Dark Screams, Volume 7 Read online

The mannequins were made of pink plastic that made me think of silly putty. They were all damaged: Dents and cuts. Cracks and fissures. And they leaked, oozing thick yellow sticky stuff that was too slow to be fluid.

  “That’s the stuff in jars in the dunes,” I said.

  And I thought of the jars of jam Grandpa Sheet gave us years ago, and of the jars at the memorial, and of this yellow sticky stuff.

  “This is too weird,” Gerard said. “Was he a tailor or something?”

  “Fashion designer, darling,” I said, modeling for them.

  “I think they must be the police dolls. Don’t you remember?” Jason’s dad said. “After I found the boys?”

  “We weren’t here then,” Dad said.

  “There were six men who didn’t come forward. Others saw them at the time they thought the boys disappeared, but they never spoke up. So the police dressed these doll things up in the gear people remembered them wearing and paraded them all over the state, hoping to get a clue, Did you see something? Is this you? But no one ever did. No idea how Grandpa Sheet got them. Maybe they were left on the beach.”

  Bernard stood up, looked at them from different angles. Then he said, “That’s Grandpa Sheet,” and jeezus, he was right. Brown shorts, stripey shirt. Panama hat. Why had no one ever seen it? He’d moved in to the area after the murders, maybe? So no one knew him?

  Sand coated the feet of the mannequins. I walked down to where the dads had first stood them up and saw the weird, perfect footprints they’d left behind.

  I’d seen these at the first memorial we found. Someone had dragged the mannequins to the memorial and let them stand there, casting shadows.

  I shuddered at the thought.

  The Grandpa Sheet one leaked the worst of all. I was tempted to collect it. In the end I set up a bucket and listened to the slow, solid, regular drip in the night.

  —

  We set the six of them up in front of the houses. They all cast a shadow, but one cast a shadow longer than the others. I couldn’t figure out why; I shifted it from place to place and still the shadow was long, dark, and cold. It’s cold in the shadow, colder than it should be, and darker than the middle of the night.

  —

  We went for a walk, all of us, heading away from the dunes.

  Birds circled overhead, squawking so loudly we could hardly hear one another. I covered my head, worried they’d let loose a sea of shit, and I did feel a spatter of something, but it was the first drop of rain. The sky blackened and we tried to make it home but were caught in a great downpour.

  The house lay ahead, so we laughed, because soon we’d be warm and dry.

  Running from the rain, laughing, but it fell so hard it actually hurt, and when I made it inside there were red marks across my arms, face, chest, legs; any exposed skin was striped. I stopped laughing, but someone still did, I could hear the echo of it. Or not the echo but an actual laugh, one of those men’s laughs when they think the women aren’t listening.

  The Grandpa Sheet dummy stood in front of the door. We’d set him at the end of the veranda, a sentinel, but here he was blocking the way.

  Bernard stripped his clothes off and dressed in the dummy’s clothing, leaving the dummy anonymous, sexless.

  I said, “It’s bad luck to wear the clothes of a man who died at sea.”

  “He didn’t drown.”

  “He drowned in his own blood. That’s what happens after you hang yourself.”

  He gave me a chuff on the shoulder, then a harder one on the chin. “Help me shift my stuff,” he said. He hardly had anything; just a couple duffel bags, a guitar he never played, his surfboard.

  I carried the board to the front of House 4, but I wasn’t going in.

  “There’s no one here,” Bernard said, but I could hear footsteps inside, for sure. “I think this is a better place,” he said, and he sat himself down on the shadowy veranda to look out.

  —

  Later, I sat on our veranda and watched Dad cooking at the BBQ. He stooped over the hot plate, looking so very old. Tired. It was dark out there, darker than usual. In the shadows I thought I saw a figure. Did Dad have a buddy out there? A beach friend? He always made friends, loved to chat.

  He looked up suddenly, as if just noticing the person there, then he pulled back, raising his arms to his face.

  Then he fell.

  “Dad!” I’m saying as I’m running down the steps, calling to the boys because I wanted them there to get the person who’d hit our dad.

  They were slow to respond, as ever. Bernard hated to move fast, even though as a kid you could never stop him. On the rare times Dad tried to whack his bum for some wrongdoing he’d scoot out of the way so fast hand never laid on bum cheek and we’d all end up laughing.

  Now his feet fell flat and sluggish.

  We made it to Dad, who was on his knees, moaning. Bleeding from the nose, but he said he’d bumped that, falling. There’d been no one standing over him, he said.

  But I knew there had.

  Bernard and I helped him up, and inside while Gerard finished the cooking (everything was burnt anyway, Dad’s idea of BBQ perfection) Mum panicked. Dad said, “I’m fine. Stop fussing. I fell,” but he had a look in his eye, a slight shiftiness. I’d seen it in older people who were starting to lose their memory, or bodily control, and didn’t want anyone to know. Their minds race, wanting to cover up a lapse. That’s what he was doing.

  “I thought I saw someone out there with you,” I said, close to his ear.

  He shook his head. “There was no one.”

  —

  We settled Dad in bed, against his will, and made Mum cups of tea because she was freaking out.

  “I can’t be on my own,” she whispered to me. “I just can’t.”

  “You can come and live with me,” I said, although no way. I couldn’t do it. Better she goes into a home, she’d be fine. Never alone, at least.

  That night was the first time I thought I heard someone outside, carrying a metal bucket. I heard weird things all night. The bucket being dragged or something, and a deep male laugh, a single laugh, a man alone.

  I got up to check on Dad and Mum twice in the night; they both happily snored away.

  —

  Next morning Bernard’s eyes were bright, set deep in dark bags that made him look older.

  “Waffles for breakfast?” Mum said, bright and desperate, so “let’s pretend” I had to go along with it. So I started a fight with Gerald and the two of us ran, hollering bloody murder, around the house, with the others inside laughing their arses off at us.

  A thin layer of yellow ooze lay at the bottom of the bucket. I set jars out to collect from the rest of them as well.

  —

  That night Bernard asked us all over “for drinks” at his house. At Grandpa Sheet’s house. He’d set up chairs on the veranda and found glasses, and he had wine. It was nice. I stayed there longer than the others did, not wanting it to end. It was peaceful, Bernard calmly smoking, pouring wine, neither of us talking. The mannequins stood forward over there in front of my house, casting shadows by moonlight. I thought I saw one man walk to the water, keep walking until he disappeared. And another vanish into the dunes, then there he was, back on the veranda, then into the dunes again. It was tiredness, my eyes aching from sun-on-sand reflection.

  Bernard didn’t want to go inside. He liked it on the veranda—no man’s land, he called it, neither in nor out. I had a last glass of wine out there with him, then left him to it. He was snoring gently, and I thought that anyone who slept so easily must be feeling okay.

  When I looked back I saw him lift his arm to wave at someone.

  I went inside.

  I went inside.

  The only thing I feel okay about is that I didn’t do it because I was tired, or cold, or bored. I did it because I thought he wanted to be alone. He seemed peaceful, barely affected by the things I saw.

  —

  So I went inside.

&nb
sp; Sometime in the night, Bernard walked into the dunes. He went past the last memorial, using a big old torch to guide him.

  We knew where he was because of the note he left. It said, “He says it will be all right. That he’ll take me the furtherest I can go.”

  Gerard and I went to look for him, and Jason’s dad came with us. That shat me, later, as if he thought he had a monopoly on finding dead people.

  Because he was. Bernard had cut his wrists with broken glass, sliced his arms carefully, longways, from wrist to inner elbow.

  The sun was well up and he looked so pale, as pale as Grandpa Sheet did. His arms were flat beside him, legs stretched out, and the sand dark and damp all around him.

  Gerard said, “You fucking idiot,” and took my hand so we could go close together; look into his face, looking for a beat in his eyelids; touch his throat, hoping for a beat there.

  Nothing.

  “I’m sorry,” Jason’s dad said. A lot of people would say that over the coming weeks, but I thought he really meant it.

  Bernard wore a dozen of those damn shell necklaces and I wasn’t sure what made me the saddest: the fact he thought they’d help, or the fact they didn’t.

  —

  We built a memorial for Bernard. Jason’s dad wanted to use the shell necklaces; I though Gerard was going to kill him. Instead we laid his surfboard down, anchored it with rocks, and every time we went back we took something for him. A bottle of wine, or a new piece of music, or a book.

  We didn’t give him a jar of the yellow stuff because we’d burnt all the dummies and their clothes. The smell of them. The memory of them. Me, Gerard, and Jason, with the adults all watching from their verandas, dead or alive. The families from House 3 would arrive in the next holiday, in whatever variation, blissfully unaware.

  Lucky them.

  They left a terrible pink mess, a sludge that set into a hard rock, so we left that on the surfboard, too.

  —

  Mum and Dad wanted to sell up the house or just abandon it, but Gerard and I wouldn’t let them.

  “I need this place,” I told them. Although it wasn’t a safe place. There were too many voices. But it made me feel strong to resist them, and that was worth a lot.

  Some days it was just me and Jason’s dad on the beach, and he talked. He told me his stories, the meanderings of a broken mind. The dead-boys one, the when-Nick-died one, the how-I-lost-my-job one, the why-my-wife-left-me one, the when-I-nearly-killed-myself one.

  And the Grandpa Sheet one. He reckoned Sheet thought of those dead strangers memorialized in the dunes as his family. His friends. That’s how alone he was. He always felt excluded. “We never let him into our perfect world,” Jason’s dad said, and that’s how deluded he was.

  “I think he did it,” he said. “He wore those same clothes every single day. The police-doll clothes. Maybe he wanted someone to identify him and no one ever did. Maybe he had something to feel guilty about. That’s why he wanted us to go into the dunes. To find the memorials. To do something about it. To stop him. We never did. I reckon he blamed us for that. Blamed us for all the memorials, all the…things he has to feel guilty about. He still blames us.”

  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. Grandpa 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, among 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. Grandpa 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 own. 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.

  West of Matamoros, North of Hell

  Brian Hodge

  It was the photographer’s idea, get some shots of them in the city before heading west into the countryside. He’d done his homework. Good for him. Good for Olaf the photographer. He’d read up on how one of Mexico’s biggest shrines to Santa Muerte was here in Matamoros. So they might as well take advantage of that, right? The shots they’d already planned for, they wanted afternoon light for those, didn’t want that glaring vernal sun directly overhead. There was time.

  Sofia thought it was cheesy and wasn’t shy about saying so. Sebastián was all for it, but then, he would be. More pictures meant more pictures of him. Enrique didn’t care either way. You choose your battles wisely. No point in getting into one here inside the airport terminal.

  And see? The idea was a done deal, anyway. Olaf had run it past the PR guy on their flight down from L.A., so Crispin had arrived presold. Crispin was all about the enthusiasm. That was his job: make cheesy things sound like a good idea. The label must have paid him well for enthusiasm.

  Besides, Crispin reminded them, they had to stay in town long enough to find a carnicería for the pig’s heart. There had to be one close to a Santa Muerte shrine. They practically went together, right?

  Crispin turned to Morgan, who looked all of a hundred pounds, half of it hair and the rest of it camera bags. “Maybe we can put you on that.”

  She looked queasy and stammered something about not speaking the language.

  Olaf wasn’t having it, anyway. “If you want an assistant, maybe you should’ve brought your own.”

  So. These three in from L.A. Plus the crate they’d shipped along in cargo. Plus Enrique and Sebastián and Sofia, fresh off their puddle-jumper flight up from Mexico City. Twenty minutes later, all of them were packed into their driver’s SUV. This was how it was going to be for the rest of a very long day. At least it was a long SUV.

  Crispin sat up front, taking the only other bucket seat for himself so he could play captain, give the orders. After a few moments of idling beside the curb as their driver scrolled his phone, Crispin slapped his fingertips on the back of the man’s headrest, bap-bap-bap-bap-bap. “Come on, let’s get rolling. We’re not paying you to check Twitter.”

  “Yeah, you are,” Enrique said. “Back home, all you got to check is traffic reports. Where we are now, before you go anywhere it’s a good idea to check that you’re not gonna be heading into somebody’s shootout.”

  “I’m sorry, señor,” the driver said. “He is correct.”

  Sofia perked up from the very back. “Crossfires don’t ask to see your passport.”

  Hector, that was their driver’s name. A middle-aged guy, big, thick mustache, and you could just tell this spotless SUV me
ant everything to him. It wasn’t all that long ago Enrique would’ve laughed at the idea of a guy like Hector, where Hector found his pride. And had, probably more times than he wanted to admit. It took awhile to grow up and find the respect again. The man was somebody’s father.

  Hector spent a few more moments on his phone, then looked up, happy, and put the SUV in gear. They were rolling.

  Next to Enrique, Morgan was still looking queasy, but in a whole new way, like she didn’t know what she was doing here and was two seconds from jumping out and running back into the terminal. They’d ended up seated together in the middle because he was so big and she was so small, so they evened out. And what was wrong with this Olaf guy, anyhow; he does his homework but doesn’t bother telling her what to expect.

  “It’s okay. We’ll be okay.” Enrique leaned in close, kept his voice to a soothing murmur. “Just a little precaution, that’s all. Nothing bad is gonna happen.”

  She took a deep breath and smiled at him. Tried to, at least.

  “And remember this: Tiene usted un corazón de cerdo?” he told her. “That’s how you ask for a pig’s heart. Just in case.”

  —

  Growing up, Enrique knew who Santa Muerte was. No secret about her. She was around. You just didn’t see much of her, not then. She was a backroom kind of saint, for the kind of altars you never got to see as a kid, because they were private, kept by people who fucking meant business.

  Now, though? Now you didn’t have to look hard at all to find her. Santa Muerte was everywhere, never more so than during the last decade, ever since the cartel wars erupted into a never-ending series of bloodbaths and massacres. Saint Death, Holy Death, had really come into her own.

  In hindsight, it seemed inevitable. There were things you took for granted as a kid that took being an adult to see how strange they really were. That, and being lucky enough to gain perspective, to see past your own borders. And he had. Enrique had seen enough of the world to know now. The band had given him that much. Every tour made it that much clearer:

  Here at home, people found death a lot more interesting than life.

  Santa Muerte—she might look different in a hundred details but was always the same simple figure: a skull in a dress, a skeleton where a woman used to be. She might look like a nun. She might look like bride. She might look no different from Santa Maria, except for that face of bone. Sometimes she might be holding a scythe. Always, she held your fate.