Dark Screams, Volume 7 Read online

  And it said, If you let me live, I will fix the boy.

  “What?” I whispered.

  “Whatever it’s saying to you, don’t listen,” said Christopher Robin. “It makes empty promises.”

  I am in Trevor’s mind, said the Backson. The structure here is jumbled, but I can fix it. It’s the simple alteration of a million and one neurons. I can fix your boy…I only ask that you bring him to the wood so that I might play with him sometimes.

  “No,” I said. I gripped the knife tight in my right hand because the voice in my head, the voice of this thing called the Backson—it was my husband’s voice.

  If you don’t want me to fix him, I could shut him down. It’s easy to do. I could turn Trevor off like a light switch. Nobody would know. It would look like meningitis. I know you have that desire. It’s right here, in this corner of your subconscious I’ve found. You wish it even if you don’t admit it. You’ll be unburdened. Free. Let me do this for you. And you can do something for me in return. Bring me someone else’s child. A healthy child whose parents take them for granted.

  It was in that moment that I lost my fear. It was a weight dropped, a heavy coat of glop sloughed off. In that moment I didn’t care about the animated creatures all around me and what it meant to the world I’d known, what it meant to my sanity. I let go of Trevor’s hand, stepped forward to the abscess, and I bent down to it. It reeked of corruption, a foul stench like the backside of a never-washed ear. The monstrosity’s mouth of razor teeth opened and closed, and it tried to squirm farther back into the tree, but I reached out and grabbed it in my left hand. Its skin was warm and firm, and it felt rather like the skin of a sheered lamb.

  How dare you touch me, you filthy, filthy girl!

  I drove the knife in deep just above its mouth, where I hoped its brain might be. Greenish guck bled from the hole I’d made, and I rooted around inside it with the sharp end, finding something like gristle, feeling it break apart. As I stabbed it again and again, it screamed out in my head and then it was silenced. And I stood back and watched it die.

  A pitiful sound woke me from my rage and I turned then to see Pooh fall forward into Christopher Robin’s outstretched arms. The old man caught the plush bear and held it close.

  “Any day spent with you is my favorite day,” said Pooh, his voice light and frail. “So today is my new favorite day.” And then the bear stopped moving and he never did move again. Piglet, Owl, Eeyore, Tigger, Rabbit, and Roo lay about the depressed circle like forgotten toys.

  After a time, I took Trevor in my left hand and Christopher Robin in my right and we left that damned place.

  —

  That was twenty years ago this week and it comes back to me now that my mind is on death again. You see, I’m helping my son die the way I helped Christopher Robin die all those years ago. I’m helping him die with grace.

  For Christopher Robin, that meant one last adventure into the Hundred Acre Wood. By the time we got him back to the house in Sussex, he’d grown weak again, retreating into himself. He was quiet all the way back to Dartmouth, which was fine with me because I thought I didn’t ever want to speak about the things we’d seen in Ashdown Forest. A week after our excursion, he went to sleep after lunch and never woke up again. I went to his funeral. We’d shared something, after all. There were not too many people there for someone so famous. He was buried with a bear doll. I don’t like to think about that part.

  My son, Trevor. You know he really was quite bright for all that barking. He tested into a gifted class at school in the fifth grade. Took calculus when he was twelve. Most of his classmates assumed he was only quiet and not completely mute. Math was his language. When he had something to say to his professors at university, he’d email them even if they were in the same room. I think he just couldn’t be bothered to slow his mind down long enough to say anything worth saying. When he was eighteen he moved into a loft apartment in Cardiff and worked eight hours a day in the efficiency department of a lubricants factory and loved every minute of it. Theirs is the most efficient lubricants factory in all of England, I’m quite sure.

  Last year, just shy of his twenty-fifth birthday, Trevor got a headache that would not go away. After a week or so he texted me, asking if I’d take him to the hospital. I came up. I was living in Falmouth again—I run the assisted-living home up from the beach—but I drove all the way to Cardiff and took him in. Tumor. Big one. Frontal lobe. They got most of it out, but bits found their way into his lymph nodes. He came to live with me again and we did the chemo thing for a while and then he said enough and we stopped and let it take him quick.

  Cancer runs in the family. Never that young. But it does. And still…I know the Backson was in his mind. It was in there, rooting around. And I stabbed at it before it withdrew entirely. This is where my mind goes in the dark at the end of the day when I’m staring at the ceiling, listening to my son’s labored breaths in the next room over.

  This morning I took him to the carousel on the beach, the one I went to when I was a child. It was still every bit as big as I remember. We sat on the bench seat behind the white horse and on the second turn around Trevor turned to me and said, quite clearly, “Thank you.”

  “For what?” I asked.

  And he said something else, but the carousel was so loud I missed it and that was all he ever said until the end.

  What it sounded like was “For protecting me.”

  But that might only be my imagination.

  Furtherest

  Kaaron Warren

  As kids we’d dare each other to go further and further into the dunes each day. You couldn’t come back until you found something, some proof you were there: a cigarette butt, a page from a book, a shoe, a ribbon. We always found something. I cheated often, tucking things into my swimming costume so I wouldn’t have to travel too far. I didn’t want to stumble on a dead boy, but I didn’t want anyone saying I couldn’t do it because I was a girl.

  We’d been going to this beach every year since I was seven. There were four houses lined up, with pathways of sand between each one. The houses were raised, enough so we could squeeze under there on the really hot days and drink lemonade and eat the ice creams our dad bought for us from the van.

  We were called House 1.

  All four houses were identical: painted blue, full of glass, open and airy. Ours was like a second home to us, and the families in the other houses our second neighbors.

  Good and bad.

  Four houses, four boathouses, four families, lined up.

  From the beach you’d think, Isn’t that nice. You’d think, Lovely families getting along.

  That’s what you’d think.

  Some years there were dozens of us there. Other years there were just a few. It was always a mix of fun, boredom, fear, and fast food. Sun and sea. Just the smell of suntan lotion can evoke those early years, when things were simple and your only responsibility was to wash the sand off your feet before you went inside.

  We got ours cheap because those two boys were murdered in the dunes and no one wanted their kids nearby. Dad was a cop and taught caution and self-defense; no one would get hold of us. But the dunes still terrified us. The way you were blocked off, alone. No one could hear you.

  We’d tell stories of murderers and lost boys, of ghosts that made you blind, or made you so sad you wanted to go to sleep forever. Jason thought he knew more than the rest of us because his dad found the bodies, but we’d all heard the story. His dad would tell us if he was drunk on the beach and none of the mums were there to stop him. I first heard the story when I was eight.

  Jason and his dad were House 2. He always told it the same way, but each time, as I grew older and more worldly, I understood more.

  At eight, all that made sense were the boys and their bodies and the dunes.

  The Vietnam War was on, but he didn’t go, even though he was twenty, nearly twenty-one. He’d dropped out of uni, finding himself, he said. His eyesight was poor a
nd he was woefully overweight, like Jason. Cruel children (me, my brothers Bernard and Gerard) called them the Beach Balls. I loved my brothers and did everything they did. Bernard, the oldest, was known for acting without thinking, which wasn’t fair, because really he thought too much. And Gerard, only eighteen months older than me, was funny as fuck from the moment he realized sticking his toes in his mouth made people laugh.

  Jason’s dad didn’t care who listened. He told the story word for word every time. “There were three of us that day. Me; my best mate, Nick; and Kate.” Kate was House 3.

  “I wouldn’t normally have got a girl like Kate. She thought of me as a brother. A nuisance. But so many of them were shipped out. We had, what? Three mates die over there. Two of her brothers were there. They were fit. Not shit like me. Shitness runs in our family; sorry, Jason. So I was twenty, she was seventeen, and she’d barely have a bar of me. She was hanging out, though, because my mate Nick was heading over and that made him a hero. I tried to get him to do the conscientious-objector thing, keep him home. But he wouldn’t. And he was fit, strong. Kate liked him, but she was too girl-next-door for him. Too boring. We’d been smoking, but not much, and we’d had a few beers. The beach was crowded and Nick and I were getting ‘the look.’ People gave it to you when they saw you having fun. Because we had mates. They had sons over there fighting, and we were having fun. So you got the look.

  “We piled a few more beers in a cooler and Kate chucked in some leftover sausages and we headed out into the dunes where no one went.

  “There were ghosts in there or kiddy-fiddlers, depending on who warned you, so people kept away.

  “We went in. We walked until we couldn’t hear voices anymore, then plunked ourselves down. Kate had a towel and Nick sat on it with her, so I sat on the cooler, facing the direction of the water.

  “At first I thought it was a pink crab. Four legs poking out of the sand. A pretty big crab. Nick and Kate were sitting close and that shat me, so I thought I’d dig out the crab, drop it in between them.

  “I scrabbled in the sand but realized quickly it wasn’t a crab.

  “It was a hand.

  “A boy’s hand.

  “I swore, and Kate and Nick noticed at last. I’m scrabbling in the sand and they’re just laughing at me, cacking themselves at my fat arse in the air, and I’m sweaty and gross.

  “They stopped laughing when I dug the boy’s body out.

  “Nick was the one who fell apart, chucking up all over the place, crying like a little baby.

  “He ran off, left us there, scared of ghosts or that the killer was still around. I guarded the body while Kate went for help. We knew they’d believe her over me and we didn’t want the birds to get at the body They were already squawking overhead.

  “You’ve never heard silence like it, once the birds took off. Not just silence but the negative of noise. The sea, I could hear that, like a heavy-breathing giant, and another breath, I thought behind me, someone watching me, but there wasn’t anyone.

  “We found out later the boys swallowed weed killer. Stole it from the hardware store, hid in the dunes, and swallowed it.”

  And he said, “That night me and Kate gave each other what comfort we could.”

  I didn’t figure out what he meant by that until years later.

  He always ended with, “So don’t go into the dunes, kids. You never know who’s lurking in there.”

  Then one of the other adults would bring him a beer (men) or try to get him to go inside (women) and we’d be left to scare one another stupid with stories of the murder and our parents would read us Winnie-the-Pooh stories to help us sleep without nightmares.

  His friend Nick survived the war but drowned on our beach a few years later. Suicide, some people reckoned, so all our parents were terrified of it, Are you all right? if you spent five minutes of solitude. The thought never crossed my mind. “I was too busy stuffing my face,” Jason’s dad liked to say. “Sitting there. Eating spag bol. I didn’t even notice he was gone. All they found of him was his shoes on the beach. His dog tags tucked into them.”

  Jason’s house was always overgrown. The other men would be out the front, ’round the side, keeping on top of things, but Jason’s dad let his weeds grow. No one cared except Mr. White, the old man in House 4.

  He was a man of habit and routine. He wore the same clothes every day: dark brown thigh-length shorts, a pale green stripey polo shirt. A panama hat he never took off.

  The beach almost killed him, with its relaxation of time.

  The other adults loosened up when we were there, some of them too much. Jason’s mum, Kate, always in swimmers, tiny bikinis that made us all feel uncomfortable, although I had fantasies for years about her pubic hair peeking out.

  The dads joked and played and rarely shouted at us.

  Mr. White started coming a couple years after we did. He didn’t have a wife. Rumor had it she’d died in childbirth. His son came only once, I think, and had no interest in any of us. He was about my age but far more independent, heading out for hours up the beach, into the water. Mum said it was because he had no mother and his father wasn’t much. We called the old man Grandpa Sheet because he was pretty old to be a dad and he was as white as a sheet. White as a ghost. He was the one who taught us the dune game. “Go further in,” he’d say. “See what you find. There might be treasure in there, washed up. A reward for the one who goes the furtherest.” But he never gave out any rewards, and we never found treasure. Once (and the parents deny this, but it did happen) he put a sheet over his head and appeared around our boatshed, where we were hanging out, smoking. The boys from House 3 had jobs before the rest of us and were generous with their money.

  Grandpa Sheet appeared, pretending to be a ghost, and nearly died laughing as we scattered like cockroaches.

  —

  I was the one who found the first memorial when I was sixteen, there with friends.

  My parents still owned the place. Mum and Dad didn’t mind me and my friends using it; I guess they thought I was safer there than on the streets of Sydney.

  Probably true.

  We were there most weekends, and it probably did save my life. Not because of the damage I could do myself, but because of the damage others could do to me.

  It was off-season, so mostly no one else was there except Jason’s dad, who was always there, and bloody Jason, who wasn’t as fat as he used to be but annoyingly clingy and boastful.

  Jason’s parents were long since split up. His mum was presenting a beauty segment on afternoon TV. She never came anymore. His dad spent most of his time on the beach, making shell necklaces and researching the great Australian novel, he reckoned, a crime novel. Jason looked more like his dad than he did his mum, which was a shame for him because his mum was gorgeous.

  House 3 only ever came during the holidays. They took it in turns; it seemed like there were hundreds of them. They were the most normal people you’d ever meet. The worst thing that ever happened to them was Kate having a baby (Jason) when she was a teenager. All the kids my age were doing well, so normal. Married, kids, and you see them here, running around like we used to. Generation after generation, rolling in like waves. Venturing toward the dunes but lacking our bravery, so mostly hovering on the edges. “It’s like going back in the past,” Mum said. “Like no time has passed at all.”

  And Grandpa Sheet in House 4 was always there. No one liked him much. He was one of those too-friendly old men, always carrying coins and shit, handing things out. You’d watch him carefully. Dad taught us to watch everyone carefully and be polite. We warned one another not to go into Grandpa Sheet’s boathouse. It was full of ghosts, we told one another. You could see the shine of them through the window some mornings and light where it shouldn’t be some evenings.

  —

  One morning, after we’d taken a quick dip in the chill water to wash away hangovers, Grandpa Sheet stood waiting for us on the beach, wearing his usual uniform: brown shorts, st
ripey polo, panama hat. I almost felt sorry for him, but not so much that I would talk to him.

  He waved to us. “You’re old enough to help me finish this wine,” he called out, but we’d rather stay sober than that. Anyway, Jason’s dad bought us whatever we wanted. It didn’t make us like Jason any more, but it meant we let him hang out with us whenever he showed up. We had to listen to Jason’s dad’s stories, though. The dead-boys one, and the when-Nick-died one, and the why-I-lost-my-job one, and the why-I-left-Jason’s-mother one.

  “A case of beer for the one who goes furtherest,” Grandpa Sheet said, nodding at the dunes.

  The boys went off, because we were all out of money and this was beer without obligation or story. I followed, calling for them to wait. Part of the fun of the dunes was you had to be scared going in, so I reminded them about the murders, the bodies, the maybe ghosts.

  “That’s all bullshit,” one of my friends said. I don’t remember his name; I don’t remember any of them.

  We went further (“furtherer,” Grandpa Sheet would say) than I’d been before. I felt safe with these friends; they lacked the imagination to be really scared, and were funny whenever they could be. Jason hung back. He hated the dunes (maybe because of times my brothers had threatened to bury him out here) but wasn’t going to miss out on anything.

  Then we saw it.

  We knew it was a memorial rather than a grave, but that didn’t stop any of us from imagining a body there. We could see the effect the weather had had on the cross, the flowers, and we imagined bleached bones buried beneath the sand, looking more like driftwood each day.

  The wooden cross must have been bright purple, once. It was very straight, buried deep in the sand to keep it upright. The paint had all peeled off, leaving just the stain of its color on the wood, which was peeling splinters. There had been decals, once, on the three outward-reaching edges of the cross. Only the glue was left, petrified against the wood: the shape of a flower, perhaps, and a ball-shaped thing that could have been the world, and something that may have been a bird.