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

“Which ‘before?’ Before now? Or before I died? Doug, I died not knowing you were as good as you are. I thought I could never make love to anybody, ever again. I concentrated on moving from place to place to keep Rochelle off the radar.”

Doug toweled his hands, which were awash in nervous perspiration, yet irritatingly cold. Almost insensate. He needed to assauge her terror, to fix the problem, however improbable; like Boyd Cooper, to Get the Job Done. “Okay. Fine. I’ll just go get her back. We’ll figure something out.”

“I can’t ask you to do that.”

“Better yet, how about we both go get her? Seeing you ought to make Grandma’s brain hit the floor.”

“That’s the problem, Doug. It’s been the problem all along. I can’t leave here . None of us can. If we do . . . if any of us goes outside of Triple Pines . . .”

“You don’t mean ‘us’ as in you-and-me. You’re talking about us as in the former occupants of Hollymount Cemetery, right?”

She nodded, more tears spilling. “I need you to fuck me. And I need you to love me. And I was hoping that you could love me enough so that I didn’t have to force you to take my place in that hole in the ground, like all the rest of the goddamned losers and dim bulbs and fly-over people in Triple Pines. I want you to go to San Francisco, and get my daughter back. But if you stay here – if you go away and come back here – eventually I’ll use you up anyway. I’ve been taking your heat, Doug, a degree at a time. And eventually you would die, and then resurrect, and then you would be stuck here too. An outsider, stuck here. And no matter what anyone’s good intentions are, it would also happen to Rochelle. I can’t kill my little girl. And I can’t hurt you any more. It’s killing me, but – what a joke – I can’t die.” She looked up, her face a raw, aching map of despair. “You see?”

Michelle had not been a local, either. But she had died here, and become a permanent resident in the Triple Pines boneyard. The population of the town was slowly shifting balance. The dead of Triple Pines were pushing out the living, seeking that stasis of small town stability where once again, everyone would be the same. What happened in Triple Pines had to stay in Triple Pines, and the Marlboro Reservoir was no boon to the community. It was going to service coastal cities; Doug knew this in his gut, now. In all ways, for all concerned, Triple Pines was the perfect place for this kind of thing to transpire, because the outside world would never notice, or never care.

With one grating exception. Which suggested one frightening solution.

Time to get out. Time to bail, now .

“Don’t you see?” she said. “If you don’t get out now, you’ll never get out. Get out, Doug. Kiss me one last time and get out. Try to think of me fondly.”

His heart smashed to pieces and burned to ashes, he kissed her. Her tears lingered on his lips, the utterly real taste of her. Without a word further, he made sure he had his wallet, got in his car, and drove. He could be in San Francisco in six hours, flat-out.

He could retrieve Rochelle, kidnap her if that was what was required. He could bring her back here to die, and be reunited with her mother. Then he could die, too. But at least he would be with them, in the end. Or he could put it behind him, and just keep on driving.

The further he got from Triple Pines, the warmer he felt.

DON TUMASONIS

Thrown

FRESH FROM AN EVENING of overindulgence on the island of Anafi some years ago, Don Tumasonis awoke with a story in his head, and immediately wrote it down.

Encouraged by fellow orgy survivors, to whom he shyly showed the fragment, he realised that honour, power, riches, fame, and the love of women were within his grasp. He acquired a Muse, as is recommended, having already been provided with that sine non qua of writers, a long-suffering wife. Two International Horror Guild awards, a film option and a Hawthornden Fellowship soon followed. He still awaits power and riches, but admits that three out of five is not too bad.

His longish tale “The Swing” was recently published in the Ash-Tree Press anthology At Ease With the Dead , edited by Barbara and Christopher Roden. Other projects are in the works.

“Once, I dreamed of becoming an anthropologist,” Tumasonis recalls. “I had, after all, got stinking drunk on cheap plonk with Sir Edmund Leach, so I thought myself eminently qualified. Fired with explorers’ tales, I fixated on northern Nepal. Months of struggle with Tibetan put paid to that fantasy and, suddenly more realistic, I settled for Crete.

“Field work in the glorious mountains of Sfakia produced little of academic value. Penitent, I vowed to cross the Great Island by foot, east to west. As may now be suspected, even that last project was somehow thwarted short of completion. Not all was lost – the narrative of ‘Thrown’ draws largely on events that occurred during several legs of that journey.”

IT WAS STRANGE COUNTRY, cast into tumult by disaster.

Signs of this were everywhere, from the seaside city in the south where they first stayed, to the northern village from whence they would start their walk. Across the neck of the island, debris was visible all over, through the dusty windows of their ageing Mercedes bus, running late. The delay was a result of the massive flood of several days past, with traffic still detoured around the washed-out main highway bridge, to the old road a bit further inland.

When Martin and Marline had first come to Crete two days after the deluge, quasi-urban Ierapetra was drying out from the rampageous torrent that had wrecked its streets and invaded buildings. The branch Agricultural Bank’s records and documents were spread out on sidewalks and streets, stones and bricks neatly pinning papers in place, the sun wrinkling and baking fibres. Nearby, a flower-filled Roman sarcophagus doubling as a sidewalk planter lent white Parian cachet to an adjacent telephone booth.

Floods came often enough on this island of canyons and gorges, but this one had been a monster, by every local estimation. It was the usual chain of events. Heavy autumn rains washed broken trees and branches down a ravine, compacting with clay and gravel at a pinched slot, forming a natural dam. Before anyone even knew, or had time to react, millions of tons of water had built up, until the sudden giving way, and catastrophic release.

A couple had been taken out to sea, drowned in their Volkswagen beetle. Excepting these, and one old woman at an isolated farm, there was no other loss of human life, amazing as that seemed in the aftermath.

But the water, gaining speed, spewing like a jet from the mouth of the deep cleft above the cultivated plain, took all else living with as it ripped through the countryside, crashing to the sea in a few calamitous minutes.

Some short hours after having checked into their room – the cheapest they could find, with a bare concrete floor, the two followed the lead of everyone else: they promenaded, taking in the chaos and damage, trying to assimilate the monstrous extent of the wreckage about them.

Crowds of foreigners from the large tourist complex near the shore mingled with the local Greeks, walking east out of town. Hundreds, clumped together in their scores, their pairs, were heading along the beach, where the detritus of the flooding was spread. All were silent and stunned, even two days after, and talked, if at all, in hushed voices, in the descending light of the sun.

Past the hotels, a new river channel had torn through the shore road, destroying it, and people waded across, past a parked bulldozer there for the clean-up. On the other side, all over the long broad beach, lay hundreds of animal corpses, wild and domestic. Lizards rotted promiscuously with goats. Pathetic lambs, wool matted and muddy, strewn broken amid snapped tree limbs. Snakes, and above all, chickens, were everywhere, half-buried in the sand. Let this their memorial be.