The Oeuvre

by Greg James

  The boy’s face was streaked with tears as his voice rose in a cry and took on the quality of something fragile breaking, something innocent being irredeemably lost. There was laughter when they tickled him as a thin, desperate sound – threaded through with tears and a longing to get away from these creatures. Each touch they made was a form of taking. Each caress of their fingers was wearing away at something more precious than his nerves. The Pierrot stood aside as a voyeur for the most part, until he decided to reach down, pinch and tweak one of the boy’s nipples with his immaculate gloved fingers.

  Emma couldn’t stand it a moment longer. She clambered through the window and ran towards the crowd of clowns. She pushed through them; elbowing, shoving and kicking. They felt ripe and rotten. They reeked of wetness and manure. They let her through, falling away, soft as scarecrows, with nothing but a dull confusion showing in their eyes. She shouldered the last clown aside and stood at the altar, face to face with the Pierrot. He met her gaze calmly. The altar was between them and, despite herself, Emma was glad of it. The Pierrot’s eyes were ancient torture-holes which shone with a queer animate light. His painted flesh looked clammy and hard as death, like cold porcelain. The stitching on his suit shimmered like northern aurorae. Emma did not flinch away from his eyes though it felt like they were peering deep inside her, seeking something out. Without thinking, she placed her hand on the chest of the boy and said, “This one’s mine. Let him go. Let him be.”

  The Pierrot’s eyes flickered for a moment then he raised his hands and gently clapped twice. He cast his eyes at each clown holding the boy down, and each clown retreated in turn, letting the child go. The boy shrank in on himself, curling foetal. He sobbed quietly on the altar with his arms tight around his bony knees.

  Emma snatched up the boy, keeping her eyes on the Pierrot as she backed away from the altar. She felt the clowns parting at her back, letting her through. The Pierrot watched her go; a calmness rested in his eyes which she did not like.

  She ran out of the church ruin and into the woods as the light within went out soundlessly. She ran as far as she could for as long as she could before her bad leg began its searing protest of pins, needles, and pain. She ground her teeth against the spasming of the muscles until her leg gave out and they both sprawled into a low bank of dead leaves. She got to her knees and her whole body trembled with her leg as its pain brought tears to her eyes which she blinked fiercely away. There was no time for weeping.

  The boy squatted on the ground before her; whining in his throat and scratching his fingertips through the top soil of the mulchy ground. Emma looked him in the eye. He was chewing at his lips, making them sore and bloody. He’d probably gnawed a few holes into the inside of his mouth as well. Each breath he let out was a keen whistling sound. Emma, short of breath, pointed through the trees, away towards the boundaries where there would be light, traffic, and people. “Go. Run for it. That way. Find someone. Get help.”

  The boy stopped scratching at the ground and followed her finger with his eyes into the outer dark of the woods. He turned his reddened eyes back to her and shook his head, whining in his throat again.

  “You must,” Emma gasped, “they’re in the trees. They’re coming. Don’t let them take you again. You musn’t go back.”

  The boy reached out a frail, trembling hand and she took it, squeezing it hard. She tried to smile but it was hard. The boy said two quiet words, “Thank you.”

  “Find someone,” she said, “go.”

  He scrambled to his feet and ran. Emma watched him run; a small ghost vanishing into the dark and thought how true it was – that’s all we’re looking for really – to find someone to help us, to share life with; the hurt, the pain, and the world’s constant cruelty. Another soul as well as your own to help you survive each day a little better.

  She knew her boys were safe and now this boy was safe. In the short time she’d held him in her arms, she’d cared no less for him than if he’d been one of her own children.

  Only a mother can heal a child.

  Branches rustled and dead leaves crackled. The clowns were coming. She had to run as in a childhood fairy-tale, all the way home; dashing through shadows, passing by fear, with her nerves burning and her bad leg slowing her down.

  Emma knew one thing though. They would not be following the boy. She’d seen recognition in the Pierrot’s shining eyes. He wanted her much more than the boy. She’d denied him twice as a child and he remembered this well.

  They were coming for her alone.

  Chapter Six

  Emma made it home.

  The woods let her go free; parting like black wings so that she found herself staggering along the narrow path up the incline and then between the houses and back onto her street. Ageing cars rested in front of red, homogenised blocks of terraced housing. The sodium streetlights stuttered on and off. She could hear the raised voices of families and see the bright rhythm of television outlining curtains drawn across living room windows.

  Home was a dozen feet away, just across the street – it didn’t seem possible.

  She’d be there and safe in a minute. A quick call to the police that she’d been chased by someone threatening to break into her home and assault her, and it would be over. She had an idea that the blue lights of a police car would banish the Pierrot completely and turn him into the dust of forgotten dreams. Some things could not co-exist.

  Emma looked back down the sloping path into the woods and saw only fallen leaves hurrying over the marks of her footsteps. She got her breath back by increments and the pulse of her heart slowly stopped labouring with the pain in her leg. She crossed the street, dug out her door keys and let herself in.

  She plucked the handset out of its cradle mounted on the hallway wall and dialled 999 for the fourth time that night. As the tone rang in her ears, she wiped the grease of settled sweat from her forehead and ran fingers through her dishevelled hair. A shower would be a good idea before bed.

  The tone cut off as someone came on the line.

  “Hello? Can I have police, please?”

  Nothing but the sound of someone’s light, unsteady breathing.

  “Hello? Who’s there?” Emma said, feeling her voice growing thin.

  The breathing changed to a quiet sobbing and she swallowed any words she might’ve spoken. The sobbing became harsh, hitching moans and, between them, she heard the boy from the woods, “Thank you.”

  The boy’s last words were lost as a series of cries were violently torn from his throat; piercing Emma’s ears with their ferocity. There came a point where they were less cries and more the sustained white noise of a child’s distress. She only realised the line had gone dead when the ringing in her ears was all that remained of the boy’s voice.

  She slumped to the floor in the hallway with the handset hanging limply from her fingers. There was nothing coming from it but the whining of a dead line. Emma’s eyes looked at a point in the distance beyond the walls of the house, beyond the woods, which was buried somewhere deep inside of herself as well.

  The Pierrot had lied, or had she lied to herself?

  The boy was gone. Lost to darkness. She’d lost him. It was her fault.

  Hope was a mistake; a lie told from mother to child.

  She didn’t look up as the Pierrot came softly down the stairs; black-eyed and smiling. He offered her his hand and Emma took it. She followed him back up the stairs. There was glass on the floor from where he’d broken all of the lightbulbs on the first floor. Emma’s trainers trod the shards into the carpet. They were waiting for her in the bedroom, all of the clowns were there; patient and quiet as they stood around the bed muttering their ritual words.

  “Ekkeri, akai-ri, u kair-an! Fillissin, follasy, nakelas ja'n!”

  The Pierrot led her in as he’d led the boy to the altar. He led her as she had been led ever since she first saw him in the circus tent, smiling and waving at the crowd, seeking for sure prey with his blackly shining eyes. Emm
a lay down on the bed without a word and looked up at the ceiling, at the patterns of dismembered light there and saw no sense in them at all; no rhyme, no reason – only darkness and loss. There was no path left for her to follow. All was nothing and nothing was all.

  “Ekkeri, akai-ri, u kair-an! Ekkeri, akai-ri, u kair-an!”

  The Pierrot drew the curtains across the bedroom window, shutting out the last of the light. The room closed in around her as an absolute shadow and breath caught in her throat as she felt hard panels of wood appearing to trap her on all sides. Emma let her breath go, closed her eyes and the reopened them. There was light of a sort seeping in from somewhere; it came down through tears in a striped, fluctuating awning far above. She was no longer in her bedroom. There were stars showing in the night sky visible through the tears, but they were not stars which she’d ever seen before.

  Emma turned her head from side to side. A number of familiar things began to form themselves from the strange starlight; the faces of an audience, slack and dun-coloured, worn into silence by decades of waiting; the wooden circle of a circus ring with its bright colours long since peeled away, and the dust scattered across the ground glimmered queerly; there was Mum, as she had once been, holding hands with a child in the adjoining seat. The child was not dressed in jeans and a Thundercats t-shirt. Its eyes shone as if it were wearing glasses though Emma was not sure there were eyes underneath. The skin of the child had the same damp, uneven texture as the stuffing which leaked from the cushions. It sat so calmly and Mum looked so placidly happy as if this were the daughter she’d wanted Emma to be.

  Emma was in the box at the centre of the circus ring; the one she’d been promised to at eleven years of age. She could not move. Her head and feet were the only parts of her body outside of the box. The air in this circus tent was old and cold and made her want to hold her breath. She withstood the removal of her trainers and socks without protest, and the rags of unkept fingernails stroking against the bare soles of her feet. The clowns were restless. They wanted that which had been promised to them.

  The Pierrot raised and clapped his hands. “Chiv o manzin apre lati!”

  There was a rustling from the audience; it might have been what was left of their voices, or the sound of their dry hands applauding – and then the clowns were upon her. Their eyes were dead moons and the touch of their fingers – so many fingers – tortured her. Emma’s laughter turned to tears and to cries as her knees jerked away from them and banged against the topmost panel of the box. Pain sang through her limbs but faded s the feeling of the clowns scratching and stroking at her feet and ankles returned. She closed her eyes tight as a few of them began to suckle wetly on her toes.

  As time went on, her cries were worn down to croaks and then to a dry, choking sound which rustled and scraped against the back of her throat. Her elbows and hands rapped hard against the rough interior of the box but did no more than spread further traces of pain throughout her body.

  She passed out at times – awoke to shadows blurring together whilst everything else whistled and sang – gasping from a fear of swallowing and gagging on her tongue. The one constant was the clowns; their excruciating touch and their distant, glimmering eyes. For here she was, bound by reality – laughing alongwith its joyless laughter and feeling all of its empty, unending pain. When the clowns brought out the saw, she barely felt its teeth pass through the enclosing wood, then her flesh, and then her bones. There was no blood though there should have been plenty to stain the dusty ground. She listened to the sound of small unoiled wheels as the lower half of the box was dragged away into shadows outside of the circus ring, leaving the rest of her behind. Emma thought she caught glimpses of pale limbs, hanging and twitching, in that lost darkness – and so many more clowns milling about in the shadows. They were plucking, stroking, and suckling at those dangling, wan remains, which were disembodied yet still somehow alive. Would she hang alongside them in time; another broken marionette strung from the hidden rafters of a forgotten cosmic attic born outside the universe?

  Emma could still feel her legs, what was being done to them, and wished that she could not. There was no mercy here. Consciousness and unconsciousness tasted much the same on her aching tongue. Her suffering had grown steadily to fill the unclear void within the funereal circus, as her voice and the voices of her boys once filled the home they shared. Jacob and Liam; they would learn the truth of things one day – but not just yet. Bad things always come back, but not always to the same people. She wanted the boys here so she could tell them that. They were not here so she did what she could to stop such a day as this coming to pass for them. Emma looked and found the hollow-bright eyes of the Pierrot clown. He was standing over her, watching as always, and she made unto him a prayer; Let me have it. Please. Let all the pain be for me. Do it to me and not to them. If this must be forever then let it be, just leave my boys alone. Let them be.

  The clown smiled, gently stroked a stray, sweat-beaded hair from her forehead, and pressed an immaculate, gloved finger to his lips; and silence followed in that faraway circus, with no applause. Fade to black.

  Zombies by Moonlight

  “Bloody weather,” Vera swore, “what a night.”

  The rain was coming down in relentless sheets; pounding against every inch of the Mini Cooper. Its headlights barely illuminated the road. The trees on the left were barely shadows and all she could see ahead was a flickering chiaroscuro of watery gloom. The clouds obscured the moon and, occasionally, the drone of the downpour was punctuated by thunder grumbling its way across the heavens. Vera leaned over the steering wheel, desperately trying to see through the unbroken skin of water flowing down the windscreen. It was no use. She couldn’t see a thing.

  Vera gently alternated between the brake and accelerator pedals, biting her lip whenever she felt the car begin to pull this way or that. It wouldn’t take much in this weather to send the car into a skid. She should slow down and take it easy but she was late enough as it was.

  The family would all be gathered. Everyone would be waiting. The weather would be making Mum worry. The rain and wind drove harder and harder. She could feel the weather pushing and shoving against the car, like a bitter will guiding the elements against her.

  Vera looked over at her phone on the passenger seat. Its luminous display showed 19:00 in luminous green. She should’ve been there an hour ago – this was supposed to be a shortcut.

  This is what I get for listening to that old bastard at the petrol station, she thought.

  She depressed the accelerator too hard.

  “Shiiit!”

  Vera snatched her foot away but it was too late. She fumbled at the brake pedal, tried to steady herself with the steering wheel, looked up and saw a man standing, swaying, in the middle of the road. The car’s headlights painted a bright sodium halo around him. She felt time as something soft and silent passing over her skin. For a moment, she saw his face illuminated; what was left of it.

  Vera screamed.

  Everything went black.

  *

  Hands were shaking her violently. Vera awoke, blinking, and saw an unfamiliar face hovering above. “Who’re you?”

  The face – a man with a scraggly beard – creased into a frown, “Your father, Alice. Come, we must go. They’re here. They’re at the door.”

  “Who’s here?”

  “Hurry. Put on your boots. There’s no time to dress.”

  Vera was yanked to her feet. Her eyes adjusting the dimness around her, she saw that she was in a hovel. Small dirty windows let in the light of the full moon, which illuminated tattered mattresses of straw and old linen. The ground underfoot was bare soil and she could smell sweat, piss and shit in the air. There was a bucket in the corner and that was where the smell of waste was coming from. The bearded man was dressed in coarse, colourless peasant clothes and she was dressed only in a thin, stained shift. She stepped into a pair of boots that smelled as bad as the hovel, and then the man was pulling
her along towards him. A hammering came from the hovel’s door. It shook in its frame as voices sounded from outside. “Let us in, Audric. You know the law as well as us. She has been chosen.”

  Vera turned, wide-eyed, to the bearded man and said, “Father?”

  “I have dug a way out. You must run for your life, child. I will not follow you.”

  “Father, no. I won’t leave you.”

  “You will and you shall. This fight is mine. You are all I have left.”

  “You are all I have too.”

  “No more talk. You must go. Now.”

  He dragged her to the back of the hovel where earth was piled up and Vera could see a shallow tunnel had been made. Audric – her father – pushed her down onto her knees and shoved her in the small of her back with the heel of his hand. “Go through, Alice. I am done for. You may still escape them if you are quick.”

  “Father, please … I don’t want to leave you. They’ll kill you.”

  “Then I’ll die protecting you and that’s as it should be. Now, go!”

  With tears in her eyes for a man she didn’t know, Vera crawled into the shallow tunnel, holding her breath as she wriggled through the tight, suffocating space. The earth was damp from the rain and made her shift cling, wet and uncomfortable, to her skin. She was weeping as she dragged herself along using her elbows and kicking with her feet. From behind, she heard the crack of wood shattering and raised voices calling out, “Find her! Bring her! The chosen one must not escape!”

  The voice of Audric drowned them out with a roar, “You shall not have her! She is gone!”