Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

The wooden cross must have been bright purple, once. It was very straight; buried deep in the sand to keep it upright. The paint had all peeled off, leaving just the stain of its colour on the wood, which was peeling splinters. There had been decals, once, on the three outward reaching edges of the cross. Only the glue was left, petrified against the wood; the shape of a flower, perhaps, and a ball-shaped thing which could have been the world, and something which may have been a bird.

Remnants of the name were there, but like Piglet’s “Trespasser’s Will,” the original meaning was obscured.

“Got Her,” Jason read. “Got who?” which was the funniest joke he was capable of making.

A plastic basket of mottled, ugly flowers sat crookedly in the sand. Smooth stones surrounded the cross, and these confused us; were these being replaced when they washed away or covered with sand? They looked dirty somehow, sticky.

There was a jar of some thick, yellow, viscous liquid. We couldn’t think what it was.

“I told you,” I said, and no one said it was all bullshit this time.

We left it there; no one wanted to touch it. It felt bad to leave the memorial as it was, disrespectful somehow, as if death was dirty but we couldn’t be bothered to spend a few minutes to clean it up.

A shadow fell over us, strange on a cloudless day, and I shivered. Someone spying on us? Standing over us, wishing they were part of our group?

There was no one there, and the shadow lifted. Something had passed between me and the sun, that’s all.

One of the guys picked up a stone.

He held it in his palm, then tucked it in his pocket. He wasn’t bothered by gross things. He’d been known to throw dog poo, bare-handed. He took the stone over to Grandpa Sheet who examined it and nodded. He handed over a six pack of beer.

“He asked what we saw. That’s all he wanted. And he said something about the poor boys.”

“Someone must have set it up for the boys I told you about,” I said. “The one’s Jason’s dad found.”

Grandpa Sheet seemed full of life, hopping up and down the stairs like a puppy dog wanting to play.

“You see?” he called out. “Reward for the ones who go the furtherest.”

That night I dreamt my pubic hair was matted and massive, like seaweed. I woke to find Jason down there, trying to get a fingerhold, his hair balled against my stomach, greasy and damp.

I pushed him off and he whined, “I thought we could give each other what comfort we could.”

“Yeah, well,” I said. I left him on the corner of my bed and went to have a shower, to wash the nightmare and him away.

We all sat on the verandah, eating the last of the cereal. Dry, because there was no milk and no one wanted to go buy some. Money was tight and we’d lost track of who’d spent what. I’d lost track, anyway, because I never had any money to spend.

Grandad Sheet sat in the shadows on his verandah. I heard clinking, like glass, and he stood up and walked towards us.

“You hungry?” he said. He carried four jam jars, clink clink. “Teenagers are always hungry. It’s jam,” he said, lifting it to the light. “Blackberry jam.”

“Thanks,” one of my friends said, because Jason and I wouldn’t.

He set the jars on the verandah railing, nodded, walked away.

“Must have been a sale on jars,” one of my friends said. Because they were the same.

The same as the jar we’d seen at the memorial.

The surf was high and the day bright, so the beach filled up quickly. The others went for a swim even though the jellyfish warning flags were out, but I didn’t have the energy.

Instead I went to the memorial. It was tucked away in the dunes where hardly anyone went, is why it lasted so long.

Someone had been there. I could see drag marks in the sand, and there were six sets of weirdly perfect footprints pressed deep next to the jar of sticky yellow liquid.

But I didn’t see a ghost until Grandad Sheet died.

I didn’t go back for a long time after that. My life progressed, sort of, or at least I didn’t fuck it up, and there never seemed to be time to go to the beach just for the sake of it.

It was fifteen years later before I went again, with Mum, Dad, my two brothers. None of us wanted to be there much but Bernard was depressed. Gerard had found him in the shed, with a glass and a bottle of weed killer. Seriously. Weed killer. We gave him shit about that, non-stop, because weed-killer? Could you be more obvious? But Gerard found him, anyway, sitting there trying to write a suicide note but not really knowing WHY, thus proving me right and every one else wrong; he thought too much.

Luckily.

So Gerard saved him and now we were all there to pretend we were kids again and the worst thing that could happen was Dad cooked dinner and made raw hamburgers.

We arrived in two cars. I’d packed wine, cheese, fancy snacks from my local gourmet store. Mum and Dad had a carload of food, stuff we’d lived on as kids. White bread, sausages, sweet cereal. Custard in cartons. They’d brought cricket gear and new table tennis bats, because there was a table in the boatshed. It was surely ruined but that wouldn’t matter.

Dad got the key from under the front mat and opened the front door. The place was stuffy but open windows would let the sea breeze in and we’d soon feel relaxed and healthy. That was the plan.

Dinner first night was Fancy Chicken Salty Bucko. Mum called it that, trying to pretend she wasn’t showing off. Dad was getting pissed with Jason’s Dad, so Mum banned him from the barbie.

It was delicious. Mum always was a great cook.

“I picked the sage myself. There’s a gorgeous batch behind Jason’s house. I don’t think they even know it’s there.”

“Sage is good,” I said. She was making a point but I wasn’t sure what it was yet.

“If you pick twelve leaves at midnight you’ll see the ghost of your future husband,” she said. She knows I’m gay and doesn’t ban me from the house, but secretly, it seems, she thinks I just haven’t met the right man.

“Doesn’t that mean he’d be dead? You can’t have the ghost of a living person,” Bernard said, and we all got stuck into our Salty Bucko and bottles of wine and it felt okay. Mum kept squeezing Bernard, watching him, as if she couldn’t believe he was real. He’s been missing a long time, gone from us, and she’d say, it’s like we have no son, as if he didn’t exist when not in our presences.

Dad made us pull out the table tennis table and set it up. It wasn’t too bad. Buckled and mottled but reasonably sturdy when you shoved the legs in the sand.

Then he knocked on Jason’s dad’s door. Gerard and I exchanged looks of relief; now he’d stop trying to make conversation with us. Bernard was already on the beach, heading for the dunes. We’d spoken of little else but the memorial, because they’d seen it but we hadn’t been into the dunes together for years. And the dead boys. We talked about the dead boys and gave Bernard shit about the weed killer. He planned to ask Jason’s dad for the story again, because you have different ears as an adult. I don’t know what he was hoping to hear.