Stephen Jones - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 23

With two inhabitants. Two children. Beneath the rocks .

I wandered around aimlessly, directing the beam of the torch at the base of the rocks in the hope of finding some sign that the ground had been disturbed. But everything was overgrown, and every rock looked the same as every other rock. I wrapped my arms around my body and shivered.

What was to say that there weren’t dead people, dead children under every single rock? What was to say things would be better if I found the two who had sought out Robin to ask for help, to ask him to find them?

We have to move away from here!

The idea was so obvious I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t thought of it before. There was nothing to tie me or my son to this haunted place with its gloomy coniferous forest and its brooding rocks. Nothing. It wasn’t my responsibility to drive away the ghosts of evil deeds committed in the past.

I breathed out and switched off the torch, closed my eyes and listened to the silence, relaxed. When I had been standing like that for a little while, a faint awareness came over me. It grew into a certainty: diagonally in front of me to the left. Something was drifting towards me from that direction, faint as the draught caused by a fly’s wings against the skin, and blacker than the night. When I opened my eyes it was gone.

The darkness felt almost solid, and the only light came from the diode indicating that the toy synthesiser around my neck was on. I switched on the torch and studied the keyboard. Then I played a note. Then another. The twelve notes echoed from the plastic speakers and were swallowed up by the darkness and the mist. I edged forward a few steps and played the melody again.

Something moved in front of me, and I glimpsed a figure disappearing behind a rock. I went over and leaned my back against the rough surface, then crouched down and played the melody once more. When I took my fingers off the keys I could hear scrabbling, the sound of small feet flitting across the moss and needles on the other side of the rock.

You’re not allowed to look at them. If you do, they take your eyes .

I directed the beam of the head torch at the trunk of a fir tree five metres in front of me and spoke out into the air: “I am here now.”

Feet moved across the ground, rustling, squelching as they came closer. Nails scraped down the rock just a metre or so away, and I closed my eyes so that I wouldn’t be tempted to look over my shoulder. Then I said it again: “I am here now. What shall I do?”

At first I thought it was a noise originating from the forest. A broken branch creaking in a gust of wind, or the distant cry of an injured animal. But it was a voice. The faint, mournful voice of an unhappy old man who has lost everything but his memories, who cries at the sight of semolina pudding because it reminds him of his childhood and makes him talk in the voice of a child:

“Find us,” said the voice behind my shoulder.

Without opening my eyes I replied, “I have found you. What shall I do now?”

“Fetch us.”

I had somehow known that this was my task right from the start, from the moment I stood in front of the spade and crowbar in the tool shed. To find, to fetch, to. conclude.

“Why?” I whispered. “Why did he do this to you?”

The only response was the slow breathing of the forest. I pressed my back against the stone, suddenly conscious of its terrible weight and solidity. To have that weight on top of you, to be slowly crushed to pieces beneath its impervious hardness. To be a child.

When the voice spoke again the tone had changed; perhaps it wasn’t the same voice. Cutting through the old man’s growl there was something that told me this was a younger child.

“The old man had a piece of paper,” said the voice. “He was writing.”

“What do you mean, writing?” I asked. “When?”

“When I was dying. I screamed. Because it hurt so much. Then he wrote on the piece of paper. He said I would scream a lot. And I screamed. Because it hurt so much.”

The voice was faint as it uttered the final words, and I felt the presence behind me disappear. I bent my head so that the beam of the torch shone on the keyboard. Thirty-six innocent pieces of black and white plastic. Now I understood how I had mistaken the notes for terrified voices.

Bengt Karlsson, the musician who took it badly , had made musical notes out of the most horrific sound imaginable, the tortured screams of a dying child. And these notes. opened the door.

How can a person bear it?

I struggled to my feet and pressed my knuckles against my temples as I staggered among the rocks. How can a person bear it? The dampness, the mist, the dark tree trunks, the evil contained within the very warp and weft of existence. How? I watched myself strike the rough surface of a rock with the palms of my hands until the blood flowed.

The pain woke me up. I gazed at my bleeding hands. Then I glanced up. All the rocks looked the same, and I no longer knew where the dead children were.

When I played the first note on the synthesiser, my finger left a dark streak on the white plastic. By the time I had played the whole melody, the keys were soiled with blood and a few of them resisted when I pressed them. Soon it would be impossible to play.

I found the button that said REC and pushed it down, then I played the whole melody again and pressed REC STOP. Then PLAY. I laughed out loud as the toy synthesiser carried on playing the melody all by itself, over and over again.

Dum, di-dum, daa.

I slipped the instrument round to the side so that I was comfortable, and it went on playing the melody as I set off for home and the tool shed.

A dirty grey dawn had found its tentative way among the tree trunks by the time my work was finished. The blood from my hands had been absorbed by the spade’s wooden handle, spread itself over the dark iron of the crowbar. The synthesiser’s batteries were running out, and the sound of the melody was growing ever fainter as I walked back from the forest, opened the front door and went into the hallway.

I picked up the duct tape which was still lying on the piano. The notes from the synthesiser were now so weak that they were drowned out by the creaking of the kitchen floor as I crossed the threshold. But the incomplete melody playing inside my head was all the stronger, and I noticed without surprise that Bengt Karlsson was sitting at the kitchen table with his hands neatly folded on top of one another.

The black line around his neck became visible when he nodded to me, and I nodded back in mutual understanding. We were men who knew what must be done. He had been unable to bear it. Now it was time for me to take over.

Robin didn’t wake up until I had secured his hands behind his back with the tape, and I placed a strip over his mouth before he had time to start yelling. I would have to remove it later, of course, but at the moment it would be troublesome to have him screaming. I held his legs firmly so that I could secure his ankles, then slipped my arm beneath the back of his knees and heaved him up over my shoulder.

The melody continued to play as I carried him through the kitchen, softly, softly as a whisper it played, and I hummed along. My body was aching with a feverish longing for the missing notes, desperate to hear the completed melody.

Robin twisted and turned over my shoulder, and his under — pants rubbed against my ear as I carried him across the lawn. The skin on his bare legs turned to gooseflesh in the chill of the winter dawn. I could hear him panting and snuffling behind my back as snot spurted out of his nose, and from the muffled sounds he was making I guessed that he was crying. It didn’t matter. Soon it would be over. Concluded.