much better than the ramshackle crammed-in house with rusty shower-heads and sand in the mattresses. Same water, she thought, squelching her envy, they get the same beach we do.

  But this was a sad little beach. Grady surged like a live wire, pulling away and eager to be in the grey-green water, but she held on and stepped with distaste around broken beer-bottles and chunks of Styrofoam. The horizon was infinite and curved but the air stank of fish. She saw a dead jellyfish on the line of the lapping water.

  “Lookit the boy with the seagulls!” Grady said, and Harriet lifted her hat
-shaded eyes to see a boy down the beach. He held his arms open, playing Messiah to the shorebirds who circled around him and dove at his feet. He had a jumbo-bag of potato chips and he scattered them, feeding the devotion of the birds. There was something horribly hungry about the gulls, dirty white feathers drifting and long beaks darting as they squabbled over fragments of food.

  “Why they his friends?” Grady demanded, his jealousy an echo of Harriet’s when she looked at the fence, screening off a beach without beer bottles and dead things.

  “They’ll come to anyone who feeds them,” she said, “They’re not really his friends, not like the animals in cartoons. They’re just hungry.” Grady nodded, already forgetting and looking at the water. She tenderly ruffled his short gold hair and wished there were time to teach him about friends, about being careful. He wouldn’t understand that some people are true friends, but that some people only want to feed on you.

  She spread a towel in the long thin rectangle of shade cast by the fence and told Grady to be careful and mind the undertow and stay in the shallows. He nodded, all impatience and eyeing the water, and bolted at her nod. She smiled after him and rummaged through her bag for sunscreen and her current gaudy romance novel; she knew they were foolish, and told herself she read them only because that is what women alone on the beach do, but secretly she loved them and dreamed.

  She looked up to check on Grady and he was deep, dog-paddling deeper. “Grady!” She stood and ran but he was swimming, bumping against the hotel’s board fence in the water. He didn’t hear. She slipped off her sandals and ran, glad she wore shorts now despite her pale thin legs. Her hat fell away and she barely had her feet wet when Grady disappeared around the fence. Harriet hung, a moment of indecision (like a seagull flying against the wind, suspended), then ran back up the beach. There was a gate in the fence, tacked with a sign that said NO ENTRY. She tugged and it opened and she ran through.

  An impression of clean sand, beach chairs and sleek dark people in bright swimsuits and trunks, a multitude of children, but her eyes were on Grady, swimming back to shore, grinning impish and in no danger of drowning. Curiosity, she thought, every little boy has to see what’s on the other side of the fence, never mind the side they’re on.

  Grady came out and looked around, face aglow with sun and shiny with water, and Harriet took his hand, scolding until his smile faded and his eyes widened and he nodded, solemn as an owl. Grady never meant to be bad, and if you pointed out bad he seldom did it twice. Harriet was satisfied, even if her heart still pounded in her throat from running and fear, the fear (she imagined) of a mother for her child.

  She held his hand and walked from the water to find every eye on her. A dozen adults, all so similar in height and color that they must be a horde of brothers and sisters, all a bit younger than she was. The women were hurrying over, looking concerned, and the men stood in a group around the barbecue grill, the eldest with grey hair holding a spatula. The smell of cooking meat wafted toward her, slightly sweet, she couldn’t place it. No smell of dead fish here. She blushed as the women, their oiled bodies firm and cared for beyond the fitness of youth, crowded around. One was older, white-haired, but her face had few lines and her black one-piece swimsuit fit snugly. She was a match for the man at the grill; grandparents to all those children, perhaps? Six wedding rings glittered on six hands, and Harriet supposed these women were married to those men, for all that their husbands looked like blood siblings, too. A similarity of taste, she supposed.

  “Is he all right?” white-hair said, smiling a greeting. Grady was looking around them at the gaggle of children, from toddlers to almost-teens, laughing and splashing in the shallows and taking no notice of the interlopers on their beach. Grady was thrumming, wanting to be away with them, but Harriet held on.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “I know we shouldn’t be here, we’ll go.” The women exchanged glances with a familiarity that spoke of sisterhood; certainly it was a clan of daughters. But all the men shared the square-jawed features of the grey-haired man (now approaching in a polo shirt, spatula in one hand like a scepter) and they stood nursing beers like brothers.

  “You’ll do no such thing,” white-hair said firmly. The youngest of the others smiled and licked her lips, then looked startled when she met Harriet’s eyes. “The boy frightened you, and the beach is awful beyond the fence. Do stay. We’ll help you watch the boy.”

  Grady hooked a finger in his mouth and looked up at the women, who cooed and smiled at him, but Grady seemed only fascinated by the bright colors of their swimsuits.

  “We wouldn’t want to be trouble,” Harriet said, feeling every sag and brittleness of her body, thinking of the broad-shouldered square-faced men and wondering why she’d never found them, why she wasn’t oiled and tan and beautiful.

  The grey-haired man arrived in time to shake his head and say “No trouble at all, this family makes enough trouble on its own, you won’t add to it. You’re welcome to stay for dinner. There will be plenty.”

  He smiled, straight white teeth, and Harriet found herself nodding. Grady sensed the shift and darted toward the children, who greeted him and sucked him into their throng. There must be thirty children, she thought, and glanced at the women again. No sign of stretch-marks, no indications of motherhood, they’d borne perfect children and emerged perfect themselves.

  The women hustled her aside giving introductions, establishing relations (though unclearly; three generations of a family on vacation, but which were married, whose children, who belonged to the old couple, and who were in-laws?). The women had long perfect nails and tiny teeth, and Harriet was aware of her own bitten-to-the-quick hands and coffee-stained smile. The women chattered and hardly noticed if Harriet answered. Did they ever ask her name? They certainly never used it. She wondered; why are they being so nice to me? Pity? She thought she heard something, a scream from the children and she turned, but they were only splashing in a knot, playing. She didn’t see Grady; his golden hair should have stood out like a beacon in that sea of dark, but there were so many children, he was surely just out of sight, and the women were plucking at her sleeves for attention. The youngest, with her eager eyes, plucked too hard, her fingernails brought a crescent of blood on Harriet’s forearm, making her gasp. The girl only licked her lips again and the white-haired woman slapped her daughter (in-law?) hard across the face. She dropped her eyes and murmured and apology. Harriet stared, shocked, but in a moment she was overwhelmed by chattering ministrations, offers of paper towels and exclamations over the small wound.

  The white-haired woman smiled graciously, then laughed, looking beyond Harriet to the water. “Those children,” she said, “Always snacking when we’re about to have dinner.”

  Harriet turned to look, a tentative smile on her face. The dark children were crouched in a circle, eating something off the sand, reaching down with their hands. One child, very small, sat sullenly away from the rest, tearing at a half-rotted fish with her teeth, shooting glares at her cousins (brothers? sisters?) as she chewed.

  “What?” Harriet began, standing, drawing breath to call for Grady. The grey-haired man shouted “These are done! Bring me more meat!” and Harriet smelled the sweet, unidentifiable odor from the grill again.

  Why so friendly? She thought. What can they want from me?

  The children scattered at the announcement of food, hurrying toward the grill, a flurry of graceful limbs and placid faces. They looked at Harriet as they loped past, wolfish faces and cool dark eyes. What they’d left steamed on the sand, ragged, scattered, wet. She saw a mass of golden hair and a jagged white stick, driftwood or a bone, driven into the sand beside it, but nothing she could call Grady. The grey-haired man called again for more meat, and his wife and daughters began plucking at Harriet’s skin, silent now, no more chatter. Harriet didn’t make a sound either, only stood, barely feeling the nips become tugs and wrenchings. She watched a cyclone of white gulls descend to fight over what the children had left.
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  ELIZABETH MASSIE

  Pinkie

  ELIZABETH MASSIE IS A TWO-TIME Bram Stoker Award-winning author and World Fantasy Award Finalist whose books include Sineater, Wire Mesh Mothers, Power of Persuasion, Shadow Dreams, The Fear Report, A Little Magenta Book of Mean Stories, Twisted Branch (as “Chris Blaine”) and many more.

  Recent work has been featured in Outsiders: 22 All-New Stories from the Edge, Travel Guide to the Haunted Mid-Atlantic, Eulogies, Deadly Housewives and Lords of the Razor, while her novella “They Came from the Dark Ride” was published in The Kolchak Casebook and an essay on Harvest Home appeared in Horror: Another 100 Best Books.

  She lives in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia with the illustrator Cortney Skinner.

  “Anyone who is familiar with my fiction knows that most often I tend to stick close to home when it comes to story locations,” says Massie. “Why go much farther, when so many bizarre, fascinating, and often scary things lurk in the mountains, forests, and fields outside my front door?

  “I was raised in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains, surrounded by cattle farms, pig farms, poultry farms. Although, recently, development has been a-chip-chip-chippin’ at 200-year-old spreads, knocking down ancient barns and rail fences, there are still a good number of old homesteads tucked away from major roads, beyond the woods or up in the foothills – the kind of farms where you would never stop to ask for directions because doing so would require you to drive up and around into a territory populated by toothless men with guns and axes and pot-bellied women with meat cleavers and gleams in their eyes.