Then, Daddy came and dragged me through a bunch of tourists with greasy mouths, lining up to watch the torches and grass skirts. I looked back to see the pig being taken away, its bones passing above the crowd, on a tray, like some terrible crown.
‘Barking Sands.’ Mommy is pointing.
Grampa Don is already out of the car and looking for a place to dump garbage. But there isn’t one and he tosses it on the ground saying it will just rot and become a hotel lobby, over time, with enough rain and ‘fucking tourist money’.
He says all the dinosaur bones grew into roads and rental cars after millions of years. He’s had four cans of beer since we left the Coco Palms Hotel, where we’re staying, and he’s unzipped and hosing down a tree-trunk.
His ancient nozzle sprays Corona on everything like some poison Daddy uses back in Los Angeles, to make snails’ heads explode.
Kitty points to a sign that says this is a holy burial ground. He likes words; their shape, worming together to form meaning he doesn’t understand. Grampa reads the sign and keeps sprinkling snail napalm like a punctured can.
‘This place is too fucking humid.’ Grampa Don is wiping his head, like those guys at the 76 station chiselling bugs off the windshield.
Daddy takes pictures even though the sign says no photography ‘cause it’s a holy place and I guess that’s bad. Daddy doesn’t care. Mommy smiles and poses under the big cliffs that go up and up and up. Her dress looks like it belongs in a vase. Kitty is crawling on the sand, chasing our footprints like a rabid bloodhound that needs to be shot in the head. I wish I could get away from them all.
It’s very windy and sand blows, sticking us with pins you can’t see. I cover my eyes and we all lean into the wind. Mommy says we look like arctic explorers going up a snow slope. She wants a happy family. But we aren’t.
I hate these trips. Being together.
Grampa Don takes Kitty’s hand. Daddy takes Mommy’s. A storm fills the sky with black sponges.
Grampa Don lags behind and we all get to the Toyota. It’s starting to rain. Daddy starts the car and the mud is turning into dirty, orange glue that grabs our wheels. They spin.
‘Zzzzzzzzzzzz.’ Kitty sounds like a trapped tyre.
The car is a mad dog chained to a tree. Thunder shakes us. Lightning cuts up the sky. Something is wrong. The sky is not happy or pretty any more. The air smells like dead things and angry wind makes all the plants and flowers look like they’re bending over to get sick.
There is warm fog. I can’t see the ocean any more. It crashes, attacking.
‘What’s the fuckin’ problem?’ yells Grampa Don.
Mommy tells him not to talk like that and he curses at her. Daddy tells him to leave her alone. They start to argue.
I hate their guts.
Grampa Don rolls down his window to look at the tyres. I notice something moving through the high sugarcane. He says he hates it here and yells at the mud and the sky and the big sand dunes that bark like wild dogs surrounding helpless animals.
The car tries harder to move. Grampa Don is getting all wet. Mommy tells him to close the window and suddenly he makes a weird noise. An arrow with red feathers is sticking through his neck, sideways. He turns and I see the sharp tip dripping blood on his tanktop. There is mud and blood on his face. He can’t breathe. There are wet bubbles in his neck.
Mommy screams.
I see feathers moving through sugarcane. Blue ones. Yellow ones. I see brown skin. Hands, eyes.
Grampa Don tries to scream and blood comes out of his mouth and sprays on everything. Kitty thinks Grampa Don is being funny and laughs, but makes no sound. Daddy screams at him to shut up and Kitty starts to cry. His face turns bright red.
Feathers.
We did something wrong. Something bad.
I am scared as they hide in the sugarcane. I know I’ll be dead in another minute. I know I can’t escape in this mud and rain. I look at my family. Mommy tries to help Grampa Don and Daddy keeps flooring the gas, too stupid to realise it doesn’t help. I say nothing as they ask me to help. I do nothing.
I hate them.
An old man and two people who just argue all the time. A retard brother someone should’ve cut into little pieces a long time ago.
The car is stuck. No matter what Daddy does. More arrows break the glass. We are bloody. We are dying. Rain is pounding harder, pinning us to the mud, and the tyres bury us deeper, spinning.
Digging us a grave.
As my family screams, I close my eyes and listen to the sand.
Richard Christian Matheson lives in Malibu, California, and he is the son of veteran science fiction writer Richard Matheson. A novelist, short story writer and screenwriter/producer, he has scripted and executive produced more than five hundred episodes of prime-time network TV and was the youngest writer ever put under contract by Universal Studios. His critically acclaimed debut novel Created By was published in 1993, and his short, sharp fiction has been collected in Scars and Other Distinguishing Marks and, more recently, Dystopia, published by Gauntlet Press. His 35mm short film, Arousal, which he wrote and directed from his own story, was previewed at the 2000 World Horror Convention in Denver, Colorado, and he has recently scripted a four-hour mini-series based on Dean Koontz’s bestseller Sole Survivor. About his story in this volume, Matheson says: ‘There are places untied from time. Ghostly cities, ancient cathedrals. Places in serene recess, where centuries drift unnoticed. And there are places more precious; rarest of all. Places that bear no sign of man’s signature, existing within their own exquisite privacy. When I first saw “Barking Sands” beach I was overcome by its beauty: endless, unearthly dunes, misted by miles of primordial waves; somehow dreamlike. It was said the dunes barked; an anomaly of wind which allowed voice. I found it spiritual, oddly troubling. I walked the vastness, listening carefully, imagining what the sand might be saying; if it were invitation or warning. As with all things seductive, there were two answers.’
CHAZ BRENCHLEY
Everything, in All the Wrong Order
There’s this disease I heard about, drinking with medics one time, where things get so turned around inside that you end up vomiting your own shit.
Think about that, and bear with me. It’s a metaphor, okay? What actually happened was this:
I let him go first up the ladder. I’d thought about that, there were advantages and drawbacks either way, but in the end I waved him up ahead of me. And followed close behind, hard on his heels so that he was barely through the trap before I was following, the bulking shadows of the attic space and my own bulk, my own closeness together serving to disguise and distract him so that he saw nothing, he didn’t even ask a question before I was up and the trap was down and I was standing on it.
Then, only then did I lighten his darkness by tugging on the string that lit the lamp behind me; then, only then did he understand.
One of those creaking, angular shadows that had made no sense in the half-dark was his sister. Still kicking, though not swinging much now: twisting rather, this way and that, like a slow clock running down. Her face was purple, and every ligament in her neck stood out against the rope that was taking its time in choking her. Her mouth was stretched wide, gagged by silence.
He was quick, I’ll give him that, but I’d always known he would be. He looked, he saw; he twisted himself, faster than his sister, and his hand already had a knife in it. He was uncertain, though, whether to save her life or take mine. Indecision can be lethal, I’ve seen that time and again; and told him so, told them both, but of course they did not listen. They were children, what did they know of decisions?