Stephen (ed.) - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18

There was some quick confusion about whether she’d got there by plane or by ship – Carol had never been a big fan of preamble – but apparently what mattered was that, after a few days, she found herself in a roadside diner with a bunch of people she hardly knew.

They were on a road trip and had stopped for lunch in this back-of-beyond and unpretentious diner – a place which, while perfectly clean and respectable, looked like it hadn’t been painted or refurbished since about 1952. They were in a booth, eating pie and drinking coffee. Her companions were about her age – but could, you know, drive and everything. Turned out boys in America could be just as fucking rude as in Liverpool. One of them – Tommy, she thought his name was – was giving shit to the waitress. Hoisting his empty coffee mug, he was leaning out of the booth and looking pointedly down the length of the room.

“Yo! Still need a refill here!” he shouted to the counter.

Carol stood up and, announcing she was going to the ladies’ room, slid her way out of the booth. Halfway down the room, she crossed paths with the waitress, who was hurrying toward their booth with a coffee pot. The woman’s name tag said Cindi , a spelling Carol had never seen before and hoped could possibly be short for Cinderella because that’d be, you know, great. Carol spoke softly to her, nodding back towards Tommy, who was impatiently shaking his empty coffee mug in the air.

“Don’t mind him, love,” Carol said. “He’s a bit of a prick, but I’ll make sure he leaves a nice tip.”

Cindi, who was harried-looking and appeared to be at least 30, gave her a quick smile of gratitude. “Little girls’ room’s out back, sweetheart,” she said.

Carol exited the main building of the diner and saw that a separate structure, little more than a shack really, housed the bathrooms. She started across the gravelled parking lot, surrounded by scrub-grass that was discoloured and overgrown, looking down the all-but-deserted country road – the type of road, she’d been informed by her new friends, which was known as a two-lane blacktop. The diner and its shithouse annex were the only buildings for as far as her eye could see, apart from a hulking grain silo a hundred yards or so down the road. As Carol looked in that desolate direction, a cloud drifted over the sun, dimming the summer daylight and shifting the atmosphere into a kind of pre-storm dreariness. Carol shivered and wondered, not without a certain pleasure in the mystery, just where the hell she was.

Done peeing and alone in the bathroom, Carol washed her hands and splashed her face at the pretty crappy single sink that was all the place had to offer. The sound of the ancient cistern laboriously and noisily re-filling after her flush played in the background. Carol turned off the tap and looked for a moment at her reflection in the pitted and stained mirror above the sink. As the cistern finally creaked and whistled to a halt, the mirror suddenly cracked noisily across its width as if it was just too tired to keep trying.

“Fuckin’ ’ell!” said Carol, because it had made her jump and because she didn’t like the newly mismatched halves of her reflected face. She turned around, ready to walk out of the bathroom, and discovered she was no longer alone.

A little girl – what, six, seven years old? – was standing, silent and perfectly still, outside one of the stall doors, looking up at her. Oddly, the little girl was holding the palm of one hand over her right eye.

“Oh, shit,” said Carol, remembering that she’d just said fucking hell in front of a kid. “I didn’t know you were –” She paused, smiled, started over. “Hello, pet. D’you live around here?”

The little girl just kept looking at her.

“What’s your name?” Carol asked her, still smiling but still getting no response. Registering the hand-over-the-eye thing, she tried a new tack. “Oh,” she said. “Are we playing a game and nobody told me the rules? All right then, here we go.”

Raising her hand, Carol covered her own right eye with her palm. The little girl remained still and silent. Carol lowered her hand from her face. “Peek-a-boo,” she said.

Finally, the little girl smiled shyly and lowered her own hand. She had no right eye at all, just a smooth indented bank of flesh.

Carol was really good. She hardly jumped at all and her gasp was as short-lived as could reasonably be expected.

The little girl’s voice was very matter-of-fact. “Momma lost my eye-patch,” she said.

“Oh. That’s a shame,” said Carol, trying to keep her own voice as equally everyday.

“She’s gonna get me another one. When she goes to town.”

“Oh, well, that’s good. Will she get a nice colour? Do you have a favourite colour?”

The little girl shrugged. “What are you, retarded?” she said. “It’s an eye-patch. Who cares what colour it is?”

Carol didn’t know whether to laugh or slap her.

“You can go now, if you like,” said the little girl. “I have to make water.”

“Oh. All right. Sure. Well, look after yourself,” Carol said and, raising her hand in a slightly awkward wave of farewell, headed for the exit door. The little girl called after her.

“You take care in those woods now, Carol,” she said.

“I hadn’t told her my name,” said Carol.

“Well, that was weird,” Michael said.

Carol smiled, pleased. “ That wasn’t weird,” she said. “It got weird. Later. After I got lost in the woods.”

“You got lost in the woods?”

Carol nodded.

“Why’d they let you go wandering off on your own?”

“Who?”

“Your new American friends. The people you were in the café with.”

“Ha. Café. Diner , stupid. We were in America.”

“Whatever. How could they let you get lost?”

“Oh, yeah.” She thought about it for a second, looking out to their side at the boating lake and its ghost moon. “Well, p’raps they weren’t there to begin with. Doesn’t matter. Listen.”

Turned out Carol did get lost in the woods. Quite deep in the woods, actually. Heart of the forest, Hansel and Gretel shit, where the sunlight, through the thickening trees, was dappled and spotty and where the reassuring blue sky of what was left of the afternoon could be glimpsed only occasionally through the increasingly oppressive canopy of high leafy branches.

Carol was tramping her way among the trees and the undergrowth on the mossy and leaf-strewn ground when she heard the sound for the first time. Faint and plaintive and too distant to be truly identifiable, it was nevertheless suggestive of something, something that Carol couldn’t quite put her finger on. Only when it came again, a few moments later, did she place it. It was the sound of a lonely ship’s horn in a midnight ocean, melancholy and eerie. Not quite as eerie, though, as the fact that once the horn had sounded this second time, all the other sounds stopped, all the other sounds of which Carol hadn’t even been consciously aware until they disappeared: birdsong; the footsteps of unseen animals moving through the woods; the sigh of the breeze as it whistled through the branches.

The only sounds now were those she made herself: the rustle and sway of the living branches she was pushing her way through and the crackle and snap of the dead ones she was breaking beneath her. Carol began to wonder if moving on in the same direction she’d been going was that great of an idea. She turned around and started heading back and, within a few yards, stepping out from between two particularly close trees, she found herself in a small grove-like clearing that she didn’t remember passing through earlier.