The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 19 Read online

  “What’s wrong, Dad?” Jack asked.

  “I was thinking about the story.”

  Jack nodded. “Me too. About the friend and helper.” He frowned. “Why did they forget him?”

  Caleb hadn’t read the book since he was a child himself, and he’d forgotten how mysterious, how at odds with the rest of the tale, the “Piper at the Gates of Dawn” chapter had been. “So they wouldn’t feel sad,” he said, after a while.

  “But he helped them find Portly.”

  Caleb nodded. “Yes, but there are things . . .”

  “Why?”

  Caleb wondered what it had felt like when he had first become aware of his own mortality. Choosing his words carefully, he said, “Sometimes people know things they’re better off not knowing.”

  “Things in dreams?”

  “Yes.” Something resonated in Caleb’s memory. He couldn’t quite grasp it, though he suspected his feelings were an echo of Jack’s empathy for Rat and Mole. “You remember anything about your dream last night?”

  Jack shook his head.

  “If you’re scared, Jack, if something’s troubling you, I want you to tell me.”

  “Are you okay, Dad?”

  Caleb wondered why Jack would ask that question. It disturbed him, but he managed a smile and said, “Course I am.”

  “Right,” Jack said, but the look of concern remained on his face. “I’ll say a prayer.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re s’posed to,” Jack said. “Mrs Lewis said you have to pray to Jesus to look after your family.”

  Mrs Lewis was Jack’s teacher. Caleb had nothing against religion, but he was troubled by the notion of Jack taking it too seriously. “You don’t need to pray for me, son. I’m fine, really. Sleep now, okay?”

  “’Kay,” Jack said, closing his eyes.

  Caleb woke from a fretful sleep, scraps of memory gusting through his troubled mind. Though a film of sweat coated his body, he felt cold and vulnerable. A shaft of moonlight fell through the gap in the curtains, cloaking familiar objects in odd, distorting shadows that, in his drowsy state, unsettled him. He struggled to claw back the fragments of a dissipating dream and the sounds that had slipped its borders. A minute passed before he understood that he had followed them out of sleep, that he was hearing the same muffled cries from somewhere in the house. He sprang out of bed and crossed the landing to Jack’s room. His son was whimpering softly, making sounds unrecognizable as words. As Caleb approached the bed, Jack’s body spasmed and an awful scream tore from his throat. Caleb hesitated, unnerved by the intensity of his son’s fear. He wrapped his arms around the boy and felt the iron rigidity in the small, thin body. Downstairs, Cyril began to bark.

  “It’s okay, Jack,” he whispered. “I’m here.” Jack’s eyes opened, and in his disoriented state he struggled in his father’s arms. Caleb made soothing noises and stroked his face. Jack tried to say something, but the tremors that seized his body made him incoherent. “Ssshhh,” Caleb said. “It’s over.”

  “Duh-duh, Dad,” Jack cried.

  “I’m right here,” Caleb told him.

  Jack struggled for breath. “He-he was here. He knew you wuh-were gone.”

  Caleb shuddered involuntarily at the words, and felt the lack of conviction in his voice when he said, “Nobody’s here Jack. Just you and me.”

  Jack shook his head and looked beyond his father. “He came in the house. He was on the stairs.”

  Caleb held the boy in front of him and looked into his eyes. “There’s nobody here. It was a nightmare. You’re awake now.” Cyril barked again, as if in contradiction.

  “His face – it’s gone,” Jack said, still disoriented.

  It was the same nightmare, Caleb realized with disquiet. Polly had said Jack had dreamed of an unwelcome stranger in their house. How common was it for kids to have recurring dreams? He wondered if it signalled some deeper malaise. “I’ll go and check downstairs,” he told his son, in an effort to reassure Jack.

  “Please Dad,” Jack said, his voice fragile and scared. “Promise you won’t go.”

  A tingling frost spread over Caleb’s skin, numbing his brain. His thoughts stumbled drunkenly, dangerously close to panic. He wondered if what he was feeling was, in part at least, a residue of his son’s fear. He needed to be strong. “All right, Jack. You come sleep with us tonight, okay?”

  Jack nodded, his gaze still flitting nervously about the room. Caleb picked him up and carried him back across the landing. He laid him down in the middle of the bed, next to Polly. She stirred and mumbled something in her sleep. He put a finger to his lips, signalling Jack to keep quiet. Then he left the room and went downstairs to the kitchen.

  Cyril was standing at the back door, sniffing. Caleb crouched beside the dog and petted him for a few moments. “What’s wrong boy? You having bad dreams too?” The dog licked Caleb’s hand. He pointed to Cyril’s basket, stood up and glanced through the kitchen window above the sink. Moonlight silvered the garden. Nothing was out of place. When he went back upstairs and climbed into bed, Jack turned and clung to him for a while, until fatigue loosened his hold and sleep reclaimed him.

  The radio clock’s LED screen pulsed redly in the darkness, as if attuned to the rhythm of Caleb’s agitated mind. Vaguely disturbing thoughts had taken root there, but an unaccountable sense of guilt made him reluctant to examine them. They seemed born out of nothing. The darkness robbed him of reason, made his fears seem more real than they had any right to be.

  What could he do for Jack? Explain that his nightmares were the product of his own unconscious fears? As if reason could ever outweigh terror in the mind of a child. As if it could account for what seemed to him a strange congruence between Jack’s bad dreams and his own fragile memories. He felt powerless and bewildered. Though he believed he would do anything for his son, he was plagued by a small but undeniable doubt. He couldn’t escape the feeling that he was in some way responsible for Jack’s terror, that it was connected to some weakness in himself.

  Caleb strummed his guitar listlessly, his chord changes awkward and slow, like they had been when he’d first started playing. Maybe, once you got past forty, it was too late to take it up. The fingers were too stiff and the willingness to make a fool of oneself was not so strong as it had been. Yet, he didn’t feel that way about himself.

  When Polly had bought the guitar for his birthday and told him it was time to stop talking and learn to play, it hadn’t seemed such a crazy idea. And still now, after a year, the desire to play competently some blues and country tunes was as strong as ever. It was something else distracting him.

  He leaned the guitar against the table, got up and walked to the sink. Polly glanced up from the book she was reading. “Not there today, huh?”

  Caleb shrugged and watched his son through the kitchen window. Jack was playing in the garden by the recently dug pond that still awaited its first Koi Carp. He was manoeuvring his Action Men through the shallow water as if it were a swamp.

  “You okay?”

  Caleb looked at her. She’d put her book down on the table and was staring intently at him. He didn’t want to talk. He knew already what she’d say. “I’m fine,” he said, turning back to the window.

  “It’s Jack, isn’t it?”

  The boy was manipulating two of his soldiers into a fight. He paused suddenly, and cocked his head to one side, as if listening. Slowly, he swept his gaze across the garden. He seemed nervous, wary of something. After a moment or two, he continued with his game, but more guarded, as if aware that he was being observed. Caleb felt uneasy. He leaned closer to the window and let his gaze wander around the garden and down to the rear wall that backed onto the lane. Nothing appeared out of the ordinary.

  “He’s okay, Cale,” Polly was saying. “He’d be even better if you’d stop fretting.”

  “I was trying to help him,” Caleb said, still watching Jack.

  “By interrogating him?”

  “T
alking about it will help him.” Jack was shielding his eyes from the watery sun as he gazed south towards the bay. “Expose the irrational to the cold light of day and it loses its power. Making Jack talk about the dream will weaken its hold over him.”

  “Oh sure. After all, he’s eight years old.”

  She didn’t seem to get it. “What do you suggest we do?”

  “Ignore them. They’ll pass of their own accord if you stop bringing them up. Jesus Cale, all kids have bad dreams sometime or other.”

  “I never did. Not like his.”

  “We all have nightmares. Why should you be different?”

  He looked at her and heard himself say, “I just never did.”

  “Or you forced yourself to forget.”

  Maybe she was right. He turned back to the garden. Jack had laid one Action Man face down in the water. He was draping strings of pondweed over the doll. He paused and glanced up towards the house, before turning his attention once again to his game.

  Polly came up behind Caleb and slipped her arms around his waist. “You just need to give him a little time,” she said, pressing her lips against the back of his neck.

  How much time, Caleb wondered, feeling an ache of tenderness as he watched Jack rise up onto his knees. The same nightmare four times in one week. How much time before reason was exposed as a hollow lie? He would not let it happen.

  As if feeling his isolation, Polly pulled away. He was about to reach for her when he saw what Jack was doing. The boy was kneeling over the pond where the Action Man floated, covered with strands of weed. His hands were clasped together, his head was tilted skywards and his lips were moving. Caleb’s flesh tingled with disquiet. What kind of game was it that necessitated prayer?

  Jack and Gary raced into the dunes ahead of Caleb and Cyril. A stiff breeze blew in from the east, across Oxwich bay, unleashing small, foam-flecked waves to snap at the shore. Caleb followed the terrier up the steep, sliding bank of a dune.

  The boys were waiting for him atop the grassy ridge. Jack looked skinny and frail next to his friend, who, though only a month older, was a good six inches taller and a few pounds heavier. Sometimes Caleb feared for his son when he watched the rough and tumble of their play, but he was glad too that Jack had such a friend. Gary seemed to him indomitable, and he hoped that some of that strength would rub off on Jack. No nightmare last night. Third dreamless night in a row. Perhaps Polly had been right after all.

  “We’re gonna hide now,” Jack said. “You gotta count a hundred.”

  Caleb nodded. He called Cyril to him and held on to the dog while the two boys took off. He began counting out loud as he watched them scramble further up through the tough marram grass. Cyril whined and struggled to chase after them, but Caleb held him until he had reached fifty. Then, still holding the dog by his collar, he crawled up the slope and peered over the crest of the dune.

  Jack and Gary were sixty or seventy yards ahead, running through the small dip towards another rise. He waited until they had disappeared around the side of the hill, then called out that he was coming.

  Letting Cyril race ahead of him, he followed their path, before cutting across and up the dune at a steeper angle. Crouching as he came over the crest of the hill, he scanned the dune slack below, searching the bracken and coarse grasses for anything other than wind-induced movement. He spied a patch of yellow moving beyond the pink and white trumpets of a bindweed-choked tree, and quickly chose a route that would allow him to get ahead of the two boys.

  Soon after, he popped up from behind a thick mound of marram grass and made booming noises as he shot them with his forefingers. After yelping in surprise, the boys collapsed spectacularly into the scrub.

  By the time they had picked themselves up and started counting, Caleb was already heading deeper into the dunes.

  He ran for about a hundred yards, found cover in a clump of bracken, and lay on his back to watch the cirrus clouds race across the sky. He could hear the sea rolling in over the long flat stretch of the bay, the screech of gulls and the wind whistling through the dune grass.

  He closed his eyes for a moment and heard voices carrying on the breeze. He was surprised at how much distance and the wind distorted the sounds, made them indecipherable, barely recognizable as human. The vastness of the sky overhead instilled in him a sense of isolation, which added to the strangeness of the voices. Despite the coolness of the breeze, he felt trickles of sweat on his back as the words shaped themselves in his head. Something about time.

  He listened more intently, made out Jack’s voice, frightened, asking what happens at thirteen o’clock. A sudden rush of panic swept through Caleb. He sprang up from the bracken and spun round, searching the immediate vicinity for his son. There was no sign of either boy. He was about to call out when he heard Jack shouting from the top of a dune some sixty yards away. The boy waved to him, then followed Gary and the dog down the slope.

  “You’re s’posed to hide, Dad,” Jack said, as they arrived, breathless, beside him. “That was too easy.”

  “We would have found you anyway,” Gary said. “Cyril had your scent.”

  There was nothing in either boy’s faces to confirm what Caleb had heard. He had imagined it, he told himself. The wind and his own anxiety about Jack. Understandable, if foolish. He thought the boy looked a little pale, but he seemed untroubled. “Okay,” he said. “I think it’s time to go.”

  “Not yet,” Jack said. “We only had one go of hiding.”

  Gary nodded, and without waiting for Caleb to agree, he tore off up the nearest slope. Caleb felt a surge of anger but he suppressed it. He gestured to Jack. “Get going,” he said. “Make it good.”

  Jack sped off after his friend. Cyril stayed with Caleb of his own accord. It was getting on for seven and a chill lingered in the late April air. As he watched them disappear over the top of a high dune, he regretted letting them go again and considered calling them back. But they were gone now, and despite his sense of unease, he didn’t want to spoil their fun.

  He counted slowly to fifty, then set out on their trail. He climbed the dune and scanned the nearby hollows for any trace of them. “Where they go boy?” he said, more to himself than the dog, who had stopped to investigate a few pellets of rabbit shit. Caleb shrugged, scrambled down the dune towards a trail that skirted the copse separating the dunes from the marshlands beyond.

  He followed this path to the end of the trees, then climbed up the nearest slope to get a better view. From the top, he saw the grey ocean and a thin line of sand, separated from him by the expanse of green, cascading dunes. A sudden, intense fear bloomed inside him as his eyes searched the wind-swept slacks. “Jack,” he cried out. “Time to go son.”

  No voice came back to him, just the moan of the insistent breeze through the coarse grass and brittle sea holly. He moved in a shorewards direction, clambering down one dune and up the next, calling Jack’s name. He felt a tight knot in his stomach as he forced himself up the yielding slope. It sapped his strength and robbed him of breath. He reached the top, light-headed and panting. Cyril scampered up the path behind him, tongue lolling out of his mouth. He stopped abruptly and turned, just as a figure burst out from the scrub.

  It was Gary. Caleb’s relief dissipated when he saw the boy was alone. “Dammit Gary,” he snapped. “Where the hell is Jack?”

  Gary’s grin slipped. “I – I’m sorry Caleb. We didn’t mean to—”

  Caleb saw that he had frightened the boy unnecessarily. “It’s all right. Just tell me where he’s hiding.”

  “I didn’t see,” Gary said.

  Caleb’s fear intensified. “Which way did he go?” he said, trying to keep his voice calm.

  Gary looked around, then pointed back towards the marsh. Caleb took his hand, and together they headed down the slope. The sweat chilled his body as he raced over damp scabious, calling out.

  The minutes ticked by and dusk began to roll in from the bay. Odd terrors clawed at the frayed edges
of his mind, and his limbs shook with fatigue as he searched through the trees. What had he been thinking, especially after what Jack had been through? Please, please, let him be okay.

  A whispered sound caught his attention. He turned and saw the dog running along another path back into the dunes. “There,” he shouted at Gary, a sharp pain piercing his side. He staggered after the boy and dog. Beyond them, he caught a glimpse of yellow through the scrub, lost it, then saw it again, unmoving on the ground behind a stunted tree. His heart was pumping furiously and the cry of despair was on his lips as he came round the tree and nearly crashed into Gary, who stood over the motionless form.

  Jack was grinning up at them. “What took you so long?” he said.

  For a second, Caleb teetered on the edge of rage, then he fell to his knees and hugged Jack tightly to his chest.

  Caleb turned into the school car park. Beside him, Jack stared blankly ahead. He’d not spoken in the six-minute drive from the doctor’s surgery to the school.

  After a dreamless week, the nightmare had returned to ravage the boy. Caleb had heard him cry out some time after midnight. He’d run to Jack’s room and had found him sitting upright, his gaze fixed on nothingness.

  Traces of whatever haunted his dreams lingered in his eyes even after Caleb had woken him, but he had been unable to ascribe it a material substance or meaning. And all the doctor had had to say was that there was nothing physically wrong with Jack. Jesus Christ – what did he expect? Broken bones? A gaping wound? Caleb had wanted answers, not fucking platitudes. Tell him why Jack was having these nightmares, what was scaring him. Instead, he’d had to listen to bullshit reassurances about Jack’s overactive imagination and how they should maybe monitor his TV viewing and ease up on the bedtime stories.

  Polly would be relieved, even if she had more or less predicted what the doctor would say.

  Caleb turned off the ignition, his body tense with anger and concern. He glanced at his son in the passenger seat. Jack looked too fragile, he thought, too lost inside his own head. He wanted desperately to hug the boy, to let him know that he would do anything for him, but he was afraid that Jack would somehow see the truth.