Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

From the peculiar vessel’s center rose an obtuse pyramid built from dismembered parts, a contortion of limbs, torsos, mouths and eyes, its capstone a half-sitting girl, straining upward in salvific longing and desperation, a shredded blouse sleeve flapping from her outstretched arm, like a flag hoisted in truce on its mast.

The dolls’ faces were vacant, emotionless, their sideways eyes neither tormented nor satiated, painted lips pressed against navels and buttocks and necks, their unclothed places teetering between nudity and the innocent nakedness of children.

As it neared, the raft seemed to extend outward, into Kris, drawing and engaging her as a participant in the wooden contraption that seemed on the verge of fracturing apart.

She stood shuddering. A figure—a man with a charred-looking face— rested along the rear of this deranged pageant boat, pulled along by his head and shoulders, floating carefree as a monarch whose kingdom has been threatened, or an ant colony’s queen in a flood, her majesty kept safe by her larval ant brood.

At first, the man looked like a massive, polyurethane balloon character. His inflated thighs and bloated arms trailed in the water, bulging with unnatural strength. His blackened head twisted, confronting Kris, beckoning her with his open, putrefied palm, his stretched arm exposing a triangular gaping wound beneath his ribs, the blood-tinged froth about his nose and mouth taunting her, his eyeballs protruding in their sockets, between his teeth, the heel of a headless doll.

A gnarled branch in the water caught the hem of the man’s pants. The collision disturbed his balance, dislodged him from the interstices of doll parts. His distended form slid from the raft and flipped over in the muck, the tarnished-bronze rag of him, macerated, broad shoulders slumped forward, his head now vanished underwater, acting as ballast. He released a sigh. The decomposing gasses produced by bacteria in his chest cavity and gut—methane, hydrogen sulfide and carbon dioxide—erupted from him as he began to deflate, until diving, groaning, a ship in distress, he was swallowed up whole by the Neches, with all that remained on the surface only bubbles, gas molecules rising upwards through the air.

Skelton could hear the sea from his room. As a teenager he had found the breath of the tide more soothing than a lullaby, but now, with disappointment filling up the years in between like accumulated grime, it seemed like nothing more than the death-bed respiration of a sick old man, struggling to draw air in to atrophied lungs.

The springs inside the old-fashioned mattress creaked so loudly as he sat up that it might have been the same one he had slept on over thirty years before. By contrast, the carpet that he crossed to the window was thinner and coarser than he remembered, and the Ikea wardrobe was nothing like the one he had once imagined might lead to Narnia—at least during the day, before the darkness transformed it into a shape that loomed with such sinister intent that he couldn’t close his eyes until his head was beneath the covers.

The promenade, and the beach beyond, looked as lifeless as an old postcard, which was not how he remembered them at all. Viewed through the shifting warp of rain on the window, the sea, sand and concrete seemed to smear together into a grey substance barely more substantial than mist. When Skelton blinked, the fist of the pier, with its overlong finger pointing out to sea, hovered into focus for a second before slithering back into murk. Was the dark blob that seemed to twitch half-way along the pier’s length a person? Was someone leaning over the railings, having braved the November squall? Or was it merely a huge gull perched on the upper rail?

Skelton leaned forward for a better look, but was closer to the glass than he had anticipated, and the sudden cold shock of it against his forehead made him flinch back with a gasp. He recovered almost at once, but by then the dark blob was gone—or at least he could no longer locate it.

He drew back from the window, unsettled by the notion that the figure—if it had been a figure—had darted out of sight because it had seen, or sensed, him watching it. Frowning, he crossed to the chair, also from Ikea, to the left of the bed, across which he had casually tossed the bulky waterproof jacket that Janice had bought him in the hope that if they spent every Sunday walking together in the country it would give them the time she felt they needed to save their marriage. As he zipped himself into it, he heard a scuff and a thump from the room above his. He looked up instinctively, even though he knew he would see nothing but his own ceiling, and thought about his parents.

They had had that room. Number 12 wasn’t it? He had a vivid memory of opening the glossy, pale-blue door at the end of his landing each morning and ascending the twisty staircase to the floor above. As he had climbed, the door had swung slowly shut behind him, like a door in a ghost story, trapping him momentarily in stuffy, creaking gloom. He had run up the remainder of the stairs, a little breathless and deliciously spooked, and had scuttled along the landing to tap lightly on his parents’ door.

“Yes?” It had always been his father who had answered, his voice stern and a little irritable, as if he had been interrupted in the middle of some fiddly task. It made Skelton wonder whether his parents had been happy here, whether the holiday had been as enjoyable and memorable for them as it had for him.

The instant the question occurred to him he was surprised by it. As a child, or indeed since, he had never really given a thought to his parents’ feelings. They had simply been his parents. A fixture. Unchanging. They hadn’t shown their emotions; they hadn’t expressed affection towards each other, or to him. It wasn’t that they had been cruel or unkind. On their holiday here they had bought him things – ice cream; a stick of rock; a Frisbee to play with on the beach; a paperback book to read. They had indulged his teenage enthusiasms, as much as they were able, and had allowed him his freedom.

Thinking of his parents made him sad. The fact that he had never really got to know them was something he would now be unable to remedy. It was one of many lost opportunities in his life, the majority of which had slipped away due to his own reticence, his inability—to coin any number of clichés—to step up to the plate, take the bull by the horns, put himself in the firing line.

Janice had found this aspect of his personality appealing at first. She had thought him “mysterious.” A challenge. “Still waters run deep,” she had used to say, with a smile that had seemed to suggest she alone was privy to some great secret. But as time, and their marriage, had dragged on, she had become increasingly disenchanted and disillusioned with his refusal to open up. She had craved affection, and had been unable to find it. “Getting a reaction from you is like trying to squeeze blood from a stone,” she had told him once—another overused analogy.

The thing was, Skelton had loved her. He did love her. He just hadn’t been able to find a way to show it, or even articulate his frustration. His own emotions were as inaccessible to him as… as his foetal memories. And much as he had wanted to, he could no more save his marriage than he could carry out brain surgery, or build a car engine from scratch.

“You’re not going out, Mr. Skelton?”

Mrs. Derry, the landlady of the B&B (though she referred to it as a ‘hotel’) sounded almost disapproving. Perhaps she was thinking of the effect his wet shoes and dripping clothes would have on her carpet when he returned.

“Just a quick ramble, Mrs. Derry,” he replied. “Reacquaint myself with some old haunts.”