Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

“A boy’s hand.

“I swore and Kate and Nick noticed at last. I’m scrabbling in the sand and they’re just laughing at me, cacking themselves at my fat arse in the air, and I’m sweaty and gross.

“They stopped laughing when I dug the boy’s body out.

“Nick was the one who fell apart, chucking up all over the place, crying like a little baby.

“He ran off, left us there, scared of ghosts or that the killer was still around. I guarded the bodies while Kate went for help. We knew they’d believe her over me and we didn’t want the birds to get at the bodies. They were already squawking overhead.

“You’ve never heard silence like it, once the birds took off. Not just silence but the negative of noise. The sea, I could hear that, like a heavy-breathing giant, and another breath, I thought behind me, someone watching me, but there wasn’t anyone.

“We found out later the boys swallowed weed killer. Stole it from the Hardware Store, hid in the dunes and swallowed it.”

And he said, “That night me and Kate gave each other what comfort we could.”

I didn’t figure out what he meant by that until years later.

He always ended with, “So don’t go into the dunes, kids. You never know who’s lurking in there.”

Then one of the other adults would bring him a beer (men) or try to get him to go inside (women) and we’d be left to scare each other stupid with stories of murder and our parents would read us Winnie the Pooh to help us sleep without nightmares.

His friend Nick survived the war but drowned on our beach a few years later. Suicide, some people reckoned, so all our parents were terrified of it, are you all right? if you spent five minutes of solitude. The thought never crossed my mind. “I was too busy stuffing my face,” Jason’s dad liked to say. “Sitting there. Eating Spag Bol. I didn’t even notice he was gone. All they found of him was his shoes on the beach. His dog tags tucked into them.”

Jason’s house was always overgrown. The other men would be out the front, round the side, keeping on top of things, but Jason’s dad let his weeds grow. No one cared except Mr. White, the old man in House 4.

He was a man of habit and routine. He wore same clothes every day; dark brown thigh length shorts, a pale green stripy polo shirt. A panama hat he never took off.

The beach almost killed him, with its relaxation of time.

The other adults loosened up when we were there, some of them too much. Jason’s mum Kate was always in swimmers, tiny bikinis that made us all feel uncomfortable, although I had fantasies for years about her pubic hair peeking out.

The dads joked and played and rarely shouted at us.

Mr. White started coming a couple of years after we did. He didn’t have a wife. Rumour had it she’d died in childbirth. His son only came once, I think, and had no interest in any of us. He was about my age but far more independent, heading out for hours up the beach, into the water. Mum said it was because he had no mother and his father wasn’t much. We called the old man Grandpa Sheet because he was pretty old to be a dad and he was white as a sheet. White as a ghost. He was the one who taught us the dune game. “Go further in,” he’d say. “See what you find. There might be treasure in there, washed up. A reward for the one who goes the furtherest.” But he never gave out any rewards, and we never found treasure. Once (and the parents deny this but it did happen) he put a sheet over his head and appeared around our boatshed, where we were hanging out, smoking. The boys from House 3 had jobs before the rest of us and were generous with their money.

Grandpa Sheet appeared, pretending to be a ghost and nearly died laughing as we scattered like cockroaches.

I was the one who found the first memorial, when I was sixteen, there with friends. My parents still owned the place. Mum and Dad didn’t mind me and my friends using it; I guess they thought I was safer there than the streets of Sydney.

Probably true.

We were there most weekends and it probably did save my life. Not because of the damage I could do myself, but because of the damage others could do to me.

It was off season so mostly no one else was there except Jason’s dad, who was always there, and bloody Jason, who wasn’t as fat as he used to be but annoyingly clingy and boastful.

Jason’s parents were long since split up. His mum was on TV, presenting a beauty segment on afternoon TV. She never came any more. His dad spent most of his time on the beach, making shell necklaces and researching the great Australian novel, he reckoned, a crime novel. Jason looked more like his dad that his mum which was a shame for him because his mum was gorgeous.

House 3 only ever came in the holidays. They took it in turns; it seemed like there were hundreds of them. They were the most normal people you’d ever meet. The worst thing that ever happened to them was Jason’s mum Kate having him when she was a teenager. All the kids my age were doing well, so normal. Married, kids, and you see them here, running around like we used to. Generation after generation, rolling in like waves. Venturing towards the dunes but lacking our bravery so mostly hovering on the edges. “It’s like going back in the past,” Mum said. “Like no time has passed at all.”

And Grandad Sheet in House 4 was always there. No one liked him much. He was one of those too-friendly old men, always carrying coins and shit, handing things out. You’d watch him carefully. Dad taught us to watch everyone carefully and be polite. We warned each other not to go into Grandad Sheet’s boathouse. It was full of ghosts, we told each other. You could see the shine of them through the window some mornings and light where it shouldn’t be some evenings.

One morning, after we’d taken a quick dip in the chill water to wash away hangovers, Grandad Sheet stood waiting for us on the beach, wearing his usual uniform; brown shorts, stripy polo, panama hat. I almost felt sorry for him but not so much I would talk to him.

He waved to us. “You’re old enough to help me finish this wine,” he called out, but we’d rather stay sober than that. Anyway, Jason’s dad bought us whatever we wanted. It didn’t make us like Jason any more, but it meant we let him hang out with us whenever he showed up. We had to listen to Jason’s dad’s stories, though. The dead boys one, and the when Nick died one, and the why I lost my job one, and the why I left Jason’s mother one.

“A case of beer for the one who goes furtherest,” Grandad Sheet said, nodding his head at the dunes.

The boys went off, because we were all out of money and this was beer without obligation or story. I followed, calling for them to wait. Part of the fun of the dunes was you had to be scared going in, so I reminded them about the murders, the bodies, the maybe ghosts.

“That’s all bullshit,” one of my friends said. I don’t remember his name; I don’t remember any of them.

We went further (‘furtherer,’ Grandad Sheet would say) than I’d been before. I felt safe with these friends; they lacked the imagination to be really scared, and were funny whenever they could be. Jason hung back. He hated the dunes (maybe because of times my brothers had threatened to bury him out here) but wasn’t going to miss out on anything.

Then we saw it.

We knew it was a memorial rather than a grave, but that didn’t stop any of us from imagining a body there. We could see the affect the weather had had on the cross, the flowers, and we imagined bleached bones buried beneath the sand, looking more like driftwood each day.