The Year's Best Horror Stories 21

WELSH PEPPER by D. F. Lewis

I was on a solitary walking holiday, the way I always liked it, with my rucksack, large colored umbrella and personal headset.

For many years, I had been coming to this part of North Wales, enjoying the rugged scenery and challenging treks, far from most tourist enclaves. I slept rougher than many would countenance, my only shelter being the umbrella which I would stake to the ground with string guyed from every pinion to keep it steady in most winds thereabouts, but sadly not preventing the driving rain from slanting in upon my sleeping bag.

Good job I always slept “like a log,” as my mother used to say.

She never liked the idea of me coming away on these ventures, for fear of me catching the death of cold or falling down some (god)forsaken ravine.

As she had been dead now for a year or two, I no longer felt guilty at making her fret. One thing I do remember is her telling me never to beat about the bush, even when telling a story.

I was listening to my favorite Beatles album, as the path took me into an unfamiliar valley. I had decided earlier in the day, after a particularly dreadful night of really soaking rain, that I would turn almost full circle on myself and head toward a hostel that I had once before visited on a previous hike, where I would be able to dry out for a day or so. This inevitably meant putting up with the back-to-back discos and irritating bonhomie of the young set but, too bad, when the devil needs, the devil must. The girls there would make a nice change of view, in any case…

I admit that I am one of those men who believe any shortcomings are the fault of factors other than themselves. On coming across this valley, I automatically assumed that geography was to blame, rather than myself, for the valley should never have been there at all. I was quite familiar with the waterfalls a mile or so back which should have led to some nuclear silos in view of the hostel’s back bedroom windows. But the turnings instead had taken me to a deep cleft between mountainous slopes which, if I did not know better, were tantamount to twin Snowdons. A mighty frothing river surged between wooded slopes…

I had not heard the crash of the waters for my headset was an expensive one, more or less acoustically leak-proof and, in any event, it was a specially noisy bit at the opening of the Sergeant Pepper album.

Sitting down to remove a large stone from my boot, which I had been enduring for some while, I suddenly felt as if I were being watched.

A young girl, certainly not more than half my age, was crouched upon a nearby rock and, since she was wearing a gray dress, I was not surprised at missing her presence until now, merging with the rock as she did.

“Excuse me! What’s the name of this area?” I asked.

She opened her mouth to speak, but before I had the chance to remove my earphones, she had finished.

“Sorry,” I said, “that’s my fault. Can you please repeat what you said?”

“The name of this valley is forgotten.”

Her voice was silky, with a lilt peculiarly Welsh at the same time as being un-Welsh.

“Show me on the map, please.” My mother had always taught me to be polite. I picked up the boot and hopped over to her rock.

I cursed myself for being a prize chump, for I had lost the map earlier; I did not think it mattered since I was so familiar with this territory, or so I thought in my usual pig-headed fashion.

The girl, seen up close, was decidedly attractive. Her face was very young, but the curves of her body gave a clue to her real age.

She pointed to my personal stereo. “Can I try it on?”

I adjusted the telescopic arch of the headset and positioned it carefully over her cropped brown hair. I felt a warm tingle in my hands as I fitted the cans upon her small ears. Listening to the faint distant tinkle, I could still just about follow the familiar music myself. Her face had filled with delight at the first surge of stereophonic sound.

I smiled as I looked down the river. Uncanny, even without the headphones: I was still unable to hear it flowing, as if it were behind glass. Broken shards of the sun shone off its careering waters.

Turning back to the girl, I had a sudden impulse to place my arm around her shoulders. Much as a father might… but I was not her father nor was she my daughter.

She had in fact begun to lean upon me, nodding her head gently to “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds,” and quietly singing along.

Her gray dress was partially buttoned down the front, exposing small swelling patches of flesh. Could she really be from the hostel, as I had automatically assumed?

I looked back at the rucksack where I had left it, beginning to steam in the growing heat of the morning sun. The umbrella, leaning against it, was opening gradually on its own accord, like a fast-motion flower. No, I looked again—it was my fancy playing tricks or the umbrella’s springloading was working loose, after being dropped.

She abruptly jumped down from the rock, pulling me with her by the hand.

“Follow me, I want to show this to my family,” she said, pointing to the throbbing cassette player which she held tightly against her breasts.

She took off more like an animal, the obvious inner strength of her limbs belying their slender shapeliness. I admired the backs of her knees… and the fine fuzzhair accentuated, rather than softened, the long new-moons of her calves.

I realized there could not be any underwear within the skimpy gray dress, for no telltale lines marred the incipient cut and thrust of her buttocks. I could not help recalling in a new light how the dress had ridden to her upper thighs, whilst she was sitting on the rock. I followed, even in spite of myself, more to retrieve my expensive headset than to pursue a vision of delight, who should be beneath the concerns of a man of my years. Or that was what I told myself at the time.

The woods that bearded the lower reaches of the valley were deceptive in their extent. Once through a seemingly slight outcrop of some trees which I could not recognize (their branches having thicker foliage than the lower ones intertwining in an apparent conspiracy to hide the sky), the two of us came into a large clearing unseen from my previous vantage point by the rock. Scattered over what was little better than colorless scrubland was a commune of wooden sheds, some leaning against each other in mutual support. Young men and women, also in gray dresses, like my guide, were waving.

The girl tugged me by the hand toward one particular older man who stood in the middle, hands on his hips, arms splayed at odd angles, like a kite ready for flight.

“Listen to the sounds that Steve has brought us,” said the girl excitedly.

Wondering what the hell I had gotten into, I recalled that there was no way she could have known my name, other than by a wild guess.

I decided to take the initiative.

“Excuse me, I don’t know your names or who you people are… or come to that, where I am…”

“Our names are forgotten,” interrupted the man I took to be the girl’s father, using the same strange lilt in his voice. He refused to try on the headset, and the girl took it back, as she was led away by a surly-looking individual who delivered her into the hands of the other females.

“Can you show me the way back to my rucksack and umbrella?”

Nobody moved. The father, after a while, pointed to the edge of the clearing whence I had originally appeared to them with the girl, and I could just make out a moving shape, human in its form, but weirdly treelike in its coloring. The face appeared to have on a cheap party mask, since it was painted a bright green and pig-snouted, its overlarge brown eyes with very little white, and fangs like large splinters of wood. I could discern a red tongue flickering from between the fenced lips. Its dress was an aged deeply wrinkled trunk, moving swiftly like a snake on end.

“Get the goads!” shouted the father.

I was frozen to the spot, not through fright so much, but by the anger at suddenly realizing that the creature was dragging my opened umbrella behind it over the tussocks and thus damaging it beyond repair.

The gray people had by now gathered several long rods, thicker than the fishing variety, but just as bendy. I was handed one and encouraged to help the group in cornering the creature between two conjoining shed walls—which, to me, looked so ill-constructed that it would only take a light touch to topple. However, the silent creature, evidently smiling—though it was difficult to tell whether it was indeed a smile or a grimace—stood its ground, accepting that it was trapped. The father started prodding its chest with the “goad” and black sap oozed from the rupture. We all had a go, me included, for I had not forgiven it for the umbrella (its shattered skeleton now lying by the creature’s feet, shreds of material still clinging to the ribs).

The creature’s carcass eventually became little better than that umbrella, its life force mercifully long departed—mercifully, because I could not accuse myself of acting cruelly in continuing to pierce the sides of something that was already dead.

Toward the end of our bloodthirsty ruck, I turned to see the girl who had led me here, heaving with tears, the upper part of her dress now sodden and doing little to hide the pert, lightly-nippled breasts. The shattered cassette player was in her hands, the headphones still resting from ear to ear, its sound pads yellowed over with some sort of earwax.

I could not believe my eyes. Could any of this have happened? Why had I taken it all as a matter of course? The girl’s eyes indeed told me that the creature I had helped flay to death had only brought me my umbrella in its own clumsy fashion because it thought I had forgotten I left it behind.

She must have listened right to the end of Sergeant Pepper for, as she handed back the case (but at the same time keeping on the earphones as a sort of ornamental souvenir), I could see that the tape had certainly run to the end.

This was a day in the life, and more! Grabbing the wreck of the brolly as an insane keepsake, I took to my heels, with the whirring, whirling crescendo of nightmare in my ears, fleeing, as I now understood, from a people more monstrous than the monsters they feared. Except, of course, the sweet girl who knew not who she really was and would figure no doubt in all my erotic dreams for ever and ever.

And dreams would certainly be very wet, when all I’d have was that brolly to guard me against the drenching nights. My mother’d turn in her grave with worry, I thought, as I entered the trees which rustled behind me, camouflaging my escape.

It was twenty years ago today.