Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

Because we always felt him over there. In his house. And I could hear him whispering in my ear as I walked along the beach, the feel of it somehow driving my mood down, making me need a drink. Grandad Sheet could get through walls. Maybe that’s why he killed himself; so he could get to us in more ways than one. There was no privacy. He was always there and I saw him down on the beach, amongst the families down there. Trying to lead them into the dunes. He wasn’t always alone; sometimes there were the shadows of others around him.

He chilled me cold.

“We should have stopped him,” Jason’s dad said.

You should have I thought. And something else.

Jason’s dad should have died two, three, four times over. Each time, someone had stepped in for him; his best friend. Grandad Sheet. My brother.

They all died in his place.

Jason’s dad shakes his head as if he was trying to clear water out of his ear, but he rarely goes swimming. “The call of the deep is stronger when I hit the surf,” he always says. He’s shaking his head to stop the voices, looking at me sidelong as if sizing me up.

Some nights the ghosts come scrabbling at my door, they crawl up the hallway, they hover over me.

And I’m starting to think thoughts that aren’t my one. There is a better place . It’s like a whisper. I’m starting to think, this is shit, life is shit , and I haven’t thought that before.

I never had that feeling before.

I sniff a bottle of sunscreen, to get that feeling back that memory of childhood when we were all safe and happy. Trying to get rid of the bad thoughts. The thoughts of dying. I could leave. I should leave. But I have to stay until I’ve done one thing.

I’m keeping Jason’s dad well fed. I make sure he’s never hungry.

There’s only the two of us here now and it isn’t going to be me, so when the ghosts come knocking again, I point to him at House 2. I say, his turn .

At last it’s his turn.

When we first arrived back home to fix our parents’ house, we were eager for the money we’d make on it; my brother’s latest venture was going bust, and I was despairing of ever making a living from my photography. We reckoned the house could fetch a handsome sum even though it was a bit out of the way down the wooded lane. Our plan was to re-decorate, fix the garden, replace parts of the veranda, put the thing on the market, and get back to our normal and very separate lives in Holesville Nine—my brother and I had never learnt how to get on together, he drank too much and gambled too often to be any real use to me as a brother. At my cruellest I used to describe him as one of those guys who are overly proud of themselves, the type that endlessly pontificate about their honourable natures.

We’d agreed to complete each room before we moved onto the next. Eddie was to remove layers of wallpaper, fill in the gaps and holes beneath it all, then wash the walls down and paint them in some pastel colour that the eye could ignore and that a buyer would not be offended by. I was to remove many years of chipped paint from the skirting boards and the window frames, and re-paint them in simple white gloss.

The evenings had turned chilly and we’d taken to lighting the old log burner in the kitchen. Apart from its heat, it gave us something to focus on because conversation between us was so difficult. Being younger by five years, Eddie felt a peculiar impulse to compete with me, but I had no interest in being drawn into whatever crazy infected jumble was going on in his mind, and whenever I suspected he was attempting to manipulate our interactions, I clammed up. But I have also to own up to the fact that when we were kids, I scared him a lot and he was, deliciously for me, dead easy to scare. It’s how I kept him under control, I now realise. I often wonder just how cruel I really was to him, but he’d be the last person I’d ask.

Each morning, before starting our work in the house, we walked down the lane into the beginnings of the wood, to collect supplies for the log burner. There was one other dwelling that we knew of for certain further on from ours, and in it lived a very ancient man, who, even when we were kids, looked far too old to still be alive. Mr. Ratchetson—that was the name, and I used to tell little Eddie that he was a night-creeper who crawled up the wall and stared through our window while we were asleep. He didn’t believe me until I told him about the noises Mr. Ratchetson made as he clung to the side of our house and moved disgustingly in and out like a fire bellows.

“What noises does he make, Ross?” Eddie asked, wriggling down further into his bed.

I had to think quickly, so he didn’t see my lie. “Like the noise Mum’s door makes, Eddie. Just like that… squeaking and groaning at the same time.”

“What does he do it for?”

“It’s Mr. Ratchetson’s way of talking to you.”

“What’s he saying?”

“How would I know, it’s a different language, silly.”

Eddie gazed at me for a long time that evening, his eyes steady on my face and widened, and the next morning I saw that I’d convinced him, and felt the grim pleasure of my deceit. Because we now live in the same town, we come across each other every so often, and he still looks at me that way sometimes, so I like to think anyway—but perhaps the uneasiness is mine for my cruelty towards him back then. I don’t know.

As we drew level with Mr. Ratchetson on one of our wood gathering trips, he was at his gate looking away from us towards the darkness of the trees. “Oh God, look! That’s old Ratchetson, isn’t it? Must be way past a hundred by now,” Eddie whispered.

“More like two hundred, and still peeping through windows,” I said.

“Thank you, Ross. I don’t want to be reminded of that stuff. And by the way, I never did believe you.”

“Like hell you didn’t.”

“You don’t know, do you?”

“What?”

“That to keep you happy, I perfected a certain way of looking that convinced you I’d fallen for your crap.”

“Yeah?” I half-turned to look at him, but my attention was on Mr. Ratchetson. “Why do old people do that?”

“Do what?”

“Stand and stare into the distance like that?” I said.

“They’ve got nothing better to do, I expect.”

On hearing our approach, Mr. Ratchetson turned his head slowly towards us, tortoise-like and blinking. “Why are you down here?” he asked. “Town is the other way, up on the tarmac road.”

“We’re the Marshall brothers,” I explained. “We’ve come here to sell Mum and Dad’s house.”

“Marshall kids?”

I nodded, and he inspected Eddie and me closely. “Selling your mother’s house?” I nodded again. “Why, what’s the matter with it?”

Eddie laughed. “They’ve passed on, you know. Died… and someone has to do something with the house.”

“They died,” Mr. Ratchetson said, and I couldn’t tell if it was a question or a statement. He turned his head to the wood again and I had the distinct impression he was waiting for something, or at least thought he was—maybe something out of his long and very distant past.

“Do you have relatives yourself, Mr. Ratchetson?” Eddie asked in a nice voice.

“They died.”

“Ah, of course they did.”

I wanted us gone now and I tugged at Eddie’s arm, but remembered suddenly something my father once said which I’d found so intriguing that it’d become a fixture in some part of my mind. “We’re going into the wood to get fuel for our log burner. It’s chilly in the evenings now, isn’t it, Mr. Ratchetson?” I began, thinking to lead him gently towards my question.