Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

I carried the board to the front of House 4 but I wasn’t going in.

“There’s no one here,” Bernard said, but I could hear footsteps inside, for sure. “I think this is a better place,” he said, and he sat himself down in the shadowy verandah to look out.

Later, I sat on our verandah and watched Dad cooking the BBQ. He stooped over the hot plate, looking so very old. Tired. It was dark out there, darker than usual. In the shadows I thought I saw a figure. Did Dad have a buddy out there? A beach friend? He always made friends, loved to chat.

He looked up suddenly as if just noticing the person there, then he pulled back, raising his arms to his face.

Then he fell.

“Dad!” I’m saying as I’m running down the steps, calling to the boys because I wanted them there to get the person who’d hit our dad.

They were slow to respond as ever. Bernard hated to move fast, even though as a kid you could never stop him. On the rare times Dad tried to whack his bum for some wrongdoing he’d scoot out of the way so fast hand never laid on bum cheek and we’d all end up laughing.

Now his feet fell flat and sluggish.

We made it to Dad who was on his knees, moaning. Bleeding from the nose, but he said he’d bumped that, falling. There’d been no one standing over him, he said.

But I knew there had.

Bernard and I helped him up and inside while Gerard finished the cooking (everything was burnt anyway; Dad’s idea of BBQ perfection) and Mum panicked. Dad said, “I’m fine. Stop fussing. I fell,” but he had a look in his eye, a slight shiftiness. I’d seen it in older people who were starting to lose their memory, or bodily control, and didn’t want anyone to know. Their minds race, wanting to cover up a lapse. That’s what he was doing.

“I thought I saw someone out there with you,” I said, close to his ear.

He shook his head. “There was no one.”

We settled Dad in bed, against his will, and made Mum cups of tea because she was freaking out.

“I can’t be on my own,” she whispered to me. “I just can’t.”

“You can come and live with me,” I said, although no way. I couldn’t do it. Better she goes into a home, she’d be fine. Never alone, at least.

That night was the first time I thought I heard someone outside, carrying a metal bucket clank clank . I heard weird things all night. The bucket being dragged or something, and a deep male laugh, a single laugh, a man alone.

I got up to check on Dad and Mum twice in the night; they both happily snored away.

Next morning Bernard’s eyes were bright, set deep in dark bags that made him look older.

“Waffles for breakfast?” Mum said, bright and desperate, so ‘let’s pretend’ I had to go along with it. So I started a fight with Gerald and the two of us ran hollering bloody murder around the house, with the others inside laughing their arses off at us.

A thin layer of yellow ooze lay at the bottom of the bucket. I set jars out to collect from the rest of the mannequins as well.

That night Bernard asked us all ‘for drinks’ at his house. At Grandad Sheet’s house. He’d set up chairs on the verandah, and found glasses, and he had wine. It was nice. I stayed there longer than the others, not wanting it to end. It was peaceful, Bernard calmly smoking, pouring wine, neither of us talking. The mannequins stood forward over there in front of our house, casting shadows by moonlight. I thought I saw one man walk to the water, keep walking until he disappeared. And another vanish into the dunes, then there he was, back on the verandah, then into the dunes again. It was tiredness, my eyes aching from sun-on-sand reflection.

Bernard didn’t want to go inside. He liked it on the verandah, No man’s land, he called it, neither in nor out. I had a last glass of wine out there with him then left him to it. He was snoring gently and I thought that anyone who slept so easily must be feeling okay.

When I looked back I saw him lift his arm to wave at someone.

I went inside.

I went inside.

The only thing I feel okay about is that I didn’t do it because I was tired, or cold, or bored. I did it because I thought he wanted to be alone. He seemed peaceful, barely affected by the things I saw.

So I went inside.

Sometime in the night, Bernard walked into the dunes. He went past the last memorial, using a big old torch to guide him.

We knew where he was because of the note he left. It said, “He says it will be all right. That he’ll take me the furtherest I can go.”

Gerard and I went to look for him, and Jason’s dad came with us. That shat me, later, as if he thought he had a monopoly on finding dead people.

Bernard had cut his wrists with broken glass, sliced his arms carefully long ways from wrist to inner elbow.

The sun was well up and he looked so pale, as pale as Grandad Sheet. His arms were flat beside him, legs stretched out, and the sand dark and damp all around him.

Gerard said, “You fucking idiot,” and took my hand so we could go close together, look into his face, looking for a beat in his eyelids, touch his throat hoping for a beat there.

Nothing.

“I’m sorry.” Jason’s dad. A lot of people would say that over the coming weeks, but I thought he really meant it.

Bernard wore a dozen of those damn shell necklaces and I wasn’t sure what made me the saddest; the fact he thought they’d help, or the fact they didn’t.

We built a memorial for Bernard. Jason’s dad wanted to use the shell necklaces; I thought Gerard was going to kill him. Instead we laid Bernard’s surfboard down, anchored it with rocks, and every time we went back we took something for him. A bottle of wine, or a new piece of music, or a book.

We didn’t give him a jar of the yellow stuff because we’d burnt all the dummies and their clothes. The smell of them. They left a terrible pink mess, a sludge that set into a hard rock, so we left that on the surfboard, too.

The memory of them. Me, Gerard, and Jason, with the adults, those alive and those who were ghosts, all watching from their verandahs, The families from House 3 would arrive in the next holiday, in whatever variation, blissfully unaware.

Lucky them.

Mum and Dad wanted to sell up the house or just abandon it but Gerard and I wouldn’t let them.

“I need this place,” I told them. Although it wasn’t a safe place. There were too many voices. But it made me feel strong to resist them and that was worth a lot.

Some days it was just me and Jason’s dad on the beach, and he talked. He told me his stories; the meanderings of a broken mind. The dead boys one, the when Nick died one, the how I lost my job one, the why my wife left me one, the when I nearly killed myself one.

And the Granddad Sheet one. He reckoned Sheet thought of those dead strangers memorialized in the dunes as his family. His friends. That’s how alone he was. He always felt excluded. “We never let him into our perfect world,” Jason’s dad said, and that’s how deluded he was.

“I think he did it,” he said. “He wore those same clothes every single day. The police doll clothes. Maybe he wanted someone to identify him and no one ever did. Maybe he had something to feel guilty about. That why he wanted us to go into the dunes. To find the memorials. To do something about it. To stop him. We never did. I reckon he blamed us for that. Blamed us for all the memorials, all the… things he has to feel guilty about. He still blames us.”