Dark Screams, Volume 7 Read online

  The lizardman realized that he was a long way from home.

  Something was coming. He heard it pushing the reeds aside on the edge of the deep channel. Heard the swirl of water around its body, and the suction of mud on its claws. Old Pope. Old Pope, risen from the heart of the swamp. Old Pope, mean and hungry. Coming back for the rest of the gator, caught on the chain’s end.

  The lizardman had often heard of people bleating with fear. He’d never known what that would’ve sounded like until that moment. It was, indeed, a bleat, like a stunned sheep about to get its head smashed with a mallet.

  He turned toward the airboat’s engine, hit the starter switch, and reached for the throttle beside his seat. As soon as he gave the engine some gas, the rotor crashed against the frame, bent by the force of Old Pope on the chain, and it threw a pinwheel of sparks and crumpled like wet cardboard. The airboat spun around in a tight circle before the engine blew, the flashlight flying out of the lizardman’s grip as he fell onto the rough hides of the dead gators. He looked up, slime dripping from his chin, as something large and dark rose up against the night.

  Swamp water streamed from Old Pope’s armored sides. The lizardman could see that Laney had been right: roots, rushes, and weeds grew from the ebony-green plates, and not only that but snakes slithered through the cracks and crabs scuttled over the leathery edges. The lizardman recoiled, but he could only go to the boat’s other side, and that wasn’t nearly far enough. He was on his knees, like a penitent praying for mercy at Old Pope’s altar. He saw something—a scaled claw, a tendril, something—slither down and grasp the snared gator’s head. Old Pope began to pull the mangled carcass up out of the water, and as the chain snapped tight again the entire airboat started to overturn.

  In another few seconds the lizardman would be up to his neck in deep shit. He knew that, and knew he was a dead man one way or the other. He reached out, found the shotgun, and gave Old Pope the blast of a barrel.

  In the flare of orange light he saw gleaming teeth, yellow eyes set under a massive brow where a hundred crabs clung like barnacles to an ancient wharf. Old Pope gave a deep grunt like the lowest note of a church organ, and that was when the lizardman knew.

  Old Pope was not an alligator.

  The severed gator slid into Old Pope’s maw, and the teeth crunched down. The airboat overturned as the lizardman fired his second barrel, then he was in the churning water with the monster less than fifteen feet away.

  His boots sank into mud. The flashlight, waterproof, bobbed in the turbulence. Snakes writhed around Old Pope’s jaws as the beast ate, and the lizardman floundered for the submerged tree trunk.

  Something oozing and rubbery wound around his chest. He screamed, being lifted out of the water. An object was beside him; he grabbed it, held tight, and knew Old Pope had decided on a second meal. He smelled the thing’s breath—blood and swamp—as he was being carried toward the gaping mouth, and he heard the hissing of snakes that clung to the thing’s gnarled maw. The lizardman saw the shine of an eye, catching the crescent moon. He jabbed at it with the object in his grip, and the bangstick exploded.

  The eye burst into gelatinous muck, its inside showering the lizardman. At the same time, Old Pope roared with a noise like the clap of doom, and whatever held the lizardman went slack. He fell, head over heels, into the water. Came up again, choking and spitting, and half ran, half swam for his life through the swaying rushes.

  Old Pope was coming after him. He didn’t need an eye in the back of his head to tell him that. Whatever the thing was, it wanted his meat and bones. He heard the sound of it coming, the awful suction of water and mud as it advanced. The lizardman felt panic and insanity, two Siamese twins, whirl through his mind. Dance a little dance! Prance a little prance! He stepped in a hole, went in over his head, fought to the surface again, and threw himself forward. Old Pope—swamp god, king of the gators—was almost upon him, like a moving cliff, and snakes and crabs rained down around the lizardman.

  The lizardman scrambled up, out of the reeds and onto a mudflat. Hot breath washed over him, and then that rubbery thing whipped around his waist like a frog’s tongue. It squeezed the breath out of him, lifted him off his feet, and began to reel him toward the glistening, saw-edged jaws.

  The lizardman had not gotten to be sixty-four years old by playing dead. He fought against the oozing, sticky thing that had him. He beat at it with his fists, kicked and hollered and thrashed. He raged against it, and Old Pope held him tight and watched him with its single eye like a man might watch an insect struggling on flypaper.

  It had him. It knew it had him. The lizardman wasn’t far gone enough in the head not to know that. But still he beat at the beast, still he hollered and raged, and still Old Pope inspected him, its massive gnarly head tilted slightly to one side and water running through the cracks on the skull-deep ugly of its face.

  Lightning flashed. There was no thunder. The lizardman heard a high whine. His skin prickled and writhed with electricity, and his wet hair danced.

  Old Pope grunted again. Another surge of lightning, closer this time.

  The abomination dropped him, and the lizardman plopped down onto the mudflat like an unwanted scrap.

  Old Pope lifted its head, contemplating the stars.

  The crescent moon was falling to earth, in a slow spiral. The lizardman watched it, his heart pounding and his arms and legs encased in mire. The crescent moon shot streaks of blue lightning, like fingers probing the swamp’s folds. Slowly, slowly, it neared Old Pope, and the monster lifted claw-fingered arms and called in a voice that wailed over the wilderness like a thousand trumpets.

  It was the voice, the lizardman thought, of something lost and far from home.

  The crescent moon—no, not a moon, but a huge shape that sparkled metallic—was now almost overhead. It hovered, with a high whine, above the creature that had been known as Old Pope, and the lizardman watched lightning dance around the beast like homecoming banners.

  Dance a little dance, he thought. Prance a little prance.

  Old Pope rumbled. The craggy body shivered, like a child about to go to a birthday party. And then Old Pope’s head turned and the single eye fixed on the lizardman.

  Electricity flowed through the lizardman’s hair, through his bones and sinews. He was plugged into a socket of unknown design, his fillings sparking pain in his mouth. He took a breath as the Old Pope stepped toward him, one grotesque, ancient leg sinking into the earth.

  Something—a tendril, a third arm, whatever—came out of Old Pope’s chest. It scooped up mud and painted the lizardman’s face with it, like a tribal marking. The touch was sticky and rough, and it left the smell of the swamp and reptilian things in the lizardman’s nostrils.

  Then Old Pope lifted its face toward the metallic crescent and raised its arms. Lightning flared and crackled across the mudflats. Birds screeched in their trees, and the voices of gators throbbed.

  The lizardman blinked, his eyes narrowed against the glare.

  And when the glare had faded two seconds later, the lightning had taken Old Pope with it.

  The machine began to rise, slowly, slowly. Then it ascended in a blur of speed and was gone as well, leaving only one crescent moon over the cacophonous swamp.

  The Seminoles had been right, the lizardman thought. Right as rain. Old Pope had come to the swamp on a bolt of lightning, and was riding one home again, too.

  Whatever that might be.

  He rested a while, there in the mud of his domain.

  Sometime before dawn he roused himself, and he found a piece of his airboat floating off the mudflat. He found one of his gaffhooks, too, and he lay on the splintered remnant of his boat and began pushing himself through the downtrodden rushes and toward the far shore. The swamp sang around him as the lizardman crawled home on his belly.

  A Monster Comes to Ashdown Forest

  (In Which Christopher Robin Says Goodbye)

  James Renner

  Twenty ye
ars ago, about last Friday, Christopher Robin Milne lived in a room at my hospital, under the name Sanders. This was in Dartmouth, Devon, and the once-famous boy was seventy-five years old and in the late stages of a terrible disease called myasthenia gravis, which makes the body weak and tired all the time. I was a young nurse fresh from school and I knew nothing really about the proper way of helping a man die. We were told, each of us, by Dr. Hadley over tea, that we were to make Christopher Robin comfortable and to bathe him once a day, and to never ever mention that bear, Winnie-the-Pooh.

  You see, Christopher Robin, for which the boy from that series of children’s books was named, hated the notoriety it brought him in life. That’s what Dr. Hadley told us. The kids at school had teased young Christopher Robin about the stories. And later when he joined the Royal Engineers in the war, the servicemen did cruel things like scribble “Hunny” on Christopher Robin’s canteens and leave Woozle prints in the sand outside his tent at night. By the time he came to Dartmouth to die, Christopher Robin Milne was using the name Sanders to hide from reporters and nosy fans.

  I had the morning shifts that spring. I showed up bleary-eyed at six each morning and worked until three, after which I would go home to my five-year-old son, Trevor. At the time I was reading to Trevor The House at Pooh Corner, a battered and dog-eared copy I found at the secondhand store in Dartmouth proper. Each morning, it was my job to feed Christopher Robin his breakfast. This was a careful, deliberate task—his mouth muscles were sluggish and he often aspirated his oatmeal. I also read the newspaper to him.

  Christopher Robin didn’t talk much, and when he did his voice slurred a bit. Occasionally, he told me about the heroes of the English cricket team he’d followed as a teen. Sometimes he talked about the bookstore he ran for many years—all the old, rare editions he’d tracked down as a younger man, the adventures he’d had. But he never talked about that bear. Or his father. Not until the day I read to him the sad report about the murder of young Sarah Baker.

  You know of Sarah’s murder, of course. That girl who disappeared in Ashdown Forest near Sussex on a walk with her mother. The girl vanished when her mother’s head was turned for only a second. Her mother looked after a mistle thrush, and when she turned back her girl was gone. The poor girl’s body was found by searchers a month later deep in the wood where nobody ever goes. Just a torso and some limbs. Poor girl.

  I remember the newspaper headline that day was “A Monster Comes to Ashdown Forest”—one of those reader-grabber titles we’re known for around here. I read it to Christopher Robin over breakfast. Soon as he heard the word Ashdown, he came over pale and started muttering. I leaned in close, and quite distinctly I heard him whisper, “Silly old bear.” And something about the way he said it put up the hairs on my arms.

  Looking back on it, I’d have been better off if I’d smothered the man with his pillow right there and then.

  —

  The day after that girl’s torso was found in Ashdown Forest, I remember it was quite dreary, so wet and cold in Dartmouth with the ice wind coming off the channel and plinking on the windows that faced south. I was bundled in a great big wool sweater my mum had knit for me. As I fed Christopher Robin his oatmeal, which was the minced kind, not the kind with the great big flakes, because he could choke on those, he looked up at me and whispered, “I do remember, and then when I try to remember, I forget.”

  “What’s that?” I asked. “What do you try to remember, hon?”

  “The wood,” he said. “The Hundred Acre Wood. That was what my father liked to call Ashdown Forest.”

  “Ashdown Forest is the Hundred Acre Wood?” I said. “I never knew that.”

  “Most don’t,” said Christopher Robin. “Otherwise they might send more children there.”

  I thought that was a curious thing to say. What was more curious was when, after his meal, he asked me to fetch Dr. Hadley. The doctor spoke with Christopher Robin in his room with the door closed for some time. When they were through, Dr. Hadley asked me to walk with him across the grounds.

  “Have you been talking with him about that damned bear?” he growled. Dr. Hadley was a large man with dark skin. His eyes were bloodshot from drinking. Really imposing fellow. Everything he said sounded angry, even when he said something nice. That’s the sort of man he was. I had heard he was a surgeon in London until he fell into the bottle and couldn’t find his way out fast enough to keep his job.

  “I didn’t ever talk to him about Winnie-the-Pooh,” I said to Dr. Hadley. “He only this morning told me about the Hundred Acre Wood.”

  What Christopher Robin had talked to Dr. Hadley about was an excursion. This is not so rare at the convalescence hospital where I worked. Little trips home. Patients are often eager to revisit places from their youth as they come ’round to their final goodbyes. I think I would like to do the same one day and take a last trip to Falmouth, to that merry-go-round by the beach that can’t be as big as I remember. Christopher Robin wanted to return to Ashdown Forest. He wanted to see his Hundred Acre Wood.

  “You will go with him,” Dr. Hadley said.

  Now, if you didn’t know, that area of Sussex is not near Dartmouth. It’s five hours by car. And as I’ve said, I had a son.

  “Mr. Milne has a family estate on the edge of Ashdown Forest,” Dr. Hadley continued. “You should stay over there and return the next day.”

  “But Trevor,” I said, and I realized this was something Dr. Hadley never knew about me until just then. He didn’t know that I had a boy. Nor did he care. I was just the morning nurse and I did not have a life outside his hospital so far as he was concerned. I ceased to exist to him as soon as I went out.

  “Take your boy with you,” he growled.

  —

  Christopher Robin could not walk more than a few shuffling steps anymore. In the morning, Nurse Rodriguez and I set him into a wheelchair and she helped me get him into the front seat of my rusty Corsa. The wheelchair barely fit in the trunk and I had to remove an old terra-cotta planter that was there, and which I’d been meaning to return to my mother, and leave it behind on the front stoop to make room. Trevor rode in the back, in his booster, and along the way his little-boy feet kicked the back of Christopher Robin’s seat, but the old man didn’t seem to mind.

  A brief word about Trevor if you never met him. When Trevor was three and still could not talk, his father and I took him to a doctor in Bromley. The doctor told us that Trevor was autistic and probably never would say anything, ever. Alfie, who had had a gloomy disposition ever since we met at university, became very sad about it all. Sometimes Trevor would grunt like a pig and bite at his father’s rolled-up pants cuffs, which started as some kind of game, but when he did this again after that meeting with the doctor, Alfie smacked him hard enough to leave a red mark on the boy’s cheek. A couple days later Alfie got in his car and drove away. We got a letter from him explaining he was not coming back. It had a postmark from York, where his family was from. The doctor was right, by the way. Trevor never did say anything. But what Alfie forgot was the way the boy can look at you and tell you everything he needs to say with his eyes. I had to leave Trevor at a daycare when I went to work. He liked to play in the corner by himself, lost in the worlds of his head. I woulda felt bad about leaving him, but he smiled every time he saw the place.

  Trevor liked dried apples. I had a big bag of them in the car with us as we drove to Sussex, and when he grunted too loud I handed back a few slices.

  The drive was not bad. We stuck close to the coast. It was one of those early-spring days where the clouds are low over the channel and fluffy like cotton balls and they shift as they move so that bright spots of light break through, amber pillars of sunshine. At Ringwood, which is an old town with narrow cobblestone streets and hardly any room to park, I stopped outside a diner and got hot soup for Christopher Robin to eat. I found a green park with a couple empty spaces by the playground and I spoon-fed the old man and watched Trevor play on the seesaw all
by himself. Trevor and I ate tuna sandwiches.

  We finally came to the house on Cackle Street in Horney Common, beside Ashdown Forest, just as the sun was setting. The Milne house was centuries old, a large brick building full of white porches and gables and dormers and a widow’s walk around the high part. One of Christopher Robin’s distant cousins lived there, a round woman named Megan, who helped me get the old man situated inside. She had thought to have a bed brought in for him, which was set up in a grand drawing room full of dusty books and a worktable that still had letters to his famous father on top. Megan and I got him into the bed with some struggle, and not five minutes later, Christopher Robin was asleep.

  Trevor barked and nipped at the hem of Megan’s dress as she prepared tea and a light supper for us in the square kitchen, but she didn’t seem to mind one bit. Or even to notice, really. Megan was altogether pleasant enough, but there was something odd about her and I don’t just mean that she was forty and single. It was the way she never ever looked into my eyes the entire time we were there. When you talked to her, she had to look somewhere else.

  “Will you come with us to Ashdown Forest in the morning?” I asked.

  At that, Megan blanched. She shook her head and looked down into her tea. “I don’t like it,” she said. “It’s queer. Dark, even in the daytime. It’s not a happy place.”

  “But it’s the Hundred Acre Wood!” I said. “Isn’t it the happiest forest in England?”

  “Little Sarah Baker wouldn’t say so,” she quipped.

  I looked down because I hadn’t heard Trevor in a while. He was sleeping in the corner, curled up on the floor beside a half-eaten biscuit.

  —

  We set out early after a breakfast of poached eggs and toast. Megan and I set Christopher Robin in his chair and she helped me lower him, step by step, down the front way. From there, the cobblestone sidewalks would take us to Ashdown Forest, which was only a couple blocks east. Trevor walked beside us and pulled oleanders out of flowerbeds we passed, plucking out their petals and dropping them on the ground so that there was a trail leading back to the house. It was warmer that day, I remember. The sun was out and you could feel it on your skin, and for the first time I thought of summer.