Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

“I almost did it. I’d gathered rocks and rope and I was going to swim out and let the rocks drop like an anchor, you know. I was so close.”

“So what stopped you?”

“It’s stupid. But the smell of something BBQing wafted over. Sausage and onions. And I was suddenly starving and I thought, I can’t die on an empty stomach . I went home and ate, then Jason rang and I went to bed and just… forgot about it.

“The next morning I found Grandad Sheet hanging in his boathouse. The door was banging in the wind so I went to shut it and there he was, hanging. I wondered if he’d taken my place. That someone had to die that night and it turned out to be him.

“It wasn’t as bad as finding the boys. Nothing could be as bad as that. But it was still a shock. So you have to ignore the voices. If they’re telling you what to do. Shut them out whatever way you can.”

“Come on you lot, help,” Dad said. Bernard had been hard at it, carrying out loads of rubbish, whistling, running into the surf for a dip every now and then.

Not even his family went near the place, so why should we? We did take drinks and snacks over to them, though.

Dad and Jason’s dad stayed over there for hours with Bernard, making a big pile of rubbish, getting drunker by the minute. They chucked out any wrecked furniture, shouting out, “Executive Decision” each time. It was actually pretty funny and we all set up beach chairs to watch the show. Even Mum, who angled her chair so she could watch all of us, too. I couldn’t be a mother. I couldn’t cope with that level of love. Too painful. I can’t even cope with a dog, too needy, too easily saddened.

They found mostly crap, like the embroidered wallhanging that said, “The furtherest you go, the better the place.”

The dads finished in the house. “What about the boatshed?” Gerard called out, then whispered, as Dad called back, “I’ll boatshed you!”

But they did go in there, torches out because all the boatsheds were filled with years of crap that blocked the windows.

They were in there for a bit so we turned our chairs around to watch the sea instead, and a group of teenagers down there making a bonfire, swearing as loud as they could, throwing bottles.

“Don’t throw the fucken bottles,” Bernard roared. You’d have to call it a roar. That stopped them. He walked down there and pointed; stack ‘em there , he said, and we’ll clear them up in the morning. Don’t leave broken glass on the beach .

He bent to pick up some of it and the kids helped, and he was back soon, smiling to himself. I nearly cried to see it, that pure, happy smile.

I was thinking of going inside when I heard a dragging sound. I turned to see the dads coming towards us, both dragging shop mannequins.

Shop mannequins.

We gathered around as they set the mannequins back on their feet. They were taller than me, dressed in clothing from, what the sixties? Mum said so; you had a shirt like that , she said to Dad.

“There are four more,” Jason’s dad said. “All standing there in his shed behind a stack of corrugated iron.”

The boys helped drag them all out and we stood them up on our verandah. It gave me the creeps, as if six strange men stood there, staring at us, watching us too closely.

Each was dressed differently. One had black pants and a white singlet. One had black shirt, white singlet, open orange shirt. One had brown shorts, green polo, panama hat. One had grey pants, blue shirt. One had faded pink shorts, towel around neck, hat. One had white pants, white hat, light jacket, blue singlet, towel under arm.

The clothes were moth-eaten, dusty, stained.

The mannequins were made of pink plastic that made me think of silly putty. They were all damaged; dents and cuts. Cracks and fissures. And they leaked, oozing thick yellow sticky stuff that was too slow to be fluid.

“That’s the stuff in jars in the dunes,” I said.

And I thought of the jars of jam Grandad Sheet gave us years ago, and of the jars at the memorial, and of this yellow sticky stuff.

“This is too weird,” Gerard said. “Was he a tailor or something?”

“Fashion designer, darling,” I said, modelling for them.

“I think they must be the police dolls. Don’t you remember?” Jason’s dad said. “After I found the boys?”

“We weren’t here then,” Dad said.

“There were six men who didn’t come forward. Others saw them at the time they thought boys disappeared, but they never spoke up. So the police dressed these doll things up in the gear people remembered them wearing and paraded them all over the state, hoping to get a clue, did you see something? Is this you? But no one ever did. No idea how Grandpa Sheet got them. Maybe they were left on the beach.”

Bernard stood up, looked at them from different angles. Then he said, “That’s Grandad Sheet,” and jeezus he was right. Brown shorts, stripy shirt. Panama hat. Why had no one ever seen it? He’d moved in to the area after the murders, maybe? So no one knew him?

Sand coated the feet of the mannequins. I walked down to where the dads had first stood them up and saw the weird, perfect footprints they’d left behind.

I’d seen these at the first memorial we found. Someone had dragged the mannequins to the memorial and let them stand there, casting shadows.

I shuddered at the thought.

The Grandad Sheet one leaked the worst of all. I was tempted to collect it. In the end I set up a bucket and listened to the slow, solid, regular drip in the night.

We set the six of them up in front of the houses. They all cast a shadow but one cast a shadow longer than the others. I couldn’t figure out why; I shifted it from place to place and still the shadow was long, dark and cold. It was cold in the shadow, colder than it should be and darker than the middle of the night.

We went for a walk, all of us, heading away from the dunes.

Birds circled overhead, squawking so loudly we could hardly hear each other. I covered my head, worried they’d let loose a sea of shit and I did feel a spatter of something but it was the first drop of rain. The sky blackened and we tried to make it home but were caught in a great downpour.

The house lay ahead so we laughed, because soon we’d be warm and dry.

Running from the rain, laughing, but it fell so hard it actually hurt and when I made it inside there were red marks across my arms, face, chest, legs; any exposed skin was striped. I stopped laughing but someone still did, I could hear the echo of it. Or not the echo but an actual laugh, one of those men’s laugh when they think the women aren’t listening.

The Grandad Sheet dummy stood in front of the door. We’d set him at the end of the verandah, a sentinel, but here he was blocking the way.

Bernard stripped his own clothes off, dressed in the dummy’s clothing, leaving the dummy anonymous, sexless.

I said, “It’s bad luck to wear the clothes of a man who died at sea.”

“He didn’t drown.”

“He drowned in his own blood. That’s what happens after you hang yourself.”

He gave me a chuff on the shoulder, then a harder one on the chin. “Help me shift my stuff,” he said. He hardly had anything; just a couple of duffle bags, a guitar he never played, his surfboard.