Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (27 page)

    "How long does it take to strap three kids into a car?" he asked.

    Cassie shook her head.

    "Maybe they're arguing over who sits where?" she said. "You know what they're like."

    "Not usually when it's someone else's car," said Paul. "I daresay Howard's a safe driver," he added after a moment.

    Cassie, who knew what was going through Paul's mind, said, "How do
you
drive when you have someone else's child in the back? Recklessly or even more safely than usual?"

    "Yeah, you're right. As usual," he said, with a little smile. "But what's taking them so long?"

    They waited a further minute then Paul got out of the car and wandered down to the lane that led to the back of the house. There was no sign of a vehicle making its way down towards him, so he had a quick look back at Cassie sitting in their car and started walking up the lane. He reached a track on the left, which could only be the access to the rear of Howard and Penny's house. Still no sign of their car. He ran down the little track towards the back of their house, which he isolated from its neighbours. There was no car. He looked around wildly, suddenly feeling exactly as he had done upon waking when he had been convinced, for whatever reason, that the children were no longer in the house.

    At his feet in the mud was a set of tyre tracks. They led towards the lane and then turned left rather than right.

    There had to be another way around to the front of the house. He turned right and ran back to the road, where Cassie was still sitting waiting in the car.

    "Have you seen them?" he asked breathlessly as he reached the car.

    "What do you mean?"

    "The car's gone. They've gone. They've all gone. They've got the children!"

    "Maybe they're coming another way round?"

    "They're not. They'd have been here by now. They've gone and they've taken the children. I don't know why, but they've taken the children. Oh Jesus Christ!"

    They looked at each other and for a moment said nothing. Paul's breath froze in the air in little clouds.

    "Call the police," said Cassie. "No, wait. Maybe they're still in the house? They got delayed or they're playing a joke."

    "There's no car at the back."

    "Let's check the house."

    Together they ran up the front path. The door was locked so Paul knocked hard. When no one came he put his elbow through the stained glass and reached inside to open the door. They entered the house. Paul ran upstairs. Cassie checked the living room and the kitchen. Something made her open cupboard doors in the kitchen. The cupboards were empty. There was no food, nor were there any pots and pans other than the ones they had used the night before. She ran into the living room, where she remembered seeing an oak cabinet with closed doors. It too was empty.

    "Paul!" she shouted upstairs.

    "Cassie!" he shouted from above. "Come up here!"

    She ran upstairs.

    "Look!" he said.

    The filing cabinet in Penny's office was empty. The laptop had disappeared from the table. The desk tidy was as suspiciously tidy as before. In the bedroom that they had said was theirs, the wardrobes contained nothing but a few rattling wire hangers. In Connor's room it was the same story. Drawers filled with stale air. Empty cupboards that they had presumed were stuffed with toys.

    No one lived in this house. No one at all.

12 - Marc Lecard - The Admiral's House

    We always called it the admiral's house. Easily the oldest house in town, it had been built right on the bay shore, facing the water, back before the suburban grid was laid out and smaller houses came to crowd around it. Broad and comfortable, with a little square turret, it was a classic Victorian "summer cottage", many rooms larger than my parents' house.

    While I was growing up it had actually been lived in by an admiral and his family - a handsome wife, a trio of young sons. I knew Dougal, the middle, son from school; we were good, but not close friends. He was athletic and popular, far above me in the high school caste system, though he always treated me well when we met. He even invited me to his graduation party. That pleased me more than I would have thought.

    The admiral's house always seemed to me to embody a kind of unattainable perfection - unattainable by me, anyway. The house itself, the tiny perfect crescent of beach, the family so good-looking, so well-mannered, members of a club that had no other local representatives - all this was more than I could hope to live up to.

    In the event my life was changed, the course of it set by the terrible thing that took place there.

    I never meant to come back to the town where I grew up. It wasn't the kind of place people stayed in or came back to - a faceless suburb, meant for raising children, for leaving as soon as you were able. But I was childless, by choice, and after my wife died I found I couldn't possibly stay where we had lived our life together. So I sold the house, sold my business, and crawled back to my parents' house (they were dead now and the house was empty) to lick my wounds and decide what if anything I wanted to do with the rest of my life.

    Being back in my hometown was eerie and oppressive. I had been gone for nearly thirty years. No one I had known growing up still lived there. I walked the streets feeling like a memory fragment, a ghost haunting my own past. Slowly, without realizing it, I became a kind of recluse, avoiding the neighbours, going out after dark if at all. I began to drink too much.

    Then at the liquor store one night, stocking up, I finally ran into someone I used to know.

    It was Dougal, the admiral's middle son. When I had known him in high school he was a strong, handsome guy, bold without arrogance, friendly and generous. Life had changed him; at first I didn't recognize the haggard, hunched old man ahead of me in line, waiting to pay for his booze. But when he turned to go, something in his profile woke my memory.

    "Dougal? Dougal MacAlester?"

    His head snapped towards me, eyes round with what looked like fear. In that instant it occurred to me that some terrible illness or mental breakdown accounted for his presence in town. Somewhat like myself.

    "Dougal, I'm sorry," I said, "I didn't mean to startle you. Do you remember me? We were in high school together."

    Dougal looked back at me, clearly upset. Slowly his features relaxed and I saw that he knew me.

    "Sure, John, I remember you. How have you been?" He shook my hand; the bag he was carrying clinked and rattled as he shifted it to his left arm.

    We talked easily together as we walked around to the parking lot. I was unreasonably glad to run in to someone I knew. Dougal apparently felt the same.

    "Why don't you come over to my place?" he asked as we paused in front of my car. "Have a drink, talk about how it used to be?"

    "Sure, I'd like that," I said. "Where are you living now?"

    A shifty look came over his face, hesitant and dishonest, not at all the way I remembered him.

    "Same place," he said. "Same old place, down by the water, you know. Dad's house. You know where it is."

    The admiral's house was as I remembered it, still a window into another era in the bland suburban street. It had a shut-up, neglected air, though, and even in the dark I could see it hadn't been well cared for.

    Stepping through the wide door into the foyer was like stepping out onto a stage. Memories began to wash over me, things I hadn't thought about since the day they had happened. It was as if this door had been shut up and never opened since the last time I had been through it.

    They were not all pleasant memories. But in a way my real life had begun there.

    After letting us in, Dougal began to walk straight through the house, head down, like a man on a mission.

    "Dougal, wait," I called out after him. "Let me look at the house. I haven't been here since…"

    He stopped and looked back at me.

    "Since the party?" he asked.

    I nodded.

    "What do you want to see?" he muttered. "It's all shut up now, anyway. Too much house for one man."

    I looked around at the darkened rooms that opened off the foyer, sheets over most of the furniture, a musty, stale smell in the air.

    "Are you all by yourself in here?"

    "I had someone come in for a while, clean the place," he said, answering the question I hadn't asked. "But I got rid of her. Too much money; it's easier just to keep it closed up."

    "You should rent it, live somewhere else, in the city maybe."

    Dougal peered at me for a second, as if looking for some hidden meaning in what I had just said. Then he laughed, a short, sharp, barking laugh.

    "I have to be here now," he said.

    He took me right through the house to the back room, overlooking the water. I remembered it well; a broad, sunny room, the width of the house, windows all around. Many-paned French windows opened onto a broad deck, with a sand beach beyond, the blue stretch of the bay from wall to wall.

   Now of course it was black dark outside, just a few lights across the water, and a streak of white moonlight painted over it.

    The room was hot after a hot day. The French windows were all shut up, but a screened window to one side let in a little breeze off the water.

    Dougal bent over and flicked on one small lamp in the corner; it barely threw enough light to keep us from barking our shins on the furniture as we found chairs and broke open the bottles.

    "I don't like a lot of light," Dougal felt the need to explain. "Hurts my eyes."

    I was not sorry for the shadows myself.

    Dougal ignored me as he focused on removing a bottle of bourbon from the bag, unscrewing the top and pouring the brown liquor into a tall glass with squint-eyed precision. He gulped half the glass in a piece, held still while the bourbon ran into him, then sat back and turned to me.

    "It's good to see you here, John. After all these years."

    "I never thought I'd be in this house again," I said honestly.

    "You remember that party?" Dougal asked. "The graduation party?"

    I did. I had every reason to remember it.

    "Angus was there," Dougal said. "That was just before Angus shipped out."

    I remembered Angus, the oldest brother. He had joined the Marines, came back to dazzle us with his dress uniform, his short hair and iron posture. Then they shipped him to Vietnam. He never came back.

    "My poor parents. That took the heart out of them, first Finn, then Angus getting killed," he said. "It was like they became old people over night. Even the admiral.

    "But Angus was still with us for the party. That was a great day, up to the end, anyway. The last great day."

    "Nothing was ever the same after that, was it?" I said.

    Dougal didn't answer. He stared angrily out at the moonlight on the water.

    "They're all dead, now, you know. The family," he said. "I'm the last one. This is my house now."

    "It's the same with me, Dougal," I said. "Not that my house is anything to compare with this place."

    He snorted. "This place. I'd burn it down if I could. I should. Just burn it."

    "The admiral's house?" I was shocked. "Why would you even think of doing that?"

    "Too much pain," Dougal said. "Too much pain, too many memories."

    We sat in the dark, in silence, for a long time. When he spoke again it was as if he was allowing me back in to a conversation that streamed constantly through his head.

    "You remember my other brother? Finn?"

    Foolishly I had been hoping to avoid talking about Finn. But what else was there to talk about, in that house? I nodded without speaking.

    "I never liked Finn," Dougal said.

    "I never knew him," I said. "Not really." Finn had been younger than us, the youngest brother. He would have been around sixteen I guess at the time of the party, almost seventeen.

    "He was always gunning for me. Nobody else could ever see it, they thought I was imagining it, but he was always trying to needle me, undermine me. I think he wanted to pry me away from dad. Not that dad ever paid much attention to any of us.

    "Anyway, I couldn't really stand him. But I would have left it alone if it hadn't been for Jeanne."

    "Jeanne Cary?" I asked.

    "Uh-huh," Dougal said. "You remember her?"

    I nodded; I didn't trust myself to speak.

    "Sure you do," Dougal said. "Anyone would remember Jeanne Cary." He fiddled with his glass, filled it up again. "I loved her, you know."

    "So did I. Everyone loved her."

    "Not like I did. I never loved anyone like that, before or since. My whole soul was bound up in her every movement. I didn't even know I had a soul, before. Jeanne took it and never knew she had it. And she wouldn't have cared if she had known.