Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

Gerard and I followed him, leaving Mum to fuss with the windows and the beds and to put a cuppa on.

We always left someone at the foot of the dunes, just in case. They could run for help.

This time, though. My brothers and I wanted to go in together, find the memorial that was periodically covered up.

Bernard had a hip flask of Bundy Rum and we drank that as we plodded on.

“We used to run in this sand, don’t you remember?” Gerard said. “As if it was a footpath.”

“We were a lot lighter then. Didn’t sink to our ankles.” Bernard was skinny as a stick, far too thin. Our brief hugs made me cringe, because I could feel his bones.

“I’m as svelte as ever,” I said, “Like a blade of grass,” and that set them off mocking me for a while, which was good.

“Is this thing actually here?” Gerard said. “It was, but I haven’t seen it in years.”

“Let’s give it another five minutes, then we’ll head back,” Bernard said. We weren’t going to argue.

At the moment he was living in these small increments of time. Five minutes. Half an hour. One afternoon. The more increments of time that passed, the further he was from that moment when he was prepared to drink the weed-killer.

What we didn’t know.

What we should have known.

Was that time goes forward to a thing as well as away from another.

We finished the rum, and I made them sing stupid songs, and then Bernard said, “There it is.”

Only it wasn’t. It was a different one. White-painted wood hammered into a cross and imbedded with sea-softened glass pieces.

We stared at it for a while, chilled even though the sun burned down.

Gerard bent over, digging in the sand. He revealed a small glass jar, filled with the viscous yellow liquid I remembered so well from the other memorial.

“Did someone make a new one?” Gerard said, but Bernard had already walked on, and called out, “Here’s another one.”

The one Bernard found could have been the original but wasn’t. It was a wooden cross but not as aged; some weather-damage but it seemed to have been made of that ‘outdoor’ wood, paint thick, with chains dangling off it, held in places by notches in the wood. One fine chain with a butterfly pendant, one thicker one with fake dog tags.

“We should take these back and hang them over the verandah at House 2. Freak out Jason’s dad.”

Even now he still got shit for not going to Vietnam. Every now and then, especially on Anzac Day.

We found the original memorial next, collapsed now, with few stones remaining. And we found two more, looking even older, that we thought must have been there all along but we never walked that far.

The next memorial was built of rusted metal, with words scratched in. We couldn’t read beyond a few letters. F and H and T

Bernard kept on walking. “There might be more,” he said. I hoped not each one meant that someone had died.

We wouldn’t have recognised the next one if we hadn’t seen the others. This one was a mound of stones, perfectly placed, with a surround of large rocks to keep them in place. Each letter on a different stone.

We pulled them out carefully and laid them on the sand, shifting them around until we found a word.

FURTHEREST

All of the memorials hosted a jar, filled with that yellow stuff.

We stayed until the sun started to dip then headed back. Bernard didn’t want to come but we dragged him. Night fell dark and fast at the beach and we didn’t have torches or food or anything but an empty hip flask.

Dad had the BBQ out when we got back. The boys stopped with him, drank beer, and I went inside for a shower.

Mum and Dad are getting on, now, but they’re sticking to the plan. Eggs for breakfast, leftovers for lunch, BBQ for dinner, cooked by Dad even though he can’t see in the dark well anymore and insisted on BBQing out there on the beach.

We told them what we’d seen, all those memorials.

“No names on them?”

“Nothing but the word ‘furtherest’.”

“Like Grandad Sheet always says,” Mum said. I didn’t think she knew about all that. “Maybe he made the memorials for his wife and son. And his parents. Who knows?”

As we talked I could hear children laughing, and someone squealing as they dipped into the water, and the pop of a champagne cork.

We all looked over the House 4. It was dark; no squatters tonight. Grandad Sheet had died five or six months earlier. No one went to the funeral. I don’t even know if there was one. His son was long dead and there was only one grandson who wanted nothing to do with him or the house. He’d never even been.

No one shut the house up, or put it on the market. The dads looked after the outside, weeding when they did their own, clearing off dead birds that periodically made it to the verandah.

No one touched the inside.

You could easily imagine him there, watching as he always did.

“There’s usually a party of some kind going on in the house. They’re always at it. Leave a great pile of shit behind,” Jason’s dad said. He still walked for hours and actually looked better than he had in years. He made shell necklaces to guard against the evil eye and handed them out to anyone he saw. Even now, he sat with his beer, threading.

“Maybe I could move into his place for a while,” Bernard said. “Keep the squatters out.”

“Yes! You could!” Mum realised straight away she’d been too excited but couldn’t rein it in.

“We’d have to get in and clear it out. He was house-proud, you could say that for him. He’d be turning in his grave to see the state it’s in.”

We’d gone off track. “What about the crosses? The stones?” I said, and my brothers said yeah , agreeing with me. The grownups (yeah, we were grown up now but not like they were. Not like kid-producing, home-owning, holiday house-owning adults) nodded.

“We’ll call the police tomorrow,” Mum said, and she did it, too. They never did come, though.

Not about that.

“I should get Jason to come back, give us a hand to clear the place out.” Jason’s dad said.

We rolled our eyes (yeah, adults).

“He’s overseas, isn’t he?” Mum said. “For his job?”

“He’s doing bloody well. They love him on the TV over there.”

He was actually a bit of a spunk now but he was still gropy-fingered Jason to me.

“He thinks of you all as cousins. He’d love to be here.”

The verandah at House 4 sat in shadows, darker than anywhere else, I thought.

The dads were up early to start the big clear out.

They wanted us to help but I wasn’t going in that place. It always gave me the creeps. Grandpa Sheet wasn’t someone you wanted to go near. He was so desperately lonely, so needy, it felt like he’d grab on and wouldn’t let you go.

He had been married; they said it lasted a week. Long enough to make a baby (the son who died) and we never saw the wife. Someone said she was a geologist and one of Gerald’s jokes was, “She must have had rocks in her head to marry him.”

Jason’s dad said, “I’m glad you’re all here. You anchor me. Not long before Grandpa Sheet died I wasn’t feeling the best. I shouldn’t tell you this. But Jason says it helps to talk. I was pretty low. I was hearing voices or something, telling me what I should do. End it all.”

“I don’t know if that’s the best topic,” Mum whispered to me.

“You can’t say anything. It’ll be really awkward and embarrassing and obvious if you do and Bernard will hate it,” I whispered back.