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

“It’s probably not as bad as she’s making it out to be,” Crispin says, picking a poppy and slipping the sapbleeding stem behind Lark’s right ear. “It just needs to cool off.”

“Yeah,” she says, “Probably,” but not sounding reassured at all, and stares down the precarious steep slope toward the beach, sand the cinder color of cold apocalypse below the grey shale and sandstone bluff. She also picks a poppy and puts it in Crispin’s hair, tucks it behind his left ear, so they match again. “I want to look for sea shells,” she says “and driftwood,” and she points at a narrow trail just past the poppies. Crispin looks back at Tam once, her black hair wild in the wind, her face in her hands like maybe she’s even crying, and then he follows Lark.

Mostly just mussels, long shells darker than the beach, curved and flaking like diseased toenails, but Lark puts a few in her purse, anyway. Crispin finds a single crab claw, almost as orange as the poppies in their hair with an airbrush hint of blue, and she keeps that too. The driftwood is more plentiful, but all the really good pieces are gigantic, the warped and polished bones of great trees washed down from the mountains and scattered about here, shattered skeletons beyond repair. They walk on warm sand and a thick mat of sequoia bark and spindletwigs, fleshy scraps of kelp, follow the flotsam to a stream running down to meet the gently crashing sea, shallowwide interface of saltwater and fresh. Overhead, seagulls wheel and protest the intrusion; the craggy rocks just offshore are covered with their watchful numbers, powdergrey feathers, white feathers, beaks for snatching fish. And pecking eyes , Lark thinks. They squawk and stare and she gives them the finger, one nail chewed down to the quick and most of the black polish flaked away.

Crispin bends and lets the stream gurgle about his pale hands. It’s filled with polished stones, muted olive and bottle green pebbles rounded by their centuries in the cold water. He puts one finger to his lips and licks it cautiously and “Sweet,” he says. “It’s very sweet.”

“What’s that?” Lark says and he looks up, across the stream at a windstunted stand of firs on the other side and there’s a sign there, almost as big as a roadside billboard sign and just as gaudy, but no way anyone could see this from the highway. A great sign of planks painted white and lettered crimson, artful, scrolling letters that spell out, “ALIVE AND UNTAMED! MONSTERS AND MYSTERIES OF NEPTUNE’S BOSOM!” and below, in slightly smaller script, “MERMAIDS AND MIRACLES! THE GREAT SEA SERPENT! MANEATERS AND DEVILFISH!”

“Someone likes exclamation points,” Lark says, but Crispin’s already halfway across the stream, walking on the knobby stones protruding from the water and she follows him, both arms out for balance like a trapeze acrobat. “Wait,” she calls to him, and he pauses, reluctant, until she catches up.

The old house trailer sits a little way up the slope from the beach, just far enough that it’s safe from the high tides. Lark and Crispin stand side by side, holding hands tight, and stare up at it, lips parted and eyes wide enough to divulge a hint of their mutual surprise. Lark’s left boot is wet where she missed a stone and her foot went into the stream, and the water’s beginning to seep past leather straps and buckles, through her hose, but she doesn’t notice, or it doesn’t matter, because this is that unexpected. This old husk of sunbleached aluminum walls, corrugated metal skin draped in mopgrey folds of fishing net, so much netting it’s hard to see that the trailer underneath might once have been blue. Like something a giant fisherman dragged up from the sea, and finally, realizing what he had, this inedible hunk of rubbish, he left it here for the gulls and the weather to take care of.

“Wow,” Lark whispers, and Crispin turns, looks over his shoulder to see if maybe Tam has given up on the car and come looking for them. But there’s only the beach, and the waves, and the birds. The air that smells like dead fish and salt wind, and Crispin asks, “You wanna go see?”

“There might be a phone,” Larks says, still whispering. “If there’s a phone we could call someone to fix the car.”

“Yeah,” Crispin replies, like they really need an excuse beyond their curiosity. And there are more signs leading up to the trailer, splinternail bread crumbs teasing them to take the next step, and the next, and the next after that: “THE MOUTH THAT SWALLOWED JONAH!” and “ETERNAL LEVIATHAN AND CHARYBDIS REVEALED!” As they get close they can see other things in the sandy rind of yard surrounding the trailer, the rusting hulks of outboard motors and a ship’s wheel nailed to a post, broken lobster cages and the ivory white jaws of sharks strung up to dry like toothy laundry. There are huge plywood and canvas facades leaned or hammered against the trailer, one on either side of the narrow door and both taller than the roof: garish seascapes with whitefanged sea monsters breaking the surface, acrylic foam and spray, flailing fins like Japanese fans of flesh and wire, eyes like angry, boiling hemorrhages.

A sudden gust off the beach, then, and they both have to stop and cover their eyes against the blowing sand. The wind clatters and whistles around all the things in the yard, tugs at the sideshow canvases. “Maybe we should go back now,” Lark says when the wind has gone, and she brushes sand from her clothes and hair. “She’ll wonder where we’ve gone. ”

“Yeah,” Crispin says, his voice grown thin and distant, distracted, and “Maybe,” he says, but they’re both still climbing, past the hand-lettered signs and into the ring of junk. Crispin pauses before the shark jaws, yawning cartilage jaws on nylon fishing line and he runs the tip of one finger lightly across rows of gleaming, serrate triangles, only a little more pressure and he could draw blood.

And then the door of the trailer creaks open and the man is standing in the dark space, not what either expected if only because they hadn’t known what to expect. A tall man, gangly knees and elbows through threadbare clothes, pants and shirt the same faded khaki; bony wrists from buttoned sleeves too short for his long arms, arthritis swollen knuckles on his wide hands. Lark makes a uneasy sound when she sees him and Crispin jerks his hand away from the shark’s jaw, sneakchild caught in the cookie jar startled, and snags a pinkie, soft skin torn by dentine and he leaves a crimson gleaming drop of himself behind.

“You be careful there, boy,” the man says with a voice like water sloshing in a rocky place. “That’s Carcharodon carcharias herself hanging there and her ghost is just as hungry as her belly ever was. You’ve given her a taste of blood and she’ll remember now. ”

“Our car broke down,” Lark says to the man, looking up at his face for the first time since the door opened. “And we saw the signs. ” She points back down the hill without looking away from the man, his cloudy eyes that seem too big for his skull, odd, forwardsloping skull with more of an underbite than she ever thought possible and a wormpink wrinkle where his lower lip should be, nothing at all for the upper. Eyes set too far apart, wide nostrils too far apart and a scraggly bit of grey beard perched on the end of his sharp chin. Lank hair to his shoulders and almost as grey as the scrap of beard.

“Do you want to see inside, then?” he asks, that watery voice, and Lark and Crispin both look back toward the signs, the little stream cutting the beach in half. There’s no evidence of Tam anywhere.

“Does it cost money?” Crispin asks, glances tentatively out at the man from underneath the white shock of hair hiding half his face.