by Greg James
Louise stopped at the wired glass windows set into the doors. She scraped away the reptile skin of grime from the glass, cupped her hands and stared inside; squinting into gloomy recesses overgrown with the ashen skeletons of chairs, desks and workbenches. Here there was stillness, emptiness, and little more.
It was then she saw there was a shadow on the wall beside her.
“Look at that.”
Clifton came over, running his eyes and then his fingers over it. She did the same, the texture was soot and ashes but its outlines were too defined, not even slightly degraded by time. The figure of a man with long, long arms and long, thin fingers.
“Bastard.”
“What?”
“He’s done this, can of spray-paint, something to freak me out,” Clifton said. “Remind me of what he did to Felicity. I’m going to have him.”
As Clifton and Louise picked their way through the detritus of classroom after classroom, there was a feeling of static in the air that was almost audible when they were close to one another. Their hands would touch, their bodies would brush close enough, but there was no lightness or gentleness to this invocative dance. It was about need in the most horrible way. Studs of sweat stood out on his brow and her skin was washing from white to pale. He was aching inside with feelings unnamed that scratched, kicked and writhed, making his exploration turn to decimation as he slammed, crashed, and smashed at whatever was to hand, to say this place still somehow belonged to him. The thing behind the door watched him from the shadows. It saw as he began to realise it no longer did.
*
Why am I doing this? Why is this happening? I don’t know, there’s a black blur, a dark smudge smeared over things but I know there was pain, abuse, bright trauma, and neglect. Something went very wrong here all those years ago when the hormones were flowing for the first time, and the sedentary masks of adulthood were forming, hardening, setting fast over our young faces. Something I cannot remember and cannot forget.
*
They left by the same way they came. There was nothing and no-one in the Science block. It was dead and empty space.
“The shadow’s gone,” said Louise.
Clifton looked and saw she was right, “Like I said, he’s trying to fuck with me.”
“And the doors in here … ”
“What?”
“The doors, well, they’re all closed. They shouldn’t be.”
Clifton looked at her.
“This place has been abandoned since the fire. Tramps and travellers have dossed down in here, yeah?”
He was still looking at her.
“So, some of the doors should be open, they should have been disturbed. Some of them should have fallen in.”
“Right.”
“So, the doors should be open but they’re not.”
“So?”
“I think they’re keeping something in, holding something back.”
Somewhere behind them, a door opened.
Louise cried out, snatching at Clifton’s arm; something she didn’t want to do but the reaction was over before she realised she was touching him. She was gesturing at the wall ahead, back towards the main corridor. Clifton’s pupils dilated a fraction as he took in what he was seeing. There was the shadow. It had not been there when they first passed this way but there it was, smeared onto the wall as if it had always been there.
Clifton shook his head, shaking Louise’s hand away. She stood, shaking, clutching at herself. Neither said anything, not knowing what this meant, how to handle it, what to do or feel. He walked up to the shadow on the wall, and lifted his hand to wipe it away in a gesture of defiance.
His hand disappeared into the shadow.
It was his turn to cry out, and the sound quickly rose to a shriek as he jerked hard on his ingested arm, trying to tear it free from the sucking black space that was rippling and trembling where wall should have been. Louise felt her stomach turn over and cramp at the sight. His eyes rose and met hers; tears were there, running down a face that did not weep, never ever cried. He was in pain. She heard him speak in a voice that was small, soft and afraid; that of the child he had once been, many years ago, perhaps.
“Help me ... Louise ... please ... ”
Then, it happened – not by wind blowing but by such a great and sudden force being exerted that it felt like she was caught in the path of a storm; a colossal dragging, almost gravitational, and Louise knew the source of it was the shadow on the wall and that the Old School, or whatever was in it, put it there, just for them.
She felt the muscles in her calves bunching, the ground was inclining so it seemed, becoming steeper, increasing towards a sheer angle. Sweat peppered her brow and she leaned into the ascent, shifting her centre of gravity right over, heaving away from Clifton and the shadow with all her body weight.
Louise saw his face; how it changed when he saw she was leaving him to his fate. She watched Clifton slither about on his feet, unwieldy, clumsy, too heavy. Crying out, he wheeled his free arm through the air to steady himself. There was a sound too – not coming from him or from her – a medley of tortured vocal fragments echoing and reverberating from every direction.
She could see Clifton’s eyes, plaintive, and the nervous working of his throat. He made one last scramble at the floor with his feet, then he was falling to his knees but he never completed the fall. Fierce winds bit at her through her clothes as she watched Clifton fall as from a distance into darkness. His eyes met hers for the briefest of moments, then he was gone – as was the shadow on the wall.
Louise went flying into the door of the Science block, where she banged her head hard enough to make her eardrums and skull sing a single high note of pain. Her knees gave out when she tried to stand. Dirt crumbled beneath her as she slumped down into it, tears prickled at her eyes as she realised Clifton had been both right and wrong. There was no ghost here, but it was no man either.
It was something else – something darker, and worse than she could ever have imagined.
*
He spoke to the ashes with words and blood. The dead should stay dead. Stilled matter should remain still. Dead was dead, and dead was better, but still – he had work to do.
*
The computer rooms upstairs were as filthy as the rest of the Old School. Here, patient rows of battered Amiga computers sat before Jenna as she entered. Their screens were coated with a thick layer of grime that turned the glass brown.
Jenna bent over one of the defunct machines, curious, not deigning to sit on the cracked chair before it. She pressed the grey square of the power switch. There was a dull click that sounded far too loud in the quiet, enclosed space. Then there was a faint but audible electric hum from the computer. Its LEDs were steadily blinking into life. Jenna stepped back, wiping dust from her hands, breathing hard. It should be dead. It shouldn’t be working. Then, with a light whine, the computer died and the school’s undisturbed atmosphere returned. She went back to the computer; leaned over it, peered into the slits atop the monitor. She saw nothing but blackness in there; no lights, no colour, nothing strange or suspicious. A voice inside her said, ‘no, don’t do it, not again.’
Jenna did not listen to the voice. She pressed the power switch home a second time and the computer began to hum steadily. The lights flickered and she waited patiently for them to go out, which they did. Then, as before, the computer whined and died.
There were other classrooms to explore if she was going to find who she was looking for. She needed to go through all of them. His spoor was in the air. This was his territory; all of it, marked and pissed on. The hate was palpable, near-tangible. She was a trespasser here. Trespassing for too long was not something she wanted to do. She hoped they would all know when was the right time to leave. The thing behind the door had been waiting a long time and now the door, for him, was finally open, giving him what he wanted; them, me, us.
We should have stayed away, let our lives fall apart somewhere else, she
thought, but the tugging, my child, what’s left of it, him, her – it wouldn’t let me.
“There must be something here.”
Behind Jenna, there was a click. The same as a door might make when it opens.
She didn’t move as it continued
Clickclick-click-clickclickclickclick ...
She did not want to turn around though she could feel pressure mounting, a pair of unseen and intangible hands taking her roughly by the shoulders. Slowly, she was being turned to see all of the old computers; useless, dusty and rusted, with their dead screens stuttering out a dim light.
Jenna saw glowing movement, brief but there, foetal data-ghosts shifting behind the curved glass of the monitors; intimately crawling about in antenatal ways, reforming, reshaping, creating a sensation in her that went from one vertebrae to another, tracing out numerous freezing lines along her spine. She wanted to look away but the imagined hands on her shoulders held her where she was – at its mercy. Glowing in utero images kept on fluxing, flowing and writhing before her eyes. Looking at them hurt, those scanned yellow and black images of lost unborn. There was no substance there just a burning cold fusion of the dead. It had no face and no eyes but it could see and it was behind those screens, looking out at her through her dead child.
It began to swell, grow, and mould itself as raw stuff to the underside of each screen; pushing at the glass, breaking on through, making warning cracks. The hands on her shoulders went tight, clenching down hard, not allowing her to move as the computers wept blood-laced trails of amniotic fluid.
The glass of every screen shattered, bursting open with a series of dull bangs, and out came streams of blood and ashes, which were tangled and clotted with newborn hair, nascent globules that might have grown to be eyes, jellied clumps of bone, cartilage flux and clusters of under-formed teeth.
... my child, what’s left of it ...
Jenna’s hands went to her face and she felt tears there. She could hear the silence with voices inside amidst the hurt and the pain. Her teeth and tongue tasted sour and her stomach ached. She saw Clifton and Louise for a moment, illumined and crucified before her mind’s eye.
Golgotha burned black and a torn foetus twitched and bled on the rust-red nails driven into the flaking wood of a great cross. Blind, milk-white eyes flickered open, staring hard at her as a toothless mouth screamed, “Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani!”
Jenna was running, forsaking her child and leaving the spreading lake of blood and ashes behind. Through the doors she went and she came out into another place entirely.
*
The darkness rages and our lives are mere haemorrhage smeared across it, dead flies on death’s windscreen. Let me wipe you clean. Let me scrape it all away. Reveal you to yourself and the world beyond.
*
Louise remembered being so alone, and that was why she came when Clifton called, and now she was leaving alone. She was so scared. She would get help for Clifton, send the police in here like they should have done in the first place. There was the door; the way out. There were lines of light creeping around its frame. It must be almost morning.
She opened the door, ran through, and found herself running through a place of angles, light, and uneven shade. Paintings hung on livid walls like plasters stretched over patches of ripe gangrene. The canvases showed stark, mathematical grids highlighted with turquoise stains, amethyst scars, raw reds and stark whites. Within each crucible, there dwelled a variety of unstill shapes. Forms which were rendered in excremental smears of pink, brown and yellow. The base forms were human but what was being done to them was not. The pictures were dirty windows looking in on the fate of unwashed souls. She saw faces betraying perversity. Masks of the fallen, cast in mockeries of holy light. She knew them all; those faces, those figures, those forms, those positions. For they were all her, her father, and the ways he loved her. Barry was there too - broken and shattered, a bloodied puppet lying at the bottom of the stairs. Pieces of him scattered everywhere, bleeding away to nothing.
Tears crept out from her eyes.
Did he do it to him too?
To Barry too?
The things he did to me.
And she remembered the black ghost at the top of the stairs - the question in its eyes?
... did he fall or was he pushed? ...
... or did Barry do it all by himself? ...
Learn to crawl, learn to walk, learn to run, learn to fall.
... did the man on the stairs tell Barry what it was like to live with such pain ... dead day after dead day ... life hurting ... feeling so long ... did it tell him that dead was better ... that life was the blight rather than death ... a white darkness ... nothing more ...
She reached out a hand to her boy’s face, dead and screaming, painted into one of the canvases. There were bestial inquisitors occupying the paintings, standing over the twisted and buggered forms of her family. Dashes of crimson and obsidian were all that was used to illustrate them. They were daguerreotypes; spider-like, with hooks and scissors in their spindly hands as they administered to the needs of the grid-like chambers, the begging abstract faces, bleeding eyes, macerated flesh and bone. Horror heaped upon horror until her brain grew numb with the need for release from this place, but there was none. This was Life. This was the Meathook Gallery.
She could see the oil paint becoming wet, starting to run. Clotted blood from old wounds set free. The depicted patterns were cracking, crumbling as the pictures remade themselves. Figures flowing from one position to another. The hooks and scissors in constant motion. She could hear the harsh sounds they made. Loose flakes of sediment fell. Created hides were moistening with tears and blood. Drawing themselves out from the edges of the paintings, cutting at the air with the rusted crusts of their scissor blades, peeling themselves free, setting foot upon the ground. They looked at her, those hateful inquisitors. They had her son’s eyes – bright and accusing.
She screamed and ran.
They came after her; bounding and shrieking, moving in blackly fluid motion, rattling scabrous sabres out of expressionistic hilts. Their barbed extrusions whipped from wall to wall. She heard sobs and cries too, from those still bound in enamel and oil. Her own sobbing, Barry’s cries, and her father’s knowing laughter. Those flayed things on canvas could not form words. Speech was a lost thing to them. They could only howl and howl, turning the red tunnel of the Meathook Gallery into a deafening throat, haemorrhaging agony, hatred, loathing, want and need.
Louise closed her eyes to all of it, wishing she could close her ears too. The air parted and sang as the flails and whips of her pursuers nicked and caught at her skin. Then, there was a garish light falling over the Meathook Gallery and its seeping insect shapes. They screamed an ululation, a defiance, a newborn hate, and drew back from her. They were forced back into their canvas prisons, back into a trapped moment between a cry and a fall by a declaration felt rather than heard, ‘this cunt is mine!’
He was waiting. She ran into his arms. She didn’t see him until the knife was driven into her abdomen. Then she opened her eyes and saw his face.
It was James; black-eyed and bitter. A long time insane. He had been waiting here at the end of the gallery for her. His fingers closed around her throat. Muscles and flesh were crushed, collapsing her larynx and oesophagus into a thin, whistling pipe of cartilage. Her eyes ran with tears as the cracked wall hit her in the spine. The impact drove out the last traces of oxygen from her lungs. Then, he drew her to him again, into an intimate embrace.
Louise was shaking and her legs were not working very well. She made a small, cold cry as something inside her stabbed deep. It felt like a point cut from arctic ice. His hold on her tightened into a a murderer’s embrace. His lips, the texture of dry perished candles, brushed against her earlobe as he asked, “Why’d you do it? Why’d you hurt me so much, you and your friends?”
The stabbing cold slithered out of her, leaving behind a leaking wound. She heard the sounds of a r
aw river flowing out from a lipless mouth. Then she felt it enter her again; more stabbing, then more holding her tight, too tight, with his arms. Again, words and questions. “Why’d you do it? Why’d you let your child fall down those stairs and die? Why weren’t you there? Why weren’t you watching? Why didn’t you care enough to stop your father doing what he did to him? Just tell me, why? It’s not hard. This isn’t maths. You were never much good at that, were you? Seeing how things add up.”
Her mouth worked fitfully, mewling, moaning as he went on; again stabbing, again withdrawing, again stabbing.
“Why’d you do it? Why’d you let your father fuck you, eh?”
He knew why and she knew why and it was an answer that could not be spoken; a truth never to be named.
“Tell me, why?”
He asked on; it was like part of a ritual, almost incantatory. She was weeping, drawing hard on the hurt in her heart as pain spread throughout her body, seeking to expel itself in one fit of spasmic grief. Her bladder emptied, warming her thighs with piss. Her bowels gushed a thick stream of diarrhoea. This violent shaking was all she knew, and all she could feel. It was so cold, much colder than being stabbed, which had happened a long time ago. She must be colder than death.
... I’ll be going soon ...
He let her go and she crumpled to the floor without a sound. Little breaths escaped her, gouting as whitish clouds before her eyes. Her fingers snatched at nothing. Her abdomen continued to spill out a river to feed the black lake steadily forming around her. She was crying, not for her son, not even for herself, but for the last thing she remembered as all other memories withered and were consumed by the Greater Darkness. She remembered those times, the times when her father touched her, the times he came inside her. She cried because she was dying and because those were the happiest moments she could remember from her life. The times when she felt wanted and loved. And when Barry was born, he did the same things to her baby – and she didn’t know if she cared or not, because he made me happy.
