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

“There’s something wrong with it, Crispin, that’s all,” Lark says, argument to convince herself, and the old man says, “She can crush a full-grown pig in those coils, or a man,” and he pauses for the drama, then adds, resuming his confident barker cadence, sly voice to draw midway crowds — “Kept inside a secret Buddhist monastery on the Yangtze and worshipped for a century, and all the sacrificial children she could eat,” he says.

The flipper thing on its side moves again, vestigial limb rustle against the straw, and the snake flicks a tongue the color of gangrene and draws its head slowly back into its coils, retreating, hiding from their sight or the dim trailer light or both; “Wonders from the blackest depths,” the old man whispers, “Mysteries of the deep, spoils of the abyss,” and Lark is all but begging, now. “Please , Crispin. We should go,” but her voice almost lost in the burbling murmur of aquarium filters.

Crispin’s hand about her wrist like a steel police cuff, and she thinks, How much more can there be, how much can this awful little trailer hold ? When she looks back the way they’ve come, past the snake-thing’s cage and the green tank and the phony mermaid, past all the jars, it seems a long, long way; the dizzying impression that the trailer’s somehow bigger inside than out and she shivers, realizes that she’s sweating, clammy coldsweat in tiny salt beads on her upper lip, across her forehead and leaking into her eyes. How much more ? but there’s at least one more, and they step past a plastic shower curtain, slick blue plastic printed with cartoon sea horses and starfish and turtles, to stand before the final exhibit in the old man’s shabby menagerie.

“Dredged from the bottom of Eel Canyon off Humboldt Bay, hauled up five hundred fathoms through water so inky black and cold it might be the very moment before Creation itself,” and Crispin is staring at something Lark can’t see, squinting into the last tank; cold pools about Lark’s ankles, one dry and one still wet from the stream, sudden, tangible chill that gathers itself like the old man’s words of cold, or heavy air spilling from an open freezer door.

“And this was just a scrap, boy, a shred ripped from the haunches or seaweed-crusted skull of a behemoth. ”

“I can’t see anything,” Crispin says, and then, “Oh. Oh shit. Oh, Jesus. ”

Lark realizes where the cold is coming from, that it’s pouring out from under the shower curtain and she slips her sweatgreased hand free of Crispin’s grasp. He doesn’t even seem to notice, can’t seem to stop staring into the murky, ill-lit tank that towers over them, fills the rear of the trailer from wall to wall.

“And maybe,” the old man says, bending very close and he’s almost whispering to Crispin now, secrets and suspicions for the boy twin and no one else. “Maybe it’s growing itself a whole new body in there, a whole new organism from that stolen bit of flesh, like the arm of a starfish that gets torn off…”

Lark touches the folds of the curtain and the cold presses back from the other side. Cold that would burn her hand if she left it there, lingered long enough. She glances back at the old man and Crispin to be sure they’re not watching, because she knows this must be forbidden, something she’s not meant to see. And then she pulls one corner of the shower curtain aside, and that terrible cold flows out, washes over her like a living wave of arctic breath and a neglected cat box smell and another, sharper odor like cabbage left too long at the bottom of a refrigerator.

“Fuck,” Crispin says behind her. “No fucking way,” and the old man is reciting Tennyson again.

“There hath he lain for ages, and will lie/Battening upon huge sea worms in his sleep,/Until the latter fire shall heat the deep. ”

There is dark behind the shower curtain, dark like a wall, solid as the cold, and again, that vertigo sense of a vast space held somehow inside the little trailer, that this blackness might go on for miles. That she could step behind the curtain and spend her life wandering lost in the alwaysnight collected here.

“. Then once by man and angels to be seen,” the old man says, somewhere back there in the World, where there is simple light and warmth, “In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.”

Far off, in the dark, there are wet sounds, something breaking the surface of water that has lain so still so long and she can feel its eyes on her then, eyes made to see where light is a fairy tale and the sun a murmured heresy. The sound of something vast and sinuous coming slowly through the water toward her and Crispin says, “It moved, didn’t it? Jesus, it fucking moved in there.”

It’s so close now, Lark thinks. It’s so close and this is the worst place in the world and I should be scared, I should be scared shitless.

“Sometimes it moves,” the old man says. “In its sleep, sometimes it moves.”

Lark steps over the threshold, the thin, tightrope line between the trailer and this place, ducks her head beneath the shower curtain and the smell is stronger than ever now. It gags her and she covers her mouth with one hand, another step and the curtain will close behind her and there will be nothing but this perfect, absolute cold and darkness and her and the thing swimming through the black. Not really water in there, she knows, just black to hide it from the prying, jealous light — and then Crispin has her hand again, is pulling her back into the blinding glare of the trailer and the shower curtain falls closed with an unforgiving, disappointed shoosh. The old man and his fishlong face is staring at her, his rheumy, accusing eyes, and “That was not for you, girl,” he says. “I did not show you that. ”

She almost resists, wrenches her hand free of Crispin’s and slips back behind the curtain before anyone can stop her, the only possible release from the sudden emptyhollow feeling eating her up inside, like waking from a dream of Heaven or someone dead alive again, the glimpse of anything so pure and then it’s yanked away. But Crispin is stronger and the old man is blocking the way, anyhow, grizzled Cerberus standing guard before the aquamarine plastic, a faint string of drool at one corner of his mouth.

“Come on, Lark,” Crispin says to her. “We shouldn’t be here. We shouldn’t ever have come in here.”

The look in the old man’s eyes says he’s right and already the dream is fading, whatever she might have seen or heard already bleeding away in the last, watercolor dregs of daylight getting into the trailer.

“I’m sorry,” Crispin says as they pass the shriveled mermaid and he pushes the door open, not so far back after all, “I didn’t want you to think I was afraid.”

And “No,” she says, “No,” doesn’t know what to say next, but it doesn’t really matter, because they’re stumbling together down the trailer’s concrete block steps, their feet in the sand again, and the air is filled with gentle twilight and the screaming of gulls.

Tam has been standing by the stream for half an hour, at least that long since she wandered down to the beach looking for the twins, after the black man in the pick-up truck stopped and fixed the broken fan belt, used an old pair of pantyhose from the back seat of the Impala and then refilled the radiator. “You take it easy, now, and that oughta hold far as San Francisco,” he said, but then she couldn’t find Lark or Crispin. Her throat hurts from calling them, near dark now and she’s been standing here where their footprints end at the edge of the water, shouting their names. Getting angrier, getting fucking scared, the relief that the car’s running again melting away, deserting her for visions of the twins drowned or the twins lost or the twins raped and murdered.