The Oeuvre

by Greg James

The Red Baron watched him come, patient, watching, waiting.

  Then, Richtofen banked, sweeping down towards his prey, a howling angel, falling, as thunder, spitting black lightning from the heavens.

  *

  Manfred Richtofen watched the rattling wreck of a Nieuport wheeze its way towards him. He admired the American’s nerve but the man was a fool, even if he had a good plane, a Spad or a DH2, he would still be done for. He had sacrificed his last drops of fuel to joust, his last chance of getting home.

  I gave him that chance, he thought, I shot wide. I warned him that I was here but he did not take heed.

  His opponent’s flying skills were good but this man was no Hawker, nor a Bolecke. To joust in the air, one needed to become objective, to seal away emotions until the fight was done. Feelings blinkered you, made you lose your temper, they could get you killed. With his heart racing but his hands steady, Richtofen lined up the sights of his Spandau machine-gun on the wavering shape of the Nieuport. His enemy’s fusillade was chattering away into the air, harmless, missing him completely. The German Ace fired.

  *

  The Nieuport fell, erupting, trailing swirling streamers of fire.

  Jerry clenched his teeth. He had been an idiot, believing himself to be a daredevil of the skies, equal to Richtofen, thinking that he could take down a pilot with more victories to his name than any man on either side. Baron Richtofen’s machine guns stitched neat lines of bullets through his dreams of glory. Jerry did not even get to catch a last look at the crimson hide of the victor before smoke fogged the air around him. The world below was rushing up to meet him, an infinite grey wall into which he would crash. Jerry wrestled with the plane’s steering.

  I can still live through this, he thought, I will survive.

  Jerry had looked Death square in the face before.

  Stealing coal from the industrial backyards of Columbus, where he grew up. That almost killed him. Jumping onto the trailing tenders of the locomotives to collect the black bounty. One day, he was thrown out onto the tracks. Stunned, he crawled clear. Seconds later, shrieking wheels backed over the space where he had fallen. Another time he did not look before running out into the street. A horse-drawn car hit him, leaving him with cracked teeth and two shining black-eyes to remember it by. He could have been killed, he wasn’t and that was all that was important. That same attitude had gotten him this far.

  Every time he felt a bullet zing by, dodged Archie fire, or pulled off a stupid and suicidal stunt, he smiled within, knowing he had been safe all along, thinking himself to be an Achilles without a heel. Now, he knew how wrong he had been.

  The Nieuport was fighting him as he struggled to right her; it did not want to go on, it had suffered enough, it wanted the torture to end.

  But, if I can just get her nose up, he thought, I can coast her over that wood below, that black wood down there.

  But the plane’s nose refused to lift, there was nothing left of her inner workings. The machinery was a blazing wreck. Burning pieces of her hide tore away, exposing the crumbling charcoal skeleton beneath. The trees of Black Wood raised their ravaged branches, waiting to embrace the sacrifice from the skies. Jerry felt something clutch his heart, closing over it with tenebrous fingers, a nauseating touch tugging at his insides. The wood spread out below, he could not see beyond its boundaries, there was nothing but jagged cruelty and tortured bracken there. Fire spat in Jerry’s face, burning his eyes, setting his hair on fire. He threw his hands out, the flesh and leather on them igniting. His heart boiled over.

  He screamed as the Nieuport crashed into Black Wood. The flaming remains of her wings shearing off. Then, there was silence, no burst of immolation, no flurry of frightened, fleeing birds, only silence.

  After what felt like only a moment, Jerry swam back into the waking world, rising slowly through oblivion’s heavy sea. Wicked shadows stood tall and high, he lurched up, sitting forwards. He was unharmed.

  I can’t be, he thought, I was burning. Christ, my hair was on fire, I could feel myself melting.

  He got to his feet, standing without pain.

  Where was the plane, her wreckage?

  Jerry scratched his head. He was alive. A weak, worn smile played over his lips. He could see the last of twilight through bark-shorn trees, this wood was near to no man’s land, if not in it. He should be able to get back to his side of the lines under the cover of night. Getting to his feet, he began picking his way through the grasping roots of the trees, heading towards the final fading of the day.

  They came out from amongst the trees, a host of haunted air, flickering, uncertain, pale, gloomy candle flames. Drifting, trailing long dissolute creepers from where hands should be, they were headless, they made no sound, they cast no shadows on the ground. He watched them, praying for this purgatorial procession to depart, leave him to feel a little less insane. How long he stood there, mesmerised, he did not know, until slowly, the figures dissipated, becoming mere outlines in the air, departing clouds of carbon and dust. A wake of emptiness sent a violent trembling through Jerry that he was only just able to quell. Swallowing, he licked his dry lips, he could feel a stirring, a writhing, in his guts that made his mouth tang of blood.

  Through a break in the branches, he saw a bright cataract eye, the moon, peering through. It was becoming night and, for a moment, there was a morbid beauty cast upon his charnel house surroundings. The trees were showing their bones, the remaining vestigial flesh of the day sloughing off, revealing the buried white horrors beneath. A luminous frost passed over the scene, a single ensilvered brushstroke, leaving something there to linger. In Jerry’s eyes, it was shining, a freezing light, precious and old, then clouds came over the moon, drowning it in darkness. There was a whispering in his ears that was not the wind. It was inside his head, a crackling in the wet undergrowth crept up on him. Dead things were rising, heaving their moist, mouldy weight out of soft earth, wheezing and breathing through the holes in their guts.

  Jerry thought about running – but Black Wood erupted all around him, drowning him in its bloodthirsty roar.

  Chapter Two

  The light in the drawing room was dim. The candles cast an umbrous glow, they were arranged so as to surround the company with the five points of a pentacle star. Dr Spice sat to the left of Hazel Grey, the medium leading the seance. A striking woman with narrow sculpted cheekbones and bright amethyst eyes. Her hair was an obsidian mane with traceries of grey and white running through it, a shimmering tapestry of secrets. Hazel was the youngest woman there by thirty years, the rest of the gathering were genteel old dears. Dr Spice was the one male in the company, a balding man with pinched saturnine features that were heavy with wrinkles. His skin was washed-out from week upon week spent out of the sun. His eyes were glinting ebony chips. He took Hazel’s hand in his, giving it a familiar squeeze. The rest of the circle linked hands.

  Dr Spice nodded his head. The last murmurings and whispers died away. Hazel’s eyes rolled back. Her mouth hung open. The seance candles burned low, then, went out. A few gasps escaped from the old women. A single strand of saliva ran out over Hazel’s lips, spattering onto the table top.

  A nice touch of the grotesque, thought Dr Spice, good girl.

  The women around the table were muttering amongst themselves. Dr Spice winced, Hazel’s hand now held his in an iron grip. A retching sound came from deep within her throat. Dr Spice blanched as she threw her head back, then violently threw it forwards. Her mouth was open, far too wide. He heard bone cracking in her head. A seething stream of matter arced out of her mouth, landing on the table with a series of wet slaps, it was heavy and white, doughy stuff. It was not his doing, he made Hazel swallow no muslin before the seance. Bubbles of plasma rose in clusters on the filmy surface of the stuff, bursting slowly. Maggots came crawling out onto the table from the settling slurry. The old women screamed but they did not retreat from the table. They did not because they could not. Their joined hands formed a chain that refused t
o break, a binding static was racing its way around the circle, making Dr Spice’s hands sore. Hazel’s lips were sticky with the colourless dregs of her retching, she did not lick her mouth clean.

  “We be the echo!” she screamed.

  This does not bode well, thought Dr Spice.

  Hazel flung her head from side to side. She turned to face Dr Spice, baring her teeth at him, thrusting her lower jaw out. Dr Spice drew away. Her eyes rolled back into place, then went wide, her lips drew back over her gums and she let loose a deafening howl. The dead candles spat back into life but the quality of the light they cast was different, the flames were burning negatives, inversions of natural light. Dr Spice looked around the circle, the old women all wore the same wide-eyed bestial look on their faces as Hazel. They were snuffling, snorting and grunting, some of them were drooling lengths of maggot-ridden mush from their nostrils. The air was close and muggy, the stench of the sty rose from the table surface, clogging the air.

  Dr Spice looked at the table’s surface. He could not see it, it was gone, the table was a table no more. Its surface no longer reflecting the candlelight, the brass sticks in which the wax cylinders were mounted appeared to be suspended in the air, their bases touching on an expanse of nothingness. He could feel the emptiness vibrating, making the air hum, hurting his ears. Then, Dr Spice heard a distinct sound from within it, an echo from a long, long way down.

  The grunting around the table-space became furious and the sound he heard, it was answering them. He tried to lean forward, to see down into the impossible pit, glimpse what might be there. Vertigo sent him rocking back into his chair, ancient fears of falling from the branches of the very highest primeval trees scorched through the fibres of his brain.

  The table was a gateway, a hole burrowed into a bottomless infinity of shifting Grey. His heart thundered in his chest, he caught one breath after another, sweat was collecting heavily on his brow. The guttural chorus of the women continued, they were summoning whatever was down there, talking to it, holding a conversation with it. The answering grunts were becoming louder, causing the shrill squealing of the possessed women to become ever more excitable. Whatever was answering them, its tone was hungry and angry.

  He remembered how Hazel had bared her teeth at him.

  Spice was paralysed, unable to move away from the pit, the circle holding him in his place. This was no longer a harmless game. This was a summoning, something he once considered to be the silliest kind of hokum and balderdash was taking place before his eyes. He feared the ascending manifestation, every single muscle in his body revolting at the prospect of it drawing near. The women’s chorus was quieter, more distant, it seemed.

  His ears rang with echoes. It was closer now, the apparition, below the limits of visibility still but it was closer. He could feel his brain aching, wanting to fail, the faecal odour in the room was making the air near-unbreathable. A fuzz of light went by, playing across his vision, streaming from the candles. Whether it was in his head, truly there or not, he had no idea.

  Then, there was a torrential gushing of silent grey vapour. A thunderhead of filmy fog pouring itself up and out from the table-space, resolving into a tumultuous pillar of dismal colour. The women were gurgling ecstatically in the backs of their throats, rocking spastically in their chairs. Dr Spice blinked sweat from his eyes. His lungs were burning, so tired from breathing the unclean air.

  I must do something, he thought, but he had no idea what to do.

  The dull pillar of fog over the table-space parted, for a moment, before his eyes and he glimpsed what was lurking within. Doughy excreta drooled from its raw, decay-gnawed nostrils. A broken tusk, caked in bilious ichor, thrust out of the gathered gloom. Maggots and grubs were spilling in gristled tides from its perpetually grinding mouth. A single, baleful eye, burned in a puckered knot of caustic flesh. It opened its jaws and let out a howl. A terrible wet roaring that swept into him, making his guts heave and twist from the assault of sour abyssal air. He tasted blood running into his mouth and nostrils. He could feel his fingers tightening as the women kept him in his place.

  I am to be sacrificed to this thing, he thought, what do I do now? Would he see Virginia and Daniel again, his wife and son? Would they be waiting for him on the other side? If the other side was where he would go to after this malignant horror finished chewing his bones into marrow and pulp.

  Somehow, he doubted it. Spice closed his eyes, thinking hard, remembering. There was a hush, a sudden quiet settling all around. A great pulse shook the room. Dr Spice was jolted to his feet, his hands tore free from the grip of the circle. The scalding sickly eye struck out at him, a palpable hit, winding him, sending him stumbling backwards, falling, taking his chair down with him, but Dr Spice climbed back to his feet, returning the glare of the eye this time. Possessed, eyes open, he thrust out a hand, pointing at the monster in the cloud, his fingers going rigid with unspoken accusation. His dried-out tongue moved fast, uttering the incantation that had been seeded in his brain by some haunted hand.

  “Oriel Seraphim! Eo Potesta! Zati Zata! Galatim Galatah!”

  The words of Sussamma, supposedly ancient, purported to crack open Time, Space and change them irrevocably. He had thought the incantation to be an occultnik joke, until now. The apparition before him testified to the truth of everything he had exploited up to this hour.

  There was urgency in his voice, spittle flew as he wove the words and cast the spell. He knew this must be done, the words must be spoken, whatever the consequences might be. Pain shot along his outstretched arm, dashing out from his fingers, lancing the bubonic cloud and that which dwelt within, striking it dead in its burning eye.

  It let out an agonised roar. The circle’s threatening grunts stopped. The Grey shattered, its sour fog receding. A dusty permafrost fell from out of nowhere. Time ceased to pass. Dr Spice could hear every heart in the room freezing over, caught, stilled at mid-beat. Life’s many drums made silent. Radiance began to filter through the room. Motes of pure luminosity danced before Dr Spice’s eyes, reminding him of spring mornings, summer afternoons, the shades of autumn and the feeling of warm eiderdown. The presence, disintegrated, huddling into its polluting pillar, it was swallowed back down into the table, uttering one last lonesome bellow as it went. The surface of the table reappeared, no trace of doughy ectoplasm was left, no maggots remained. The candle flames flickered back to normal. Plain yellow arrowheads dancing up from their wicks. Time began to flow once more. The women blinked, muzzy-headed.

  Hazel looked around, saw Dr Spice on his feet, away from the table.

  “Dr Spice? What ‘appened? You alright?”

  He rubbed his arm. He shook his head, “No, I’m not alright. You don’t remember what happened?”

  Hazel shook her head, her eyes clear and true. The old women were looking around, chattering amongst themselves, similarly bemused, the electricity of a past tension was in the air. A cataclysm had come and gone but no-one, save for himself, had witnessed it. Dr Spice placed his chair back on its legs.

  He sank gratefully into it, hanging his head.

  Afterwards, the seance broke up. The old women were dissatisfied, feeling they had been swindled. They would be telling their friends about the debacle. Under normal circumstances, Dr Spice would have cared about their threats but not this time. He said barely a word to Hazel as he let her out. She had taken off the long black wig and taken out the tinted scleral lens from her eyes. Her plain brown irises matched her frizzy hair, making her a far less exotic creature out of costume.

  “Same time next week, Dr Spice?”

  “Thank you, Hazel. I’ll ... huhm ... I’ll let you know.”

  She held her hand out, fingers twitching.

  “Ah yes, of course. My apologies.”

  He placed her cut from the proceedings into her palm, the notes crinkling like old skin as she folded and tucked them away.

  “Cheers, guv. Let me know what the set-up’s going to be like for next tim
e.”

  “I will do. Safe journey home, my dear.”

  She pecked him on the cheek and left.

  Spice closed the door behind her. The lights burned low and black boards were pressed up against the insides of the windows, creating the feeling of being enclosed within a dark and warming womb. He could hear the storm-sounds of the zeppelin raid but it was not enough to distract him.

  In the cellar, he went to his library of occult tomes and scrolls, moving his hands over it as if divining for what he sought. He snatched one of the volumes out. It was thin, bound in a tatty powder-blue jacket, one of the nameless books he’d picked up over the last few years in bric-a-brac sales. Dr Spice flicked to halfway through. As he read what was on the page the colour washed from his face.

  ‘Twas a bleak and blighted earth of low-lying hills and deserted hollows I did behold. Without rivers. Without seas. A starless sky crushing down upon me, underlined by clouds that were as dirty as unwashed cloth. No life was there to be seen, naught to be heard. This was the heart of the Grey and there stand the Stones, flawless obelisks of jet and obsidian, chitinous growths sprouting from the loose topsoil. So many. Without number. So silent. Black teeth of the gravelands and lords of the Vetala. There will be many more of them, never will there be any less. Lustre is given to their cold black dimensions by the fear, pain and blood the Vetala harvest from us. To what egregious end these plaintive resources go, I do not know, I could not perceive this truth. But I know that when the all and everything has dried down to its last bones, the Stones will sigh and go quiet.

  Perhaps then, they will then sleep and have dreams.

  They groan in tune with our universe and their ululations sang to my very soul, making it both sick and ecstatic. Oh, to be inside the Stones, to be one with them, to know nothing but infinities of distance, desolation and loss. For each Stone is a tenebrous treasure house, shining with solitary secrets, insect-plagued visions and deliciously bitter horrors. Their audient depths promised me such beautiful and boundless nightmares. To exist thus, breathless and senseless, unbound from the sufferings of skin and bone. To be Vetala, one of their banshee ariels and ride the dead winds created by whatever dreams may come.