Ellen Datlow - The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 6

“When they got back to land, all of them swearing my boy was lost in the storm that sank the ship, he came in the night, and he told me the truth of it, and he gave me the bone, for the love there had once been between us.

“I said, you’ve done a bad thing, Jack. That was your son that you’ve eaten.

“The sea took him too, that night. He walked into her, with his pockets filled with stones, and he kept walking. He’d never learned to swim.

“And I put the bone on a chain to remember them both by, late at night, when the wind crashes the ocean waves and tumbles them on to the sand, when the wind howls around the houses like a baby crying.”

The rain is easing, and you think she is done, but now, for the first time, she looks at you, and appears to be about to say something. She has pulled something from around her neck, and now she is reaching it out to you.

“Here,” she says. Her eyes, when they meet yours, are as brown as the Thames. “Would you like to touch it?”

You want to pull it from her neck, to toss it into the river for the mudlarks to find or to lose. But instead you stumble out from under the canvas awning, and the water of the rain runs down your face like someone else’s tears.

“The other night I dreamt about this lowlife I used to screw,” Carol said. She and Franco were sitting in the lounge of the Broadsword Hotel, a monument to the Roaring Twenties situated on the west side of Olympia. Most of its tenants were economically strapped or on the downhill slide toward decrepitude, not unlike the once grand dame herself. Carol lived on the sixth floor in a single bedroom flat with cracks running through the plaster and a rusty radiator that groaned and ticked like it might explode and turn the apartment into a flaming wreck. “I mean, yeah, I hooked up with plenty of losers before I met you. Marvin was scary. And ugly as three kinds of sin. He busted kneecaps for a living. Some living.”

Franco flipped open his lighter and set fire to a cigarette. He dropped the lighter into the pocket of his blazer. He took a drag and exhaled. Franco did not live in The Broadsword. Happily, he lived across town in a smaller, modern apartment building where the elevators worked and the central heating didn’t rely on a coal-fed furnace. He decided not to remind her that he too damaged people on occasion, albeit only in defense of his employer. Franco didn’t look like muscle — short and trim, his hair was professionally styled and his clothes were tailored. His face was soft and unscarred. He didn’t have scars because he’d always been better with his guns and knives than his enemies were with theirs. Franco said, “Marvin Cortez? Oh, yeah. My boss was friends with him. If this goon scared you so much, why’d you stick around?”

“I dunno, Frankie. ’Cause it turned me on for a while, I guess. Who the hell knows why I do anything?” She pushed around her glass of slushed ice cubes and vodka so it caught the light coming through the window and multiplied it on the tablecloth. This was late afternoon. The light was heavy and reddish orange.

“Okay. What happened in the dream?”

“Nothing, really.”

“Huh.”

“Huh, what?”

“Dreams are messages from the subconscious. They’re full of symbols.”

“You get a shrink degree I don’t know about?”

“No, my sister worked as a research assistant in a clinic. Where were you?”

“In bed. The whole bed was on a mountain, or something. Marvin stood at the foot of the bed and there was a drop off. The wind blew his hair around, but it didn’t touch me. I was pretty scared of the cliff, though.”

“Why?”

“My bed was practically teetering on the edge, dumbbell.”

“This Marvin, guy. Did he do anything?”

“He stared at me — and he was too big. Granted, Marvo really was a hulking dude, Ron Perlman big and ugly, but this was extreme, and I got the impression he would’ve turned into a giant if the dream had lasted longer. His expression weirded me out. I realized it wasn’t really him. Looked like him, except not. More like a mask and it changed as I watched. He was turning into someone else entirely and I woke up before it completely happened.”

Franco nodded and tapped his cigarette on the edge of the ashtray. “Clearly you’ve got feelings for this palooka.”

“Don’t be so jealous. He skipped on me. Haven’t heard from the jerk in years. Weirdest part about the dream is when I opened my eyes, the bedroom was pitch black. Except … the closet door opened a bit and this creepy red light came through the crack. Damndest thing. I’m still half zonked, so it’s all unreal at first. Then I started to freak. I mean, there’s nothing in the closet to make a red glow, and the light itself made my hairs prickle. Something was really, really wrong. Then the door clicked shut and the room went dark again. I’d drunk waaay too many margaritas earlier, so I fell asleep.”

“You never woke up in the first place,” he said. “Dream within a dream. The red light was your alarm clock. Nothing mysterious or creepy about that.”

Carol gave him a look. She wore oversized sunglasses that hid her eyes, but the point was clear. She snapped her fingers until a waiter came over. She ordered a rum and coke and made him take the vodka away. “Thing is, this got me thinking. I realize I’ve been having these dreams all week. I just keep forgetting.”

“Your boyfriend in all of them?” Franco tried not to sound petulant. His vodka was down to the rocks and he hadn’t asked the waiter for another.

“Not only him. Lots of other people. My mom and dad. A girlfriend from high school that got killed in a crash. My grandparents. Everybody guest starring in my dreams is dead. Except for Marvo — and hell, for all I know, he bit the dust. He who lives by the sword and all that.”

“This is true,” Franco said, thinking of the time a guy swung a machete at his head and missed.

Carol glanced at her watch. She picked up her prim little handbag. “Let’s go fuck. Karla’s doing my hair later.”

He stripped her in a half-dozen expert movements and had her crossways on the low, narrow bed, a pillow under her hips because he wanted to work her over with a vengeance. His blood boiled after their conversation regarding her old goon boyfriend. She was voluptuous as a ’50s pin-up and white as milk and her body amazed him. He held her hips and pushed toward climax while she cried out, shoulders and head suspended off the mattress, her fingers twisted in the sheets. He drove, and the bed moved an inch or two with each thrust, adding grooves to the warped and stained floorboards. Then, he came, crashing the bed with enough force to surely jolt the lights in the lower apartment. She swung herself upright and her expression was that of an ecstatic. He met her eyes in the gloom and his brain became jelly; it felt as if it might drain through his nose, suctioned by some force at once ancient and familiar and beyond his comprehension. The iris of her left eye was oblong, out of plumb. It seemed to elongate and slide around like the deformed bubbles in a lava lamp, and for several seconds every piece of furniture, the apartment walls, its doors and fixtures, were distorted, undulating in a way that made him sick in the stomach. Then it passed and he flopped on his back, spent and afraid.

Carol climbed atop him and kissed his mouth. Her breath was hot. Her lips moved wet and swollen against his, “Well, Jesus. Aren’t you a voyeuristic sonofabitch.” She reached down and her petite fist partially encircled him. She slowly put him back inside her and had her way, mouth against his ear now. He closed his eyes and the vertigo subsided, and he lay in a semi stupor while his body reacted.