Christopher Fowler - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 10

Halfway back to the car, a small squeal of surprise and delight from Lark and “What?” Crispin said, “What is it?” Lark stooped and picked up something from the rough bed of redwood needles.

“Just get in the goddamned car, okay?” Tam begged, but Lark wasn’t listening, held her discovery cut for Crispin to see, presented for his approval. He made a face that was equal parts disgust and alarm and took a step away from Lark and the pale yellow thing in her hands.

“Yuck,” he said, “Put it back down, Lark, before it bites you or stings you or something.”

“Oh, it’s only a banana slug, you big sissy,” she said and frowned like she was trying to impersonate Tam. “See? It can’t hurt you,” and she stuck it right under Crispin’s nose.

“Gagh,” he moaned, “It’s huge,” and he headed for the car, climbed into the back seat and hid in the shadows.

“It’s only a banana slug,” Lark said again. “I’m gonna keep him for a pet and name him Chiquita.”

“You’re going to put down the worm and get back in the fucking car,” Tam said, standing at the back fender and rattling Magwitch’s key ring in one hand like a particularly noisy pair of dice. “Either that, Lark, or I’m going to leave your skinny ass standing out here with the bears.”

“And the sasquatches!” Crispin shouted from inside the car and Tam silenced him with a glare through the rear windshield.

“Jesus, Tam, it’s not gonna hurt anything. Really. I’ll put it in my purse, okay? It’s not gonna hurt anything if it’s inside my purse, right?” But Tam narrowed her mascara smudgy eyes and jabbed a finger at the ground, at the needle-littered space between herself and Lark.

“You’re going to put the motherfucking worm down, on the ground,” she growled, “and then you’re going to get back in the motherfucking car.”

Lark didn’t move, stared stubbornly down at the fat slug as it crawled cautiously over her right palm, leaving a wide trail of sparkling slime on her skin. “No,” she said.

“Now, Lark.”

“No,” she repeated, glanced up at Tam through the cascade of her white bangs. “It won’t hurt anything.”

Just two short, quick steps and Tam was on top of her, almost a head taller anyway and her teeth bared like all the grizzly bears and sasquatches in the world. “Stop!” Lark screeched. “Crispin, make her stop!” She tried too late to turn and run away, but Tam already had what she wanted, had already snatched it squirming from Lark’s sticky hands and Chiquita the banana slug went sailing off into the trees. It landed somewhere among the ferns and mossrotting logs with a very small but audible thump.

“Now,” Tam said, smiling and wiping slug slime off her hand onto the front of Lark’s black Switchblade Symphony t-shirt. “Get in the car. Pretty please.”

And for a moment, time it took Tam to get behind the wheel and rev the engine a couple of times, Lark stood, staring silent toward the spot in the woods where the slug had come down. She might have cried, if she hadn’t known that Tam really would leave her stranded there. The third rev brought a big puff of charcoalsoot exhaust from the Impala’s noisy muffler and Lark was already opening the passenger-side door, already slipping in beside Tam.

She was quiet for a while, staring out at the forest and the stingy glimpses of rocky coastline, still close enough to tears that Tam could see the wet shimmer in the windowtrapped reflection of her blue eyes.

So the highway carries them south, between the ocean and the weathered western slopes of the Klamath Mountains, over rocks from the time of Crispin’s dinosaurs, rocks laid down in warm and serpent-haunted seas; out of the protected cathedral stands of virgin redwood into hills and gorges where the sequoias are forced to rub branches with less privileged trees, mere Douglas fir and hemlock and oak. And gradually their view of the narrowdark beaches becomes more frequent, the toweringsharp headlands setting them one from another like sedimentary parentheses.

Tam driving fast, fast as she dares, not so much worried about cops and speeding tickets as losing control in one of the hairpin curves and plunging ass-over-tits into the fucking scenery, taking a dive off one of the narrow bridges and it’s two hundred feet straight down. She chain smokes and has started playing harder music, digging through the shoe box full of pirated cassettes for Nine Inch Nails and Front 242, The Sisters and Nitzer Ebb, all the stuff that Lark and Crispin would probably be whining like drowning kittens about if they didn’t know how pissed off she was already. And then the car starts making a sound like someone’s tossed a bucket of nails beneath the hood and the temp light flashes on, screw you Tam, here’s some more shit to fuck up your wonderful, fucking afternoon by the fucking sea.

“It’s not supposed to do that, is it?” Crispin asks, back seat coy, and she really wants to turn around, stick a finger through one of his eyes until she hits brain.

“No, Einstein,” she says instead, “It’s not supposed to do that. Now shut up,” settling for such a weak little jab instead of fresh frontal lobe beneath her nails. The motor spits up a final, grinding cough and dies, leaves her coasting, drifting into the breakdown lane. Pavement traded for rough and pinging gravel and Tam lets the right fender scrape along the guardrail almost twenty feet before she stomps the brakes, the smallest possible fraction of her rage expressed in the squeal of metal against metal; when the Impala has finally stopped moving, she puts on the emergency brake and shifts into park, turns on the hazard lights.

“We can’t just stop here,” Lark says, and she sounds scared, almost, staring out at the sun beginning to set above the endless Pacific horizon. “I mean, there isn’t even a here to stop at. And before long it’ll be getting dark. ”

“Yeah, well, you tell that to Magwitch’s fine hunk of Detroit dogshit here, babycakes,” and Tam opens her door, slams it closed behind her and leaves the twins staring at each other in silent, astonished panic.

Lark tries to open her door, then, but it’s pressed smack up against the guardrail and there’s not enough room to squeeze out, just three or four scant inches and that’s not even space for her waif’s boneangle shoulders. So she slides her butt across the faded, green naugahyde, accidentally knocks the box of tapes over and they spill in a plasticloud clatter across the seat and into the floorboard. She sits behind the wheel while Crispin climbs over from the back seat. Tam’s standing in front of the car now, staring furiously down at the hood, and Crispin whispers, “If you let off the brake now, maybe we could run over her,” and Lark reaches beneath the dash like maybe it’s not such a bad idea, but she only pulls the hood release.

“She’d live, probably,” Lark says, and “Yeah,” Crispin says, and begins to gather up the scattered cassettes and return them to the dingy shoe box.

The twins sit together on the guardrail while Tam curses the traitorous, steamhissing car, curses her ignorance of wires and rubber belts and radiators, and curses absent Magwitch for owning the crappy old Impala in the first place.

“He said it runs hot sometimes, and to just let it cool off,” Crispin says hopefully and she shuts him up with a razorshard glance. So he holds Lark’s hand and stares at a bright patch of California poppies growing on the other side of the rail, a tangerineorange puddle of blossoms waving heavy, calyx heads in the salt and evergreen breeze. A few minutes more and Lark and Crispin both grow bored with Tam’s too-familiar indignation, tiresome rerun of a hundred other tantrums, and they slip away together into the flowers.