The Oeuvre

by Greg James

  There was a table. It wasn't much but it was better than nothing. They didn't seem all that limber and, with their faces in that state, they must be blind. He doubted if they could hear or smell much. Touch and vibration would be how they would find him. As long as he stayed still, he could have a chance. He knelt down under the table, clasping his hands over his head. He caught his breath as he heard rotten feet slopping onto the cellar floor. They dragged across the stone surface, leaving a glistening excremental trail. Wilson gritted his teeth as his stomach rebelled against the smell coming from the nightmare bulk invading the cellar's space.

  It was lurching around trying to find him. Tins and boxes toppled to the floor with a series of clatters and bangs. The shape knocked everything flying, searching for its prey. He heard a frustrated grunting escape from the thing. It bellowed, striking a wasted fist on the table top.

  The footsteps stopped. Wilson stopped breathing. Had it heard him? Did it know he was under the table?

  He froze.

  Waiting for the table to be swept away. Waiting for those hands to seize at him. The footsteps slopped over to the cellar steps. He held his breath. He listened. The footsteps kept going, receding further and further away.

  After quiet returned to the cellar, Wilson squeezed out from under the table. Breathing in measured gasps, he crept up the steps to the room above. The door hung loose on its frame. A huge hole smashed through it. He peered round the corner of the frame. The room was empty. The door to the house was open and there was no movement or sound outside, just the rattling of the rain. Wilson sank down onto the floor, his breathing becoming free and easy.

  They were gone, like a passing storm.

  Running for so long, so hard, Wilson felt exhaustion wash over him, a visceral wave of static. This time, he let it take him.

  Letting himself fall and sleep.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The stars were long dead here but a little of their light remained. The sky was funereal, a glimmering morgue, except it was not a sky. Wilson tried to get to his feet but there was nothing to stand on. Nothing was there but shadows gathering. They caught at him. Snatching him down, dragging him into unspeakable undercurrents. It was not water but it behaved so, closing over his head, snuffing out the lingering starlight, their faint, shining memory, old, fading photographs. The undercurrents became fierce, tearing at him. He beat his arms back and forth against it, striving to swim upwards, his muscles aching, straining. It was no use. He continued on downwards. A long way down. He held his breath. He knew that he was not drowning. He knew that this stuff was not water. But the similarities were hard to ignore. He was also sure that, if he saw all of this as it truly was, his mind would snap and he would be done for.

  He felt a subtle change in the texture of things. A spreading expanse below as smooth as glass, whereas the stuff dragging him down to it was an amniotic treacle. He was looking out over the edge of Forever. Out there was Outside. Illimitable absence. That was where he was going, falling towards.

  For a moment, Wilson surrendered.

  He was so tired of fighting. He wanted this all over and done with. The barrier was pulsating. Entrancing Wilson as he came rushing down at it, driven by the hating dark. He braced himself for extinction.

  Wilson's boot soles hit the membrane.

  Seconds, minutes or hours passed. He did not know how long. But he was still there. He had not passed through. Squinting in the dimness, he could see the membrane. Twisting and buckling. A curious warmth enveloped him up to the waist. He had been driven into the membrane but the membrane was holding. Stretching, bending around him. Unbroken. The atmosphere of the depths became fearsome. Hitting him hard. Pounding upon his form but it could not drive him through, banish him to oblivion.

  The membrane, whatever it was, would not yield.

  For the first time in ages, a genuine smile spread across Wilson's face. He felt the membrane’s embrace ease, slowly pressing him back out. Then, with elemental force, he went rushing upwards. The seething sea ebbing away, thinning into flux. Black waves burst open over him.

  He was out.

  He let out a roar that was heard by the dead stars.

  *

  The night sky was sparkling with stars when Wilson came to. For a moment, he felt stiff, dead and cold, could not see the walls and ceiling of the farmhouse. He felt the heavy sucking of mud on his limbs, heard a rustling and shuffling of feathers, a clicking of beaks and claws in the night. The black birds waiting in the trees, growing restless, starving. Then it was gone, a passing thought. He could again see the ceiling, the walls and the stars shining through the glassless windows.

  He heard something outside.

  Getting to his feet, he padded over to the door, pushing it open. The scratching tore through his mind. Closing his eyes, he saw the rats scrabbling inside his skull, working themselves into a blood-frenzy. Wilson clasped his head in his hands. He opened his eyes and stared out into the stillness. There were figures out there, rocking and swaying on their feet around a form he knew all too well. He could see those terrible eyes shining in their sockets. Spattered and smeared with bodily fluids, he could make out the shapes that had pursued him from no man's land to the hospital and back again. Gurgling, they slapped their ragged lips together as Wilson came out into the open.

  He shuddered but knew he had to go through with this. This was the end, whatever came of it. He would run no more. Wilson took one shaking step after another out of the house, towards the gross horde. The thing from the crypt leered at him. It raised a finger, gesturing. The words it spoke were a whisper, he heard them in Smithy's voice.

  “Remember the truth, boy.”

  “No.”

  “Remember everything.”

  Wilson screwed his eyes shut, trying to force the memory down. It rose instead, a vengeful kraken, a long-buried demon of the deep. The waters of memory erupted. The monster broke loose, and Reginald Wilson remembered as his finger sank into burnt, ravaged flesh. The earth was steaming around him, opaque with rivulets of hot petrol. They were dead. Every one of them, dead. The fire-breathing phantoms had come and gone, walking in and out of the inferno. Wilson did not know how he had survived. Luck was a commodity in short supply at the Front. Yet he had just had some. A bucketload. I should feel great, he thought to himself, I survived. I lived.

  But he did not.

  He was surrounded by twisted mangles of cooked meat and cindered bone. They had once been men. Some had swapped smokes with him. Others once passed him nips of black market rum. They were all gone. Roasted to death.

  There was a cry off to his left. Wilson got to his feet and went to the body he could see moving. It was hunched over, gurgling to itself.

  One of them was alive.

  Exaltation ran through him. He was not alone out here with the dead. He did not recognise the man but who would after the punishment that the fire dealt out?

  His skin was blistered, bleeding, burnt scaly in places. His uniform hung in tatters, clinging to his back. Wilson reached out a tentative hand, touching the man. The man yelped and Wilson jumped back. Uncurling, the man raised his head and his eyes met Wilson. The man was younger than Wilson. The man was a boy. Something wet and red hung from his charred lips, torn from one of the dead. His teeth were grinding at it, insistently. The sticky scarlet strip disappeared with a slurp. A crackling wet croak of a voice came from the burned boy's throat.

  “Y'want to try some? S'good.”

  Wilson did not understand. The boy opened his fingers. There was meat there, in his palm. Lots of it. He offered it to Wilson.

  “First cooked meat in months. Heh.”

  The boy was one of the smiling insane. Dead inside. Wilson smiled back to him all the same. He took the meat. His stomach was rumbling. He was hungry, had been for days. He raised it to his lips. He took a bite. He savoured the taste of the meat. It was bloody and burnt but it was meat all the same. It was familiar in flavour too. He could not place
it. The boy reached up with one hand, hooking a finger and thumb into the moist flesh underneath his own eye socket. Wilson watched the boy pull at it, tearing off a bleeding length of meat from his own face, all the way down to the chin. Ripping the end of the charred matter free, the boy popped it between his lips, sucking it all in with another slurp. Wilson gagged, swallowing the flesh in his mouth, inadvertently.

  He looked into the boy's eyes.

  They were his eyes.

  The boy was who he had once been, back then, after the night of the fire. Starving, feasting on his chums, the leftovers of their bodies, just to survive, until rescue came. All alone with the wet red horror of what he was doing to stay alive. All that time, all those mouthfuls of cold, charred, mouldering meat. Something was lost to him then, because something awful had been done. Inside, shades swarmed, gathering themselves, rolling in numinous waves through his brain, drowning him, veiling his past with a shadow of darkness. Submerging the horror of what he had done in the blackest stuff of all. Concealing the creature he became after the night of the fire, until Wilson screamed, shaking his head, clawing at his eyes, trying to reach inside his head and tear out the memory. His stomach buckled. He bent over, retching violently. He looked up at the thing from the crypt.

  “Who are you? How the fuck did you get inside my head?”

  Its leer broke, it sighed.

  Wilson pressed a hand to his brow. There was that migraine again, lancing through his brain. The taunting expression of amusement was there on its face. The one that haunted the pathways of his brain. His migraine spread out into a web of agony. Hot livid lines were pulsing underneath the dome of his skull as more memories burst free like when he left Brookes to find Smithy.

  Wandering deep into the crypt, he found the coffin. He saw the silver blade jutting out of the body and admired the winking emeralds inset in the bronze hilt. A pretty little souvenir to take home. The body the blade had violated was nothing to admire. It was gaunt, yellowish and pale. The skin was stretched taut across ribcage and pelvis, cartilage at the elbows and knees poked through a filmy epidermis. Its fingernails were long, crusty with brownish muck. The droppings of rats and parasites coated it. Putrefied genitals hung between wasted thighs. Its bony arms were clasped about the wizened torso, as if it were hugging itself for protection against the sour atmosphere of the crypt. Its lips were drawn back over rancid gums, revealing ratty teeth, which rested over the lower lip.

  Not paying a second thought to his actions, Wilson jerked the silver blade free.

  The body shook, sucking in air, greedily. Coarse whispery breaths escaped from the jagged mouth. It looked too frail to do so but it began to move. The body arched its back, heaving in a terrible asthmatic breath.

  It shot upright, sitting up in the coffin, turning its head towards Wilson.

  Its infernal eyes held him, freezing him where he was. He gulped at the air, shivering on the spot. The blade dropped from his hands, clattering away. Clawed hands reached out, fastening around his shoulders and the thing puppet-walked him closer to it. He watched as it opened its maw into a hole edged with decaying fangs, discoloured saliva sliding from them.

  It clamped down on his throat, stabbing deep, its fangs sinking in. He trembled as he felt them burrowing into his flesh, holding on tight, feverishly sucking at him, so hungry.

  As it fed, the paralysing gaze was broken. His will became his own again. He clenched and unclenched his fists. He tore himself free with a wordless shout. He clasped a hand to his neck, gingerly fingering the ragged wound. The beast raised its face to him, gurgling, lapping the blood from its lips with a grey snake of a tongue. A tremor shook through it. There was another terrible asthmatic gasp and it flopped down, hanging over the edge of the casket, a puppet abandoned, its strings cut.

  Holding a hand to his neck, Wilson stroked the sticky bites it had made, hissing through his teeth as he did so. Inspecting his fingertips, he saw beads of something laced with the blood. Viscous, black and yellow. He looked back at the lifeless form.

  What the fuck was that thing?

  Wilson looked into its face – the face before him – knowing what he would see now; his own face. It had always been him. Before he was him, it had been him. Now, all was lost but his name.

  The black of its eyes ebbed away, fading to grey. Wilson looked away from it, his eyes coming to rest on the crowd of quivering shapes around him. He stepped towards the grotesque creatures. He looked into their faces and he recognised them. Each one of them was a mangle, a mirror, flesh as fragments, pitiable pieces. Little things gave the truth away. An eyebrow here, a facial tick there, vestigial mockeries of fingers and toes that he knew. An eye, his eye, embryonic and filmy, blinked at him.

  Wilson reached out a shaking hand, touching them. The creatures quivered for a few moments, moaning and wheezing. Then, they crumpled to the ground. Their enseamed flesh softly undulating, collapsing. Wilson cried out, wounded. Then, one by one, the fallen fleshy sacs burst open and black rats came boiling out, pouring, shrieking, streaking away into the stygian depths of the surrounding trees.

  Wilson fell to his knees, sobbing, clawing at the earth.

  …we are such stuff as nightmares are made of…

  He got to his feet, shaking. None of this made sense. His mind was splitting into bits. He could feel the hot, loose fragments moving freely inside his head. Wilson wrung his head in his hands. There were too many pieces. None of them were fitting.

  He had forgotten who he was. The night of the fire had burnt it all away. Wilson tried to see further back, to glimpse more of who he had been, before the crypt, before the rats and the dark.

  There was nothing.

  All he could see were shadows gathering. So much was gone. So much lost to him.

  “What do I do?”

  A voice answered him, familiar and far away.

  …You do the right thing, Reg. That's what…

  Wilson was alone now in the clearing at the heart of Black Wood. The thing from the crypt was gone. He knew what he had to do. He went back into the farmhouse, down into the cellar and found the cellar was no more. Wilson was standing in the crypt. Ahead of him was the tunnel and, by the wall, rested his long-lost rifle. The bayonet was mounted, ready.

  …You're gonna need this, boy…

  On the floor was the same skull that frightened him when he first entered the crypt. Wilson kicked it away. He picked up his rifle. He knew where he had to go. What he had to do. The lightless tunnel was there, waiting to consume him with its shadows.

  Inside, the gloom became intense, almost a glow. The ground was sloping beneath him where it became one with the Grey. It clung to him, like cobwebs, trailing from his limbs in streams. The definition of the tunnel faded away, not coming to an end, retreating away, evaporating, disintegrating. The Grey became thicker, swallowing all and everything. Wilson felt the slope come to an end. Shivers passed through him as a rarefied electricity. The temperature down here made his head hurt and his eyes burn. His tongue felt heavy, embalmed by bitumen and bitter mineral salts. Wiping clots of a cloying frosty substance from his eyes, he went further in.

  Space opened out around him into an unearthly cathedral, stalactites depending from above as long nacreous tears, covered in dripping layers of clear oily residue. Grottoes and shadow-obscured hollows created numerous echoes, giving sonorous voice to the most minute of disturbances.

  Nothing breathed. Nothing lived. The only stirring came from a whispering in the tainted air, a rich rank draught wafting out from adjoining networks of catacombs that went even deeper into the bowels of the Grey. The surface underneath Wilson was slippery and soft. Giving, crackling, sometimes hissing. The dead were everywhere, squelching under his feet. Not substitutes for duckboards here, they were the stuff and hideous substance of the ground. Every one of them having fallen through to this place from the killing grounds of Black Wood. Wilson picked his way through the grisly heaving remains. Walking across the slick backs o
f the lifeless, he could feel the weight of the quiet settling on him. The pressure in the freezing air. The cavern, awesome in its scale, stretched on before him into a distance where there was a tinged mist hanging as a veil. Drawing nearer to it. Wilson glimpsed something shuddering there, hidden within. It was not human, unfamiliar, nothing he knew. It was big, gigantic. Seeming to hover, to hang in the air.

  Wilson felt a chill sweat peppering his brow as he approached. The vile air flowing around the shape in the mist was thick, heady and close. Wilson could feel its deadness. He was conscious of each step he took. He heard, with unusual clarity, the sucking sound of his boots as they pushed into failing flesh and then drew back out.

  He did not want to go on. He could feel it watching him. It was the rats, the wolf and the thing from the crypt. Nestled within the Grey, it had been waiting for him. A nightmare that lived and breathed and rooted about in the deep, hidden pits of a man's mind, feeding on what it found buried there.

  The rifle shook in his hand. He listened to the rats scratching inside his skull. It was strange how he had almost become used to the raking and scraping of their claws. The shrouded shape was before him. Bulbous and distended, it hung in the air. Rippling, unsteady, abortive in its breathing. Wilson thought that he could see a light emanating from it. A tumour-white light that burned. Wilson wanted the veil of mist to stay there. More than anything else in the world. More than anything he had ever wished for, he wanted that veil not to part. He did not want to see what was on the other side. He did not want to see it but he had to. He raised his rifle. He slashed the bayonet blade into the veil.

  He split it open – and there it was, suspended in a corrupt, disintegrating womb. Deathless and wormy. Obsidian eyes, poison moons, blazing with nocturnal brilliance from its mildewed and crabby underside. Tangled vegetative fronds came weaving out from the chitinous matter of its layered hide. Reaching to the high vaulted ceiling of the cavern, weaving in with the hoary roots of Black Wood. Drinking the sustenance of blood and suffering from its noxious soil.