Каарон Уоррен - The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2018 Edition

There were petals scattered across the bed, and the static remained, fizzing and angry. It was a sudden confusion of the senses. I couldn’t decide if the dream had really ended. There were fragments of it everywhere. Ingrid wasn’t in bed beside me. When I rose, there were sunflower petals fluttering in the air, and a carpet of them beneath my feet. They were parted to suggest a path to the bathroom.

The radio was tuned to a dead station at maximum volume. A vacant sound. Ingrid had opened up her wrists. Blood had sprayed across the bathroom tiles, had turned the water a shade of red so beautiful it was hypnotic. There were pills under my bare feet on the bathroom floor beside an empty bottle of cheap supermarket Scotch.

“Christ, Ingrid,” I heard myself saying in a high pitched voice. “ Christ .”

I vacillated between finding my phone and then attempting to rouse her and staunch the bleeding from her wrists with towels. She hadn’t cut them properly. I was waiting for the remains of the dream to detach itself from me. Waiting to understand the world again. I must have called an ambulance, put on some clothes. I held her and stared emptily at the tiles until the paramedics arrived.

I went with Ingrid in the ambulance and then sat in the waiting room with a coffee that tasted like cigarette ash while they pumped her stomach, stitched up her wrists, arranged for a psychological assessment. I assumed they’d detain her this time under the Mental Health Act, and she’d be transferred to a secure psychiatric unit. At this point, it probably wouldn’t make much difference. Some wounds are too deep. The razorblades were just her way of exerting control over a situation that had defeated her years ago. The burden of trying to live a life you no longer understood.

I sat with her in the ward later on. She woke after an hour and stared at me absently, and then unexpectedly she reached out for my hand. “Hey,” I began and leaned forward, trying to smile, trying to be something reassuring for her, but then her face creased into tears, and she folded in on herself. I relinquished her hand and sat back while she wept silently.

It was almost light when I got home. I went upstairs and let myself into Ingrid’s flat. I spent an hour cleaning the bathroom of blood and pills and sunflower seeds. The petals that had showered down from my dream had come to rest on every surface. I made the bed and found the dream I’d had. It was just the husk of a sunflower head, or a heart made of fractured triangles, I couldn’t decide. When I pushed aside the soft folds with my fingertips I caught glimpses of the field of sunflowers, the hospital bed, the musician with his mouth filled with sun. I teased open the folds, touched the warm, inviting flesh. It invited me to tumble back inside it. Instead I found a jar in Ingrid’s cupboard. I washed it out and placed the dream inside, along with as many of the petals as I could gather. I took it downstairs and placed it on the shelf in the closet and closed the door on it.

Toby King met me outside a pub across the street from Flamingo Park. It was raining. There were no tourists, no children, no calliope music. The rides were covered over, dripping wet. Seagulls wheeled above us. The sea crashed against the promenade, restless, violent, surging.

We sat beneath the pub’s awning, nursing beers it was too early in the day to drink. Toby was in his fifties. He had a hard face and arms that looked like they were made from granite. He wore a pork pie hat without apology. He tapped the table with his calloused fingers, then the chair, his knees, anything. Allan had given me his number. He had footage on his iPhone of one of the shows he’d played when he was in Hugo Lawrence’s band.

“I suppose I should get one of my kids to upload it to YouTube one of these days,” he said.

It was a typically shaky hand-held video, but I honestly didn’t care. At this point, it was like being granted the sight of the Flying Dutchman overhead. The band was mid-way through a delirious rendition of Sunflower Junction . Hugo’s head was down, his hair falling over his face, swaying, his guitar clasped like a talisman, utterly abandoned to the moment. The band was building to something ragged and ecstatic. Finally, reaching some kind of euphoric high, Hugo raised his face. His eyes were wild; sweat was beading at the tips his hair. Just as it seemed there was nowhere else for the music to go, at his indication, the band circled back around and began to build again, like waves crashing repeatedly at the shore. As Hugo turned his back to the crowd, the video ended.

“Christ,” I said.

“Intense, right?” King lit a cigarette and exhaled a plume of smoke as if he were post-coital. “It was like that every night. Every fucking night . Shit for the audience, but an absolute fucking trip for us.”

“What was it?” I asked. “What was he trying to achieve with that song?” I think I already knew at that point, or I sensed it, like something settling into my bones. It felt like my life was infected with it already.

King shrugged. He took off his hat and rubbed at his bald head. “Fucked if I know, mate. I just turn up and play my instrument.”

“Did you work on the album?”

“Yeah, yeah, man.”

“Were you there that night you all came up with Sunflower Junction ?”

King grinned. “Yeah, I was there. We were booked into the studio down the road for the evening, so Hugo brought some magic mushrooms and some weed and we started jamming while we waited for the ’shrooms to kick in. Hugo would start something, some idea he had and we’d join in, work at it until we hit a groove. By the time we were peaking on the mushrooms, we’d fallen into something good. We could feel it. None of us were thinking consciously about what we were playing, you know? Just instinct. And we were all in sync with each other. It was fucking heavy . I’ve never experienced anything like that night. None of us have.”

“What about Hugo?”

King sniffed, looked at me from the corner of his eyes, sizing me up finally. He shook his head. “It fucked him, that night, you know? It was, I don’t know, transcendent for him, for all of us, but it broke him too. He was ecstatic about it that night, and then the next day when we realized that it sounded good and we’d got it down on tape, you know? This fucking incredible piece of music that seemed to take you somewhere if you wanted to go.”

He sighed. “But Hugo couldn’t get back there. He told me he’d caught a glimpse of something, and I said ‘Yeah, man, me too. The walls were fucking melting.’ But he said ‘No, none of that mushroom shit. Something else.’ ”

“Did he say what it was?

King laughed. “Sunflowers? It’s all in the lyrics, ain’t it? This glimpse of something he’s been seeing since he was a little kid. Somewhere better than here, than this shit.

“Either way, man, it fucked him up. But gradually, you know? We finished the record and then we toured it, and for a while he was the same old Hugo. Still intense, but you could drink with him, talk about women and shit. But it was that song. We played about twenty gigs and each night he’d get to that song and he’d want to us to get to that place again, just like that first night. But it was lightning in a bottle, man. You can’t replicate that sort of shit, night after night.

“So we’d play that song and we’d go round and around, like it was some sort of mathematical problem.”

“That pattern on the album cover,” I said, realizing it then. “It’s a Fibonacci spiral.”

“If you say so, man. He sort of explained it to us once in the van on the way to a gig, but you know, I’m a bass player. It doesn’t mean shit to me. I just try to keep time and not fall off the stage.”