The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 23

SIMON STRANTZAS An Indelible Stain Upon the Sky

I WALK THE SHORELINE as I did ten years ago but everything has changed. The intervening decade has not been long enough for wounds to heal; everywhere I look I see the scars of what’s been done. It all looks dead, covered in a thin viscous layer of regret.

The name is infamous even now. The oil tanker Madison, one thousand feet long and one-sixth that wide, ran ashore on the reef not twelve miles from where I stand, and the sharp coral sliced through its two hulls as though they were made of paper. From that long gash flowed the darkest, most vile blood into McCarthy Sound, and it spread faster than any estimate could predict. It raced towards the shore, hungry for life to feed on, and it took all birds and fishes and animals in its way until their deaths numbered into the thousands. Everything it touched withered and died, and then it took the life of Port McCarthy, the once peaceful town that could do nothing but watch itself succumb.

Suzanne and I had been there only a few months earlier, when everything seemed as though it would remain beautiful forever. It was still early June, when the days stretch their longest and we had nothing but warm weather to look forward to. We had by then only been together a short while, yet like the summer I could only see happiness laid before us, mapped out across the white sands of the beach. It’s strange now to remember; the accident was so close, and in hindsight I can see the ripples it sent backwards through time, yet I was too ignorant to recognise them for what they were. Portents of change, and what they promised has haunted me every day since.

We had driven half a day to reach the small town, sent on the recommendation of a close friend. Suzanne wore a straw hat, and through its wide woven brim a checkerboard of light dappled her soft face and filled her eyes with something akin to a sparkle every time she looked at me. Her laugh made me in turn laugh, and I still recall the sight of her newly shaven legs rubbing against one another and the feeling of absolute happiness it brought me. Were I somehow able to have frozen that moment, I would gladly have spent my remaining life there, wrapped in that beatific feeling of joy. That is the worst of the hauntings: the reminders of what I shall never again have.

The Port McCarthy that lies before me now is overcast, and I must work to remember that this is due to the shorter late autumn days and not that the oil has stained the sky.

I check myself into the Windhaven Inn, the same place where Suzanne and I stayed those many years ago. I must admit I’m surprised it’s still there and doing business, but one step inside shows me that it has hung on only by the thinnest of threads. The smiling woman who greeted us a decade ago is nowhere to be seen. Instead, in her place, a girl no more than sixteen, her faded black clothes stretched over her thick body, coils of seeping tattoos wrapped around her arms. I notice her pierced tongue as she speaks to me, and the words leave me feeling cold and wet.

“I’ve a reservation,” I tell her. “For the weekend.”

“Sign here,” she says, and I see her chipped nails are painted a matching dull black as she points to an empty space in the smudged guest book. I take the pen and try to sign my name, but after more than two attempts the ink still refuses to run. She takes the pen from me wordlessly and dabs it on her studded tongue. When she hands it back it works, but the ink it dispenses is clotted and old.

I follow her upstairs, carrying my small leather bag over my shoulder. I make the mistake of touching the banister and my hand comes away feeling sticky. I try to discreetly rub it clean on the leg of my trousers, but instead stain them as well. When I ask after the woman I’d seen there years before, the young girl explains that she is that woman’s daughter, and hints that the Madison spill changed her mother in inexplicable ways, ways impossible to come back from. My smile is weak as I look away though I don’t know if it’s because of the girl’s mother or the mother’s child. The young girl gives me a half-hearted tour of the inn, her well-practised voice unable to disguise her boredom. She takes me down a corridor and along its length I see three other bedrooms. Only one door is ajar however, and I try to glance in while we pass but the gap is too narrow and the girl has guided me too quickly to catch more than a fleeting glimpse of something dark and wet seeping across the floor.

“This is your room,” she says, and hands me a key large enough for only a child’s hand. “The lock sticks sometimes and you need to pull it shut to move the bolt.” I smile and nod but she doesn’t return the courtesy. Instead, she tells me breakfast will be served downstairs at seven, and warns me not to be late.

I close the door and, after struggling with the lock, inspect the small room. It’s the same one in which Suzanne and I spent those past days together and for a moment my memories are superimposed over what is truly there. Instead of the stained wallpaper under an overcast day, I see sunlight and warmth; instead of a sagging bed and carpet that looks matted by a million little feet, I see Suzanne laughing as she jumps on the bed, the springs bouncing suggestively. I smile, and the act of smiling causes the mirage to dissipate, revealing the truth of the room, and the first thing I see is a crack that runs down the wall, starting a foot from the ceiling. At its base there is a dark wet mould that has grown into the carpet. I breathe out slowly and look in the mirror on top of the dresser. It too is covered in some greasy film, obscuring my features or twisting them into someone who looks far too old. I hear a noise and look towards the window but I see nothing there. Nothing at all.

I walk over a small bridge into the town of Port McCarthy. To my right, between the rooftops of the tiny stores, the dark grey clouds roll towards me, while beneath them dark waters churn. No one walks the streets but me, and it’s clear why as soon as I reach the grimy storefronts. They are closed; boarded for the coming winter. I wonder if it’s my timing that’s the issue. Had I arrived earlier, in June as before, would the town be bustling with the tourists that I remember Suzanne and I walking past, hand in hand, as we investigated the narrow streets? The two of us spent hours there, wandering through the tiny shops filled with trinkets and home-made crafts, each one comprising a tiny piece of a town that neither of us wanted to leave or ever forget. How different, I think, to now, when all I want is to somehow rid myself of the memories. I look just off the main street and the spectre of Suzanne is there waiting for me, wanting to evoke a memory I’d long ago suppressed.

Suzanne, standing in the sun, an ice-cream cone in one hand fresh from a cart by the edge of the water, pointing at a small sign affixed to a faux-antique lamppost.

“Look,” she said, “A new store’s just opened. Do you want to see inside?”

“I’m pretty tired,” I laughed. “And we’ve been on our feet for hours. Can’t we just rest for a bit?”

She handed me her cone.

“You sit on that bench. I’ll only be a minute.”

And she was off.

I laughed and waited, and as her treat melted I ate it with selfish glee. Yet, after twenty minutes she had not yet returned and I decided I’d had enough of sitting. I followed the direction she had taken until I came to an old house at the end of the small street. It looked much like any of the houses beside it, yet it had a hand-painted sign with the word ALICE’S written on it in children’s paint. The screen door was slightly ajar and I pulled it open to step into the dim room beyond.

It took a few moments to get my bearings, my eyes unable to cope with the change in light. A shadow moved before me and I tried unsuccessfully to blink away the spots that blinded me. In the faux darkness, small black blobs squirmed across my vision, making the world appear murky. As my sight cleared, the first thing I saw was Suzanne, inspecting a polyester dress that hung shapelessly from its hanger. Around me were the beginnings of a consignment shop, filled with crafts of all different kinds, each vying for the attention of tourists. But beyond the items displayed for sale it was clear that no other work had been done to transform the house into a proper store.

“This place fascinates me,” she said. “I could spend hours in here.”

From room to room we travelled while Suzanne inspected the clothes slowly, her fingers lingering on sizes that would forever be too large for her, and in every corner I saw the same traces of the store’s previous function. A single standing lamp in each room were the only sources of illumination, and those oversized ugly dresses were displayed from small hooks screwed into the rafters and walls. I shook my head. It was a terrible place, that converted former house. I thought I heard it scream for release, then realised it was not the house, but Suzanne, and I was immediately certain I had underestimated just how bad things would become.

In my memory, the events play out in slow motion, as though trapped in amber, or perhaps oily tar. I know these things occurred many years ago — so many they may not have happened at all. All I have left of those times are ghosts; dark shadowy ghosts that hover and remind me of what I’ve lost, of what I’ve given away without thinking. They are blemishes on my life, like the stains on the Port McCarthy beach that are still working their way into the ground a decade later, killing the seeds of any life they find.

“Look at this. Who makes these things?”

Suzanne whispered to me in that converted house, and though it must have been loud enough for anyone to hear, I was far too unnerved by spinning uncontrollable fear to check. There before us stood a doll the size of a small child, dressed in a small child’s clothes. It faced the wall as though it were being punished, its arms raised to cover its missing eyes. I shivered, and then saw a second doll. Then, another. They stood throughout the house in the same manner, faces turned to the wall, their little bodies impossibly real. Except their faces. I knew immediately that if I were to check the dolls’ faces they would be blank, lifeless, and part of me wished that would not be the case.

“They’re so creepy,” Suzanne said. “They look so real.”

“I don’t know who would buy one,” I said, looking away because I could no longer bear the sight. An older man across the room smiled at me from behind a counter, his teeth too large.

“The sign says they’re called ‘hide and seek dolls’,” Suzanne said. “Where do they get their clothes?”

“Maybe from their dead children,” I said, mesmerised by the man’s widening smile — so wide I doubted reality for a moment. Then my own words registered, and the sickness they filled me with snapped me back to attention. “I mean, they were probably donated. Some kid outgrew them.” I smiled at Suzanne in hopes she had forgotten what I had said. Instead, she grimaced.

I carry that image of her in my head still, and sometimes it amazes me it’s there at all when so many other things I wish I could recall have been forgotten. Memories are strange and elusive, yet they can return at a moment’s notice and from out of nowhere, appearing so vividly it feels as though time has not passed. But time has passed, and those memories that return most often have crashed just off the shore of my life, and the dark sweep of destruction continues to move towards me over the churning water’s surface.

I can’t be sure if it’s going to rain, but the air feels wet and chilled and I decide I don’t want to take the chance. By the time I return to the Windhaven Inn, I know I was right, as the rain has started, but even so it is not a hard cleansing rain. Rather, it’s a drizzle, barely more than a mist, and all it succeeds in doing is making my shoes damp enough that each step feels as though I am wading through water.

Outside the Inn’s front door is a small garden in which an old cat squats. Its fur is grimy and matted as though it has spent an inordinate amount of time underground, and there is a glazed look in its dull ancient eyes. It chews grass slowly, and doesn’t seem to know I’m there, or if it does it cannot be bothered to acknowledge me. Perhaps one of us is a ghost, though neither of us is sure which.

“It has six toes, you know. Born like that. Six on every foot. You know what they say about that, don’t you?”

It is the young tattooed woman. She stands at the door smoking a cigarette, looking at me as though I have disturbed her with my thoughts. I smile weakly.

“No. What does it mean?”

She shakes her head, disappointed, and looks up at the sky. I look too, but the rain is a cloud hovering too close to the ground.

“Your key is at the front desk.”

I nod. She signals me with some hand sign that belies her youth, then retreats inside. I try and push the cat out of the way with my foot, but it doesn’t move, not at first. My foot sinks into sickly soft fur that feels no different from a dish of rotted meat. The cat makes a low gurgling noise, and finally gets to its feet and staggers a few steps before falling on its side, out of breath.

My room is dark when I return to it, the overcast day filling the emptiness with the kind of shadows that do not dissipate when I turn on the lamps. I take my shoes and socks off to dry them, then sit on the edge of the bed. I scratch at the underside of my beard, less from discomfort and more for something to do with my hands, and look out the window at the solid wall of mist that hovers there. Part of me wants to draw the drapes, but I can’t. The swirling reminds me of a flood that will wash over everything and make it new. I just wish I knew what colour the water would be.

Suzanne and I made love that first night at the Inn, when the summer was warm and the scent of the beach was in the air. I remember it clearly, remember how soft and slow it was, remember us pausing to share a cigarette afterward, the smoke curling around the curve of her small breasts. And then I again see her grimacing face before me, only now she’s joined me on the edge of the bed, and with a sense of ten-year-old déjà vu I ask what’s wrong. She hangs her head so I can’t see her face behind her hair, and covers her eyes. “A ghost must have just walked past me.” She laughs and I laugh with her though I’m not sure why. The vision begins to recede again until all that is left is the memory of a sky turned dark orange, and Suzanne’s hand fidgeting awkwardly as it lights on her abdomen. But there is something else, a flicker on the edge of my vision. I turn to the source and see in the darkness that the crack in the wall is longer, and the stain spreading from it is creeping across the carpet towards me. There’s something intriguing about it, but before I can determine just what that is I realise the stain is in fact something more.

In my head, words still echo like ripples in time spreading out from the past. I try to push them aside, try to drown them with alcohol or noise, but I can still hear them as they leave an indelible mark on my soul.

“What are we going to do?” I remember Suzanne asking me, her eyes wide while I only wanted to close my own to dull the throbbing.

“What can we do?”

There were no answers. What had seemed so clear only a few hours before we spoke had become suddenly so muddy, as though the oil that had flooded McCarthy Sound had contaminated my mind. I rubbed my temples as she spoke, and the fear she filled me with was thick and suffocating. She cried and hugged herself because I could do neither for her. I was afraid. I was young and afraid and selfish, and I could not understand why such a thing was happening.

“Why is this happening?” she echoed.

My apartment seemed filled by her presence, and as she sat at my kitchen table quietly sobbing I tried to think. Behind me, the television news was stuck in a loop, repeating the story of the tanker Madison and the wave of inevitable death that advanced upon the idyllic town of Port McCarthy. The words repeated in my mind until it seemed as though the voices were talking about me — talking to me. The accident was dire; everything had to be cleaned — I heard the words over and over until it seemed the only logical course, and yet Suzanne did not agree, not at first. I managed to convince her, though. I wore her down until she believed it was for the best. That ghost, too, continues to haunt me. It yelps at me, demanding my attention, and as I’m drawn from my reverie I realise it’s the sound of a dog in the next room. At least, I believe it’s a dog. I can’t be sure. It is unlike any sound I’ve ever heard, and it cuts into my nerves.

Yet I can’t help but feel dissociated from that part of myself, far away from the place I truly am, for when I see the shape of the shadow standing before me, I barely register its impossibility. The illusion is darker than anything I’ve ever seen, and beneath its form is a stain that has crept across the carpet towards me, a stain of what was spilled here so long ago. And yet, that darkness looks familiar to me, as though I should recognise its shape but cannot. It’s a puzzle that my brain doesn’t comprehend. Not until the shadow moves. It’s then that the image shifts into focus, and I realise to my horror what I am witnessing.

I don’t know where he comes from or what he’s made of, but before the wall stands a child formed from the black oil that is spread like a thin blanket over every surface of Port McCarthy. The boy-shaped shadow ripples, standing with his back to me as he shields his eyes from the deep fissure he was born from. He hides his face as though playing a game, a game meant to tell me something, but I’m not sure what that might be. Whatever knowledge he is trying to impart has been washed away by the flood of regret that pours from my heart like oil from a ruptured ship. I stand, intent on going nearer to him, wanting to inspect the vision to be sure my eyes are not deceiving me, but I travel no more than a step before I find myself hesitating, unsure I truly want to know the truth. In my terror I am unable to confront him and the wave of my regret threatens to overwhelm me. The only way I might breathe again is to turn my back, to hide from the childlike shadow as it hides from me, and wait until the world seems familiar again. But instead all I can see is the dresser mirror, and the reflection of a shivering child smeared and fractured within it.

The accident’s effects were not clear to me at first. I thought naïvely that the world would revert to what it once had been. Suzanne returned to work, I to my writing, and though we still bore the knowledge of what had happened I thought for a while that it meant nothing, that ultimately our love — that love shared between us in the sun of Port McCarthy, that had taken seed and grown further there — would be enough to heal us. I could not allow myself to believe that the accident would rob us of that idyllic life and erase everything that had preceded it. Yet, over time, my confidence faltered. The first sign things had altered irrevocably I did not immediately notice. Each return of Suzanne home from work was progressively later, until eventually I realised it had been months since I’d seen her in daylight. The darkness, it wore on her. Deep circles appeared beneath her swollen eyes, her blonde hair dried and lost its lustre. She no longer smiled, and try as I might to retain what we once had I could feel it slipping through my fingers like the fine grains of sand along the Port McCarthy beach. The life Suzanne and I once shared had withered after the accident, and though a portion of me understood that I still refused to believe the part I had played. Port McCarthy, where all our happiness once lay, had become ruined by the black oil that lapped its shores. It had become a barren place to which neither of us could return; we no longer belonged there. The accident had banished us forever. I know this because ten years later I have returned, and as I stand in nearly the same spot, in the same room, as I did then when I told Suzanne I loved her, I cannot face what we made reflected in the mirror before me. Instead, I weep over all that has been taken from me and all that has been lost, never to return.

The knock at the door startles me. The world that had been so quiet before returns and I find myself caught in a limbo state between what is real and what cannot be. As though I am awakening from a dream, the sensation is enough to disorient me, and looking around everything appears to be wrong. Understanding of what has happened is frustratingly out of reach. The knock returns, a voice calling to me from the door, and shaking off my delirium I stumble towards it, keenly aware of the presence that stands behind me, not looking my way. I don’t dare turn to see if it has vanished.

“Are you okay in there?” the young woman from the desk asks through the door. Her concerned words belie her distaste for me. I hear her fumbling with the lock, trying to open it. I place my foot surreptitiously against the base of the door.

“I’m fine. Fine.”

“Can you open the door?” she asks. I jiggle the handle ineffectually from my side, feigning effort.

“It seems to be stuck.”

“That’s okay. I’ve just come to tell you—” she lowers her voice and I’m not sure at first I’ve heard her properly. “There’ve been some complaints. The walls here are a bit thin; things pass through them.”

“Things? What things?” I say, growing cold. Is it possible I feel the fissure behind me growing wider? Feel it like a crack in my own being?

“Like I don’t know what. Like whatever you’re doing in here. Can you keep it down?”

I am not sure what she means but I agree. What else can I do? I’m afraid she’s going to push into the room and see the wall and what has emerged from it. Or, perhaps, I’m more afraid she won’t. I close my eyelids and listen to her walk away then hear nothing more — nothing but the slow leaking tap, or perhaps it’s the rain outside. Or is it a small figure made of oil, its back turned to me as mine is to it, no longer able to keep its shape and exist in this world, that drips darkness onto the carpet? I open my eyelids finally and turn around to see which it is.

The town of Port McCarthy died slowly, choked by the darkness that rolled towards it without warning on waves as black as night. While the rest of the world saw this from a distance, Suzanne and I suffered the full brunt of the accident there, we suffered the crashing waves of darkness that would not stop, would not end, until it spread through our lives as surely as it had through Port McCarthy. Even now I feel it, and even now I wish I had known some way to halt its progress before it was too late. But that’s the way with accidents; they come when we are not prepared, and in their wake they leave devastation and death. As soon as that black oil was spilled in Port McCarthy, there was no hope for me, for Suzanne, for us. It doesn’t surprise me in hindsight that there is no sun in Port McCarthy, instead only dark clouds. The sun forsook us then. While we laughed and smiled and embraced in ignorance the seeds of our destruction had already been planted.

It doesn’t take me long to pack my bag, my distaste for the town all but palpable. The dog in the next room has not made a noise in some time, and I pray it doesn’t start because I worry what I will do if it does. Not once do I look at the crack in the wall, at the stain that has spread from it across the carpet. I want to, but if I succumb I fear I will be drawn too far into the darkness to ever extricate myself.

I rush down the stairs, nearly slipping on something that coats them. The tattooed girl at the front desk clicks her studded tongue against her teeth as I sign out and hand her the key.

“You aren’t staying?”

“There’s nothing here to see anymore,” I mutter, my head down, and scurry from the Windhaven Inn while trying to dispel the image of that dark child from my memory. If the girl says anything more to me, it does not register.

I stop on the porch of the Windhaven Inn, my hastily packed bag in my hand, and look up at the dark clouds that are like an indelible stain upon the sky. And I wonder, for a moment, if it’s not my soul that has been so marked.

Then, at the foot of the steps, I see the large six-toed cat once again. It still stares blankly ahead as though it is waiting for something but has forgotten what. It sits, blocking my passage, but I don’t dare touch it — I cannot bring myself to relive the experience of feeling its matted fur slide across its body. As I watch I see that what it chews is not grass, not any longer. I put my bag down and take a hesitant step towards the creature, not heeding the low growl it gives as warning. Instead, I crane my head further until what I see between its teeth is the head of a flower from which a long stem trails back to the ground; a flower that has impossibly sprouted through a dark oily film and beneath an even darker sky.

A flower. A life for a life. A promise of re-growth.

I reach towards the old cat but it only growls and bites.