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

STOP

That’s all it said. Despite himself, he found he was doing just that, pulling over toward it. When the car was stationary, he looked at the sign curiously. It had been hand-lettered, some time ago, in black marker on a panel cut from a cardboard box and nailed to a tree.

He looked back the way he’d come, and then up the road once more. He saw no traffic in either direction, and also no indication of why the sign would be here. Sure, the road curved again about forty yards ahead, but no more markedly than it had ten or fifteen times since he’d left Branciforte Drive. There had been no warning signs on those bends. If you simply wanted people to observe the speed limit then you’d be more likely to advise them to ‘Slow’, and anyway it didn’t look at all like an official sign.

Then he realised that, further on, there was in fact a turning off the road.

He took his foot off the brake and let the car roll forward down the slope, crunching over twigs and gravel. A driveway, it looked like, though a long one, bending off into the trees. Single lane, roughly made up. Maybe five yards down it was another sign, evidently the work of the same craftsman as the previous.

TOURISTS WELCOME

He grunted, in something like a laugh. If you had yourself some kind of attraction, of course tourists were welcome. What would be the point otherwise? It was a strange way of putting it.

An odd way of advertising it, too. No indication of what was in store or why a busy family should turn off what was already a pretty minor road and head off into the woods. No lure except those two words.

They were working on him, though, he had to admit. He eased his foot gently back on the gas and carefully directed the car along the track, between the trees.

After about a quarter of a mile he saw a building ahead. A couple of them, in fact, arranged in a loose compound. One a ramshackle two-storey farmhouse, the other a disused barn. There was also something that was or had been a garage, with a broken-down truck/tractor parked diagonally in front of it. It was parked insofar as it was not moving, at least, not in the sense that whoever had last driven the thing had made any effort, when abandoning it, to align its form with anything. The surfaces of the vehicle were dusty and rusted and liberally covered in old leaves and specks of bark. A wooden crate, about four feet square, stood rotting in the back. The near front tyre was flat.

The track ended in a widened parking area, big enough for four or five cars. It was empty. There was no sign of life at all, in fact, but something — he wasn’t sure what — said this habitation was a going concern, rather than a collection of ruins that someone had walked away from at some point in the last few years.

Nailed to a tree in front of the main house, was another cardboard sign.

WELCOME

He parked, turned off the engine, and got out. It was very quiet. It usually is in those mountains, when you’re away from the road. Sometimes you’ll hear the faint roar of an airplane, way up above, but apart from that it’s just the occasional tweet of some winged creature or an indistinct rustle as something small and furry or scaly makes its way through the bushes.

He stood for a few minutes, flapping his hand to discourage a noisy fly which appeared from nowhere, bothered his face, and then zipped chaotically off.

Eventually he called out. “Hello?”

You’d think that — on what was evidently a very slow day for this attraction, whatever it was — the sound of an arriving vehicle would have someone bustling into sight, eager to make a few bucks, to pitch their wares. He stood a few minutes more, however, without seeing or hearing any sign of life. It figured. Aimless people find aimless things, and it didn’t seem like much was going to happen here. You find what you’re looking for, and he hadn’t been looking for anything at all.

He turned back toward the car, aware that he wasn’t even feeling disappointment. He hadn’t expected much, and that’s exactly what he’d got.

As he held up his hand to press the button to unlock the doors, however, he heard a creaking sound.

He turned back to see there was now a man on the tilting porch that ran along half of the front of the wooden house. He was dressed in canvas jeans and a vest that had probably once been white. The man had probably once been clean, too, though he looked now like he’d spent most of the morning trying to fix the underside of a car. Perhaps he had.

“What you want?”

His voice was flat and unwelcoming. He looked to be in his mid — late fifties. Hair once black was now half grey, and also none too clean. He did not look like he’d been either expecting or desirous of company.

“What have you got?”

The man on the porch leant on the rail and kept looking at him, but said nothing.

“It says ‘Tourists Welcome’,” Miller said, when it became clear the local had nothing to offer. “I’m not feeling especially welcome, to be honest.”

The man on the porch looked weary. “Christ. The boy was supposed to take down those damned signs. They still up?”

“Yes.”

“Even the one out on the road, says ‘Stop’?”

“Yes,” Miller said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have stopped.”

The other man swore and shook his head. “Told the boy weeks ago. Told him I don’t know how many times.”

Miller frowned. “You don’t notice, when you drive in and out? That the signs are still there?”

“Haven’t been to town in a while.”

“Well, look. I turned down your road because it looked like there was something to see.”

“Nope. Doesn’t say anything like that.”

“It’s implied, though, wouldn’t you say?”

The man lifted his chin a little. “You a lawyer?”

“No. I’m a businessman. With time on my hands. Is there something to see here, or not?”

After a moment the man on the porch straightened, and came walking down the steps.

“One dollar,” he said. “As you’re here.”

“For what? The parking?”

The man stared at him as if he was crazy. “No. To see.”

“One dollar?” It seemed inconceivable that in this day and age there would be anything under the sun for a dollar, especially if it was trying to present as something worth experiencing. “Really?”

“That’s cheap,” the man said, misunderstanding.

“It is what it is,” Miller said, getting his wallet out and pulling a dollar bill from it.

The other man laughed, a short, sour sound. “You got that right.”

After he’d taken the dollar and stuffed it into one of the pockets of his jeans, the man walked away. Miller took this to mean that he should follow, and so he did. It looked for a moment as if they were headed toward the house, but then the path — such as it was — took an abrupt right onto a course that led them between the house and the tilting barn. The house was large and gabled, and must once have been quite something. Lord knows what it was doing out here, lost by itself in a patch of forest that had never been near a major road or town or anyplace else that people with money might wish to be. Its glory days were long behind it, anyway. Looking up at it, you’d give it about another five years standing, unless someone got onto rebuilding or at least shoring it right away.

The man led the way through slender trunks into an area around the back of the barn. Though the land in front of the house and around the side had barely been what you’d think of as tamed, here the forest abruptly came into its own. Trees of significant size shot up all around, looking — as redwoods do — like they’d been there since the dawn of time. A sharp, rocky incline led down toward a stream about thirty yards away. The stream was perhaps eight feet across, with steep sides. A rickety bridge of old, grey wood lay across it. The man led him to the near side of this, and then stopped.