The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 19

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.

"Oh, she was nice enough to me, not a bitch, I mean. Not cruel at all. We even went out for a while, but it wasn't real. It was like she was doing me a favour, to not hurt my feelings. I could tell it didn't really mean anything to her.

"That was not the way she felt about Finn.

"I knew there was something between them, right from the first. Finn was younger than she was, barely a kid. but they had known each other all their lives, since they were little. They had always gotten along, I guess, and as they got older that deepened into something beyond friendship. I could see it; I hated to see it, but I did. That should have been me.

"But what could I say? He was my brother. It wouldn't have done any good anyway. So I kept my feelings to myself.

"But at the graduation party, when I saw her there, laughing, flirting, talking to Finn, I couldn't stand it. There was something around them, a force field, something between them and the rest of the world. They were together, and all the rest of us were out here, on the other side.

"I don't even know if they understood it themselves, in any conscious way. But I could see it. And it made me crazy.

"That day at the graduation party, I kept coming across them. Not in any kind of compromising position, I mean, not making-out or even holding hands. Just standing there, talking. But I could see it, the energy between them, the way they looked at each other. They were together. I couldn't take it."

Dougal paused to take a drink. When he stopped talking you could hear the waves breaking on the beach outside. The bay had always been part of the admiral's house for me, almost an extension of it. There were no lights on the deck, but the moonlight touched up the shape of things and spilled across the water, so that you could see the silhouettes of neighbouring houses, boats tied up nearby, a distant line of houses on the other shore of the cove, hunched up in the dark with a few lights burning.

"You know those islands across the bay?" Dougal asked. "The barrier islands. You can see them easily in daylight, green bars on the horizon. They're only about, I don't know, four miles away." Dougal looked toward the islands, invisible in the dark, sipping at his bourbon.

"I went up to Finn, pointed to those islands.

'"Think you could swim to those islands?'" I asked him. 'Little brother?'

"He looked at me, a little up and down look like he couldn't believe I was really that lame.

" 'Sure,' he said.

" 'Well come on then.'

" 'What, right now?'

" 'Right now. Unless you think you can't,' I pushed him. 'Unless you don't have it.'

"I knew he was a punk swimmer, no stamina. I also knew that Jeanne was right there, talking to someone else, but well within hearing. She was looking over at us, frowning a little. I knew she was about to come over and come between us, so I pushed Finn harder.

" 'Come on, little brother, if you can,' and I turned and ran and dove into the water, without even taking my shirt off.

"He was right behind me, like I knew he would be.

"We were both a little drunk by then, I guess. We swam out across the cove, into the big part of the bay. It had been a warm day, and the bay was pretty calm, dead still. We tore it up.

"After a while I pulled up and looked behind me. Finn was still coming on, a little further behind now. I could just see the house, and the beach. I couldn't make out the people; I doubt they could see us at all.

"When Finn was almost up to me I took off again.

"The bay's pretty shallow for the most part. In a good low tide you could walk across most of it. But there's one part where the channel comes out from between the islands, where it shelves off, pretty deep. The water gets dark there. You can feel it get colder, deeper, more powerful. You can almost feel that the water is a being, there, a living thing, that knows you're there. Do you know what I mean? It's frightening, sometimes.

"When we got to the deep part I was far ahead of Finn. Then I thought I heard him call out, call my name: 'Dougal!' I stopped swimming, and hung there, paddling, looking back towards him. At first I couldn't see him; I remember thinking he must have gone under. Then his head came up. He was close enough that I could see his eyes, popping out with panic.

"'Doog!' he yelled, 'Doog! help me!' Then he went down again.

"I just hung there. There was something cold in me, cold and unmoveable, cold and dark like the deep water.

"It's not true what they say about a drowning man goes down three times. Finn never came up again.

"I watched my brother drown, man! I watched my brother drown.

"After a while I swam over to where I saw him last, and dove down. I didn't see anything the first time. Visibility's never very good in the bay, too much mud and sediment stirred up all the time.

"The second time I went down I saw something pale, floating with its arms hanging. Maybe he was dead already, I don't know. I didn't try to find out.

"I came up again, and started yelling and waving my arms, just in case there was anyone around I hadn't noticed, boaters or fishermen; we were way too far from the beach for them to hear us, or even make us out against the water. Then I began to swim back."

The heavy night was heavier now, the darkness thicker. This is why he brought me here, I thought, to make this confession. But there was more to come.

I thought back to Dougal's return, shivering in the stern of the boat that had finally gone out after them, wrapped in a blanket, his long blond hair darkened by the water, hanging down around his face.

They never found Finn's body. People thought it must have been carried out by the tide through the channel and out to sea.

We were quiet for a long while after he told me about Finn. Dougal drank pretty steadily, looking out over the water, his eyes searching for something, as if he were trying to see back through the years to two swimming figures headed for the distant islands.

Finally I couldn't stand it anymore. The silence seemed to pack my head until I thought it would explode.

"Where did you go, Dougal? After that?" I asked him. "I lost touch with you. We all did."

He seemed to travel back a considerable distance before he replied.

"Went away to school," he said eventually. "Far away. I chose the school I went to because it was far away. I thought I would never see anyone from around here again."

"Did you?"

He smiled oddly. "No, not really." He reached for a bottle, knocked it off the table. We were both pretty drunk at this point.

"But something followed me," Dougal said after he had retrieved the rolling bottle and topped up.

"Something? What do you mean?"

"Something. Little things, at first. Little reminders. Just to let me know I wasn't forgotten, wasn't forgiven. Little things like you would hardly notice." He looked over at me in the dark, squinting through the shadows and the whiskey.

"Like when I went to my dorm room, the first time. My roomie hadn't showed up yet; I was there by myself. When I sat down on my bed, to get a feel for the place, it was wet. I pulled the sheets off: it was soaked through, as if someone had turned a hose on it."

"A practical joke? People do terrible things to freshmen sometimes."

"Maybe. But it was salt water. You could smell it. And not clean salt water. It smelled like the mudflats at low tide, with every dying thing in the universe turning to rotten black mud, bubbling and stinking. It smelled like that.

"I ran out of there.

"But when I went back later, my new roomie was there, unpacking. My bed was dry. I couldn't smell anything.

"That's the way it was. At every important point in my life, every time something was about to happen, to change, to begin, there would be a reminder. I knew it was Finn."

"Finn?"

Dougal nodded. "I knew. Things like that didn't just happen by accident. He was letting me know, telling me it would never be all right.

"When I went to take my bar exam, the first time, for instance. They had those plastic chairs, you remember, with the Formica slab to write on, metal legs. The seats were contoured to fit your ass. But in the seat of my chair there was a pool of water, with a strand of eelgrass floating in it. Eelgrass! I was in the mid-west, miles inland. How did eelgrass get on my chair? How did he know which chair I was going to pick?

"Things like that kept happening. They fucked me up, threw me off my stride. I failed that bar exam, you know. The second time, too. I gave up after that. I knew Finn would never let me pass it.

"Some mornings I'd wake up wet and chilled, as if I'd slept outside all night. The sheets lay on me thick and heavy, like wet sailcloth. Everything smelled of mud and death.

"Then I knew he'd been there, with me, all night."

Dougal's lost his mind, I thought, lost his mind from guilt and drink and sorrow. My own grief woke up and opened up a pit in me. I poured whiskey into it. Maybe losing your mind, I thought, wasn't the worst thing that could happen.

"Little things like that," Dougal went on. "He was always with me. Isn't that what they say? 'I am with you always,'" he laughed derisively.

"But I tried to get on, you know? I kept trying to live my life."

"You can get used to anything," I lied.

"Not this. I began to brace for it. I tried to be ready for it. But it always seemed to take me by surprise.

"I got married at one point," Dougal said, as if he couldn't believe it. "To Marcie, someone I worked with, a great woman. We were pretty happy together at first. I couldn't believe Finn would let it happen. I kept waiting for something to go wrong, for him to show himself, but nothing happened. I actually began to think it was over, that he was satisfied somehow, and would leave me alone now. That by falling in love and getting married I had atoned, or balanced things in some way.

"But I was wrong. He was just waiting, waiting for things to get good for me, so that when he ruined them there would be something to lose, something that would hurt.

"Marcie and I did the whole married thing — car, house in the 'burbs. No kids, thank god, but we talked about having them, made plans.

"Then, after about a year, I began to smell that smell, that evil low-tide reek, everywhere. I tried to scrub it out of the house. I became a fanatic, cleaning everything constantly. My wife thought I'd lost my mind.

"I began to find things, too. Between the pages of a book, there'd be a piece of marsh grass, still damp. And there was sand everywhere all of a sudden, gritty underfoot. Sand in my bed. That smell. We were still in the mid-west, I was determined never to go back to the coast, never to smell salt water again, never see anyone I knew from here. But it all came to me.

"Then, I started hearing him."

"Finn? Did he speak to you? What did he say?"

"Not words. That might have been better. It couldn't have been worse. What I heard was breathing, someone breathing. But not regular breathing — gasping, gurgling, choking — the sounds of someone trying to breathe under water. It got so it was the background music to everything I did.

" 'What are you always listening for?' my wife would ask me. It aggravated her. I never listened to her, she said, right before she left me. She said she wanted to be with someone who was actually there all the time, who wasn't always sitting there wishing he were anywhere else, listening to things no one else could hear.

"There was more to it than that, of course. You fill in the gaps. But the upshot of it was that we got divorced. I left town, bummed around a while. That's when I started drinking, seriously, I mean.

"I stopped hearing the breathing after the divorce. Everything stopped. But I knew he was just waiting for me to settle down, to get happy again. So I kept moving, kept drinking.

"I lived that way for years.

"Then my mom died, down in Florida. Dad had died the year before — I missed the funeral. When I went down there to take care of things, I found out we still had this house — they couldn't bear to sell it, and had rented it out when they moved to Florida. So I came back here to get rid of it.

"That was a mistake. I knew as soon as I walked in the door that I would never leave here again. Finn wanted me here. All of his persecution had this one end, to drive me back to this house.

"And here I was.

"I would sit here and drink, like this, night after night. I would sit here and yell at the water, challenge him.

" 'Come on out, Finn! Here I am! I'm waiting for you!'"

"Then, finally, he came up out of the water and showed himself to me."

I shuddered; in spite of everything Dougal had told me up to now, I wasn't ready for this.

"You saw him?"

Dougal nodded. "I still see him."

"When does this happen?" I asked, "on the anniversary of his death or something?"

"Oh, no." He shook his head. "Every night."

I glanced out the window at the moonlit deck. "Are we waiting for him now? Tonight?"

Dougal nodded. "He should come soon. He comes around this time. Every night. You'll see."

After that first time, Dougal told me, he had kept the curtains drawn. "But I knew he was out there. I could feel him, smell him. Hear him, too, feeling along the glass, looking for a way in."

It was late now, and in the heavy stillness of that summer night you could hear everything: insects chirring, a distant speedboat gunning through the darkness, out of sight across the bay, the waves shushing in on the beach, lapping against the bulkhead.

Then there was a sound that cut across the regular rhythm of the waves, a slopping, wallowing sound. Dougal stopped talking; his face fell apart, as if someone had just cut the strings that held it together. A rotten, low-tide stench filled the room, getting stronger and stronger until I could barely breathe.

Deep in the shadows, I saw something lying on the deck; I was sure it hadn't been there earlier.

Then whatever it was stood up. It stumbled across the deck and pressed itself against the glass.

"He wants to come in," I said, surprised at the sound of my own voice in the still room.

"I won't let him in," Dougal said. "I'll never let him in."

The figure felt its way along the windows until it reached the far railing of the deck. You could hear the soft pat of its hands against the glass, hear the slight creaking of the window-frames as it pressed against them.

It was too dark to see clearly. I got no more than a glimpse of white flesh through the window, flesh too white to be living, and somehow soft, corrupt, swollen.

I saw the palms of its hands against the glass.

It was appalling. I shut my eyes, and shielded them with an open hand, the way you do against sun-glare, to make sure, I guess, that no image of that thing could get through, light or no light.

When I opened my eyes again it had gone, though I thought I could make out a dim form moving slowly towards the end of the dock. Another minute and something clambered down the pilings and slipped into the bay water.

We sat there in silence for a long time. Dougal's breathing was rough and uneven, as if he'd just run up a flight of stairs. I had to consciously keep myself from holding my breath. I didn't want to draw the dense, rotten miasma of salt marsh and mudflat that filled the room into my lungs.

"You saw that?" Dougal asked after a while.

"Yes," I admitted. "I saw it. How do you know it's Finn?"

"It's Finn. No doubt about that."

"What does he want?"

"This is what he wants. He wants me to remember. He doesn't want me to forget. He doesn't want me to have any more happiness, any more life, than he does."

I thought of Dougal, sitting here in the dark, night after night, waiting for his dead brother to visit him.

"Are you afraid? Do you think it's trying to get in to do you harm?"

Dougal shook his ruined head. "Oh no. He can't harm me. He hasn't the power to hurt me, physically. That's why I opened the curtains, to confront him, to show him I'm not afraid of him. That way he can't hurt me."

I looked around the empty house, its shut-up rooms smelling of mildew, stuffy, peeling walls, the whole house falling apart. I looked at Dougal, his body destroyed by alcohol, his life reduced to a nightly vigil of horror and guilt.

"I think I'd better go," I said. Dougal nodded, never taking his eyes off the window, staring out over the bay.

"He won't come back now," Dougal said. "Not tonight."

"Good night, Dougal," I said. I couldn't think of anything else to say.

Dougal just sat there, silently, cradling a bottle in his lap, staring out at the water.

I let myself out.

Dougal had done all the talking, but I had had something I meant to tell him. In the event I never came out with it. That was just as well.

I didn't have the heart to tell him that I had married Jeanne Cary. I thought he had enough to bear without that.

I drove her home the night of the graduation party. She had been planning on getting a ride from Finn, or Dougal. Otherwise I might not have met someone like her. I comforted her. No, it wasn't like that. But when we met again, there was an opening, an emotional contact already made. We started from there. One thing, as they say, led to another. We spent some good years together before I had to watch her die of cancer. Now that was over and I was back where it all started.

I wouldn't have minded seeing her again, but that was not given to me.

Driving back home along the shore road, I stopped just before the road bends away from the water and looked back towards the admiral's house. On the far point I could just make out the looming shape of it, shadows hovering over a spark of yellow light, the small table lamp burning at the back of the room overlooking the deck. I knew now why Dougal hadn't lit the other lamps.

I knew Dougal was still sitting there, drinking and staring out at the bay. I also knew that one night, when he felt he had waited long enough, been punished enough, Dougal would get up and open the door.

I opened all the windows of my car to let the warm summer night air chase out the heavy, rotten stink of low tide mud that had followed me from the admiral's house and filled the car interior to choking. By the time I pulled up in front of my house I couldn't smell it any more.