by Greg James
Tom bit the inside of his mouth, tasting hot, bitter copper.
He did not know what to do.
It was the corpse of his father hanging there, ungainly, uncomely, and so ugly in death. The skin cut open, the flesh hanging out, trailing from gashes and holes. Under the swinging feet wound piles of insides, glistening in the damp, biting air of the trench. Tom swung himself, swaying side to side on his feet, licking at the wound he’d opened inside his mouth, imagining it to be akin to one of the wounds on the body before him. Running his tongue over the little lipless mouth inside his mouth, he felt it speak unto him with the voice of blood. He hawked and spat out a gobbet of gore onto the stones before him, a warm offering.
Tom shook, stepping away from the sight, feeling his heart open up, a black running emptiness silently spilling out of it. He went down on his knees, his fingers sliding through the clotting remains of his old man's vitals, pawing at them, sifting through them, seeming to be seeking an answer there. He raised the dripping slippery pieces to his open lips.
“I must find the way,” he said.
Closing his eyes, he bit down on the cold, dead meat, and from the strangled throat of his dead father came a wet stream of laughter.
The Night Bus was before him, there, out of nowhere, patiently waiting. Its engine chuckling then growling. And Tom fled before it, once again, scrambling out of the trench, into the Gravelands. And it came after him, unhurried, knowing that his path was set, that his thread was full-woven, knowing that it would always have him in the end.
Chapter Fourteen
Tom stood atop the crest of the slope, looking down. He had been alone when he awoke this time. He remembered running, fleeing before something, then the memory was gone, just as Bell was gone. The silence went unbroken as Tom stared down below. Nothing living disturbed it that he could see, the buildings were nestled in the bowl of a great crater around which ran the crest of the slope he had climbed with Bell from the beach. Through a grey mist he stared, the shapes within it resolving slowly, becoming clear, the buildings were old, skeletal and broken, a crumbling collection of bricks, mortar and mouldering timbers. Then he saw it and his breath was torn from his throat, forming a gasp. Standing against the black horizon was St. Paul's cathedral, all in ruins; a shattered shell leaning upon rough hillocks of debris, everything drowned in ashes, lost under a spreading sea of sand, rotting away into billows of grey, white and black mica. All was dead, everyone and everything thoroughly buried in this open grave. Bell must be down there somewhere. Tom had to find him, his officer, in the London that was waiting, dead, below.
Down the slopes of the crater then through the streets, slithering and sliding, the bedraggled, under-fed soldier descended. A shiver went down Tom’s spine. There were shadows on the outer walls of the houses and on their mildewed doors. Tom approached the nearest door, running his fingers through sooty blackness, staring at the rough residue it left clinging to his skin. He cleaned off the grime, not wanting to think about what it might have been before it became carbon and ashes. He looked at the state of the door, the rotting paint-skin revealing a worm-eaten woody flesh underneath, veined with cracks. A gritty wind blew down the streets, stinging his eyes. Tom didn’t like it, the way it was lazy and heavy; it felt like the wind was seeking him out, dogging his footsteps, getting his scent.
The stranded man, all alone here, easy prey.
“No field telephones for you here, boy,” Tom muttered.
His stomach was queasy, the combination of exposure and uncooked fish was not settling well as his body tried to right itself. He could feel it squirming about inside him, he wiped a hand across his brow, the world oozed and flowed around him in a sickening spiral.
Tom was on his knees. He didn’t remember falling down, the ground biting into his patellas. His hands slapping down, knuckles trembling, the heaving started deep down inside him from a place sickness had never reached before. His epiglottis was burning as sea-salty vomit burst its cartilage banks, spilling out into his mouth and pattering onto the ground. Tom’s fingers raked through the steaming muck as another spasm shook him, semi-digested fish bones cut at the tender lining of his throat, stomach juices were hot on the backs of his hands. Tom saw strange colours once more, running, falling, blooming across his vision. He tasted an otherworldly vapour on his bile-flecked lips. His head cleared for a moment, blinking tears away, wiping his tattered sleeves over his lips. Tom got to his feet.
“Jesus, those fish didn’t agree with you, did they, Potter?”
Tom managed a weak smile.
“Hold on, what’s that?”
A bloody radio!
The smile grew in strength and spread across his face. His eyes brightening, he followed the sound, a static sizzling that became louder and louder as he stalked it. The source of the noise was a house on the next corner, the door was ajar. He reached out to open the door, the limp wood collapsing with a rustle at his touch, falling to the ground in a shower of loose splinters. Tom stepped into the gloomy interior. It smelled musty, the electric hiss was coming through a door to the right. The wireless was resting on a table in the middle of a dingy front room, a few rumpled blankets covered the bare boards. The smell of must was stronger, riper. The metal on the two chests containing the apparatus was caked over with rust, the wires connecting to the wooden aerial were a shining tangle of copper and black. The aerial itself was a shattered mess. The equipment was unusable but the radio was still hissing away.
“Plaisirs d’amour ... qu’un jour ... d’amour ... la vie.”
Tom swallowed hard. He shook his head.
It’s picking up gibberish that’s all. You’re making sense out of nonsense, he thought, conjuring the past up out of the air.
The hissing continued and all the words faded out.
All, except for one.
The radio spat it out, again and again and again.
“D’amour ... ”
“D’amour ... ”
“D’amour ... ”
Outside, he heard a scream.
“Bell?”
He ventured back outside. Nothing there. Nothing that could have made such a terrible sound. He remembered a night in the trenches. Down low, chuffing on the last fag from the packet. The cheap fumes of the burning tobacco flooding his lungs and brain. Sweet soporific nectar. It helped him cope with what he could hear out there, in no man’s land, the screams of men, their fury, hopeless, broken sounds made by creatures who knew death as something better than being alive. Whatever had screamed outside, just now, knew that same truth. It made Tom's skin turn cold and he waited a long time before he dared to breathe. He could feel something drawing him, with a sure and steady gravity, along these dilapidated streets, some unseen umbilicus pulling at his guts that was as real as the tides of the sea and the moon.
It is in me, a part of me, he thought, this Vetala.
He trudged past gaunt and empty hovels. Mould was spreading there, puce, across all surfaces. The cold air salted with undercurrents of slaughterhouse foetor and corroding eggs, it was a long time before he met a soul with whom to speak, before he heard that distant bell ringing, so sad and alone, for the first time.
It was coming from St. Paul's.
Where was Bell in all this? Where was anybody?
It was then that he saw her ghost in the fog, heard her voice, a clear-as-water human sound, on a bench she was sitting, singing to herself.
The only colour in a colourless world.
“There’s a long, long trail a-winding,
Into the land of my dreams;
Where the nightingales are singing,
And a white moon beams.”
Bruised, battered, fragile; a sad-eyed burnt-moth creature simply sitting there on that old park bench, waiting for me, a little like her, a little like Bea.
Heart palpitating, Tom went to her.
“There's a long, long night of waiting,
Until my dreams all come true;
Till the day when I'l
l be going down,
That long, long trail with you.”
Her head was bobbing back and forth, rocking in time to the memorised rhyme. She was singing softly, barely pronouncing the words, her cataract eyes turned to stare at Tom.
“Who are you?”
Tom told her.
“I’m not meant to be here,” she said.
Tom asked her why she was here.
“I don’t know. That bell, I heard it. You can hear it too? It called to me, to come here. Made me come here, made me walk a long, long way from where I was meant to be. It’s too cold here.”
Tom asked if he could sit down.
She said yes.
“I was somewhere else,” she said, “where it was warm and summer. There was an echoing grove. I could hear the water in the stream. The animals and the birds in the trees. All the good things. Then, I heard this sound and they all went away. It became dark and I couldn’t find my way. The ground grew hard and all the soft things were gone. I ended up here. I don’t know how. I followed the sound of the bell. It was all that was left.”
He asked her why she listened to the bell, she could have ignored it.
“For the same reason you did.”
What did she mean by that?
“I could not not come. I had to.”
“Do you know who I am?” Tom asked again.
She said that she did, she favoured Tom with a careful, sidelong glance and he returned it, less carefully. She took his hand in hers.
For now, he ignored the summoning sound of the bell.
Night settled over the crater, bringing with it a light rain. Tom took shelter in one of the ruined houses with her. It was small and grubby. The ceiling hung low, sagging in places. It would do. The bell, out there, continued to toll, calling out to him. Knowledge was there, in each toll of the bell. That desolate sound was sending out wave upon wave of it, robed in a bottomless melancholy. It hit him, it hit her, beating them down. Both shook violently, retreating to the uncomfortable bed. They drew limp, lukewarm sheets tightly around their bodies, spinning a sweaty, grease-linen cocoon, curling in on themselves, dead leaves in winter. Tom’s heart hung on heavy tangled ropes in his chest. He slept.
In the morning, she was gone, leaving only a drying, yellow stain to be remembered by. And, outside, the bell tolled for him once more.
Chapter Fifteen
Decades later, Tom got out of bed and left his bedroom to make a black coffee. He then sat down in his armchair to watch the weaving patterns made by the Vetala on the living room windowpane. Making its way from here to there, seeking a way in so that it could complete the cycle and make Tom its own. It spat sizzling gouts of venom onto the glass.
“That the best you can do is it? That all you’ve got, you nasty little sod? Come on then. Don’t look at me like that, do something about it, come in and get me.”
The bottle of scotch was at his side, Tom picked it up by the neck.
“I’ll fucking have you if you fucking get in here.”
It rattled the window once more with a sickled forelimb.
“Fuck off,” Tom snarled, “You’re not getting in. You are not invited!”
It paused and its torso came apart, dissolving, running in a sticky, clotted river down the pane and out of sight. With the steaming, rich cup of coffee on a coaster by his side, he flicked on the television to see what was on there and take his mind off what was out there. Words echoed from the speakers and a picture flickered, coalescing.
“...and now, Double Agent, the block-busting espionage thriller starring Hayden Panettiere as Jaclyn Johnson, based upon the best-selling novel by Sean Sweeney...”
Tom settled down to watch it, to escape from hell for a short while into a better place, a better world where there was hope and justice was seen to be done rather than the one which would one day come to an end that he had witnessed, lost, long ago, somewhere at sea.
*
Through the pale grey worms of the streets he walked, glimpsing shapes in the windows of the houses, navigating by the sound of the bell. This place was profane, part of a future London, a necropolis rising out of a sinking desert of grey sands, the buildings standing black against a blacker sky.
And, it was on the next toll of the bell that they came out of the houses in droves, herding, as one, down the road towards him, barefoot through trash and broken glass, uncaring of the discomfort, heeding the call, to come and worship the Grey Dawn.
These were the leftovers of humanity.
Tom examined their faces as they came close. He saw his own lingering death in every face, the aching in their warty eyes, he could smell the scorch of gunpowder and see blister-burns upon their skin, charred indentations, bites and bullet holes.
And there, in their milling midst, was the Conductor; his blind, pale head running with a gross, gluey moisture. The tatters of his grubby, unwashed uniform fluttering, snapping, as he petted his Bell Punch with intimate tenderness. The Conductor seemed to be the shepherd for the milling crowd, guiding them on, towards Tom. He realised that it was useless to fight them. He was swept along by them, his feet barely touching the ground. They came to the looming structure of St Paul's; a hollow, haunting hive of white and old stone. The smell of the place was strong, dead and vile.
The surge of the crowd came to an end, before the great steps, cracked and collapsing leading inside, into a sounding darkness.
Stiff and brittle fingers set him free.
Tom looked to the Conductor.
The Conductor did not approach him. It stood there, at the head of the horde, stroking and caressing its Bell Punch with its fingers. Tom passed the Conductor, wary eyes on the glistening tip of the needle that was still weeping its terrible tears of nacre. At the top of the shattered steps, Tom stopped and turned around. He was so high here and could see so far, out to the volcanic slime of the seashore resting beyond this shadow of the future, he saw how sluggish and heavy the waters were. The sea groaned deeply, the last sound of a dying world, where earth and water were becoming as one, a tainted chemical-grey gelatine.
This would come to pass.
This would be.
This war was not the war to end all wars, even if the dead were piled up so high that they touched the lowest cloud of the heavens, the bloodshed would not stop. This was the end, the beginning of the end, the end of everything, the cycle of all things slowly closing down. The mountains on the horizon were black teeth grinding against the gristle of Time and Space.
The black teeth that grind out darkness.
Hell's teeth.
The bell fell silent. Unsteady footsteps came up behind him, a hand came to rest on Tom’s shoulder. The fingernails dug into the raw skin, bursting half-a-dozen baby blisters. Tom could hear Bell crying there, right by his ear, yet when he turned, there was no-one standing behind him, there was only the doors of the cathedral, open, waiting.
Bell, he had to find Bell, that was why he was here.
He could not leave Bell to die in this future.
There were voices in there. The acoustics of the domes, all pitted, pale and hollow as the craters of the moon, resonated, making him shiver involuntarily. Baritone was the choir, C sharp minor was the key, Tom remembered it from his father picking out Moonlight Sonata on the piano. He came to the waiting congregation within. They were all dead, slouched, somnambulant, defeated. Their faces were chalk masks, the only colour was the mouldy sepia that spread about their bodies, left unwashed for too long a time. There was a shuffling of ancient cloth on grubby skins.
They knew he was amongst them.
Their voices stopped, silence fell. A figure separated from amongst the mass. His hair falling out in whitening clumps, he wore an adornment about his throat, a once-white band, the glittering grey pebbles of the man’s eyes met Tom's.
The man spoke. “You are welcome amongst us, Thomas Potter.”
Tom's breath caught. “How do you know my name?”
“The shadows speak
of you. We hear you in the song of the Stones.”
“What?”
“Come, Thomas Potter, rot with us as we sing to the dark mark moon. For this earth has become as the moon. We are the altar and the sacrifice. The Grey Dawn will be the cleansing and the black teeth of the Stones will grind us all down into everlasting Darkness. Come, be our communion with our lords, the Vetala!”
So many of the faces about the priest were dark twists, guilt was sewn into the fabric of every visage. The man in the stained collar raised his hands to the enseamed congregation. Their hands were reaching for Tom and, as the crowd scampered around the priest, Tom saw past them, saw what was hidden by the rotting herd.
A rood of roughly-hewn standing stone, unadorned by a saviour's form, with rusting spines jutting from the required places, where wrists and ankles could be driven onto them, and the stone around the spines was dark with blood and old stains.
Chapter Sixteen
The Night Bus went bone-shaking along, taking Tom on his way to a final destination, what it would be he did not know. Raw light came crawling in through the broken windows, picking out sunken cheeks, stark jaw lines, marble eyes. The boarded-over windows on the houses outside had given way to clotted stretches of barbed wire, strung through with dried lengths of a knotty brownish-crimson material. He looked away from it, having a few ideas what that stuff might be, he didn’t fancy having those ideas confirmed. He could feel something gathering in his heart, filtering through his cells, moving through his veins. It brought tears to his eyes, his heart choked on the stuff. He could feel it wending its way through, passing into the left side, tracing the lining of the muscle’s twin chambers, settling into the aorta. His lungs were sore, each breath feeding the scalding coals in them with oxygen, making them burn. His kidneys were tight cold knots and his liver ached abominably.
He took in a long breath, that of a man coming up for air. He remembered the crucifixion in the cathedral, being dragged to the stone rood, kicking, biting, scratching and screaming as the priest intoned a haunting mass to the destitute maniacs.
