The Oeuvre

by Greg James

  “Baby, are you okay?”

  The words should have been his but they were hers instead as she turned to face him. She was exactly as she should have been. The same tangled hair and gentle smile. Her eyes looked a little darker but that was just another conjuring trick of the day. It had to be. His heart eased as Garry realised how silly he had been. The images, ideas and fantasies let loose in his head by the heat of the day. Their perfect day. He had almost spoiled it by working himself up into a lather.

  “Yes … yes, I’m fine.”

  “You look like you’ve gotten yourself hot and bothered. Come on, let’s get an ice cream. I could murder a Magnum.”

  He let her take him by the hand and lead him away before he could think too long about why she’d been waiting here for him; why she hadn’t come back earlier, or why her hair seemed to be thicker and near-black rather than the autumnal shade he was used to. Her eyes were darker, steadier and harder than they had been before. He noticed when she looked back at him that her smile was not so gentle either. No, that was all nonsense, he was worrying about nothing. Everything was fine, wonderful and normal. This was just a perfect day in the park with his perfect girl. She hadn’t changed, not one bit. How could she?

  One of the birds in the lake chose that moment to take flight and, as it did, it called out. The sound it made was harsh and forlorn. For some reason, it made Garry think not of a bird’s cry but the sound made by something else; abandoned in the dark, moist and rotting, with a face he once loved and a mouth that would never be whole again.

  Pteronophobia

  A captured moment. One that does not last for long, disintegrating quickly, ageing softly into tragedy and dust. A feather falls; its quill wet and shining, bloodily torn out, coming to rest in a lonesome place. The last bird dies. Years go by. Footsteps come, disturb the dust. Voices upset the silence. The blood on the feather is still wet, still shining. The dead and thoughtless space around it darkly stirs.

  Guin comes to, violently. Eyes open wide, wondering where she is, feeling bed sheets beneath her body. They are cold and old. The texture is heavy with the sour leavings of many bodies; dead skin cells, crispy patches of dried fluids. Still in a world she does not know, she scrambles off the filthy linen. The floor is filthier. A stale carpet of dismal dusty tangles. Vermin droppings and extinct arachnids crunch and crumble under her feet. The room is clear to her now. The windows are papered over, yellow copies of The Times and The Daily Mail keep out the light; what little light there is. Through torn patches in the makeshift curtains, feeble fingers of moonlight trace their way through the atmosphere, casting faint grey lines of illumination, dissecting the scene. She sees the bed is dark with stains that are not her own. She is unhurt. The stains on the bed have been there a long time. Sagging shelves surface out of the shadows; bent and buckling under the weight of thick crusty books. The writing down the spines is alive before her eyes. It moves as snakes move. It flows with exotic rhythms. Piercing her eyes with unseen needles, drawing out tears, the pain goes through her, into her brain. Aches reach her fingers and toes, making them curl into rigorous spasm. Her streaming eyes clear, just for a moment, and she sees them. In their hundreds, thousands, millions, falling. Slowly, silently, softly falling; white, speckled feathers, their quills dripping bright red tears.

  The blood touches her.

  A feather touches her.

  Guin screams.

  Guin and Libby are walking and laughing, going home. They do not see him. They walk into him. A box of shittily-fried chicken and chips goes everywhere. Ketchup spatters their clothes. Malt vinegar fouls the air. His name is Arcade. His eyes are white almonds, his diamante ear-studs catch the moonlight and his skin is marbled red by acne pits. They know him. He has a knife.

  Guin runs, one arm over Libby’s shoulder. Libby is nursing her face, the cut made there by Arcade. It runs from the corner of her mouth to the lobe of her left ear. Her fingers slither through the tacky film of blood drying on her skin. She can’t believe he did it. Marked her. Cut her face open. She can taste the pain as cold static on her tongue. She gags as bitter fluid runs down her throat. She lets Guin guide her. She feels the cold static spread down her spine, icicles grow in her veins and arteries. This is shock. She wants to stop, scream and drop. Curl in, concave, against the horror that is happening. This is a good night out, was, should have been. Now, a nightmare of bleeding is happening. Her head swims with ghosts of darkness chasing light. Libby hopes she’s asleep, hopes she will wake up. She hears a coarse cry and the bleak beating of a bird’s wings.

  Arcade is the runt of the litter, that’s what makes him mean. Got all the bad genes. The bad skin. There’s nothing smooth or comely about him. He marked that cunt good. She asked for it. So he did it. Did it good. It would leave a scar. His stomach is sore from the other bitch – her sister – beating him. She decked him while he was laughing at the blood on the pavement, at Libby’s whining. His skull bangs with pain, hurting deep, as he runs. Each footstep strikes the pavement and drives rusted nails into his head. She hurt his teeth when she hit him. He bit off a piece of his tongue. He hawks, gobbing it into the night. He will mark her same as the other; make those sisters match.

  The street is old and sits far back from the main road. A Victorian terrace where no light shines. The trees grow in a line on one side of the road. Their gnarled fingers reach the gutters of the houses, creating a claustrophobic canopy. It is late summer, not yet autumn, the leaves hang heavy on the trees. The stars of the night cannot penetrate through. No street light punctures the gloom with a bright sodium hole. Not one window glows.

  Guin and Libby run into the darkness. So does Arcade. The street breathes in, consuming them. Their footsteps disintegrate, becoming silence. On the rooftops, there is a rustling and shuffling of downy bodies. Claws crack and scrape on tile. Pinhole eyes shimmer at the centre of small black moons. Beaks open, quietly cooing, calling out to something that cannot be seen.

  Guin is on the landing. Her breathing is convulsive as she scratches the feathers away. The door to the bedroom is closed. Gooseflesh makes her ache. She feels every trail of sweat following its course. Feathers, always feathers, something about them, how soft they are, how they feel, how they were once a part of something living. Those who wear or carry feathers are pallbearers for pieces of the dead. When feathers touch her skin, when she sees them, all she wants to do is scream.

  Libby is here. She stands at the far end of the landing, eyes open but not seeing. Guin calls out to her but makes no sound. Her throat is too raw. Libby descends the stairs to the floor below. Guin runs to her, reaching over the bannister, tugging at her sister’s clothes. Libby does not stop. There is a sound coming from below. A quiet cooing. The light call of a bird dying. Guin does not know what to do. Libby is sleep-walking. Waking a sleep-walker can be dangerous, fatal, but she wants to stop her from following the bird’s call. There is something in the sound. Something wrong with it. She reaches out to grab Libby’s shoulders, stop her descent.

  Something soft brushes the back of her hand, unsettling the skin; a blood-tipped feather. Guin’s gut clutches tight. She hurls herself away from it, from the disappearing Libby. The storm from the bedroom is here, descending anew. Countless, soundless fragments of speckled white, tumbling down, meaning to drown her.

  Guin, drily heaving, scrambles away on hands and knees. There is a door adjacent to the stairs. She fumbles at the handle. Her fingers made clumsy by trembling. The handle turns. She claws her way inside. Breath whistling, skin scrawling with hot streaking rash-lines. She rubs at herself fitfully, huddles in the dim quiet of the room; listens to the creak-creak of stair after stair giving way under Libby’s footsteps. Going down and down. Then, they stop.

  Libby is gone.

  Lost to below.

  Guin chokes on a sob. She hears a sound in the room. Something is in here. She is not alone in the dark. A rumbling shakes the floor and walls. A gust of cruddy air clogs her nostrils.
It comes rushing out of the far wall. Shatters the plaster. Breaks the wood. Shreds ancient wallpaper into fluttering grey strips. In places, patchy white flesh shows through, some of it made red raw by scales and weeping sores. Butchered limbs, once wings, beat brokenly, battering, flapping, scrabbling and scratching, flailing wildly, further wounding themselves. Great bones splinter and much blood falls. Shrieks echo out from the glistening meat-hook of its beak. No gentle cooing here. There are no feathers on the thrashing thing. It is bare meat and bone inhabited by something monstrous and unknown. Caught between places, only partially here, half-made, imprisoned in the brutish stuff of the wall.

  Its eyes are scalding spokes, blinding furies, pure burning promises of violence. Promises it cannot keep. It cries out for pain, wanting blood. Guin sees tears run down the skinned bulb of its awful avian face. She winces at the sight.

  She opens the door and sees that the storm is no more.

  No feathers lie on the landing’s dirty boards.

  Time to go.

  Find Libby.

  Get out of this place.

  Guin leaves the thing to its brick and mortar gaol. She shuts the door, she hears a deep, rough grinding. The wall ingests the screaming vulture once more. She hears the sound of utter agony it makes as it is eaten, as bricks break more of its bones into dust. She pities it.

  This darkness, this place, is a something that is nothing. An opening, an emptiness, a way through; calling it a door or a portal would be doing it a favour. It is a pisshole in black snow. A septic open wound with dirty scabbed-over edges. Where bad stuff clots, turns from yellow to black, goes soft and rotten. On the rooftops, the birds watch and wait, quietly cooing, listening to the screams below, feeling the pain. There is not enough, never will be enough. The blood must flow forever.

  Arcade is not where he should be. He sees undecorated slabs of brick and inhales the rank odour of rat piss. It is cold and damp here. He does not want to be here. He gets to his knees, then to his feet. Shivering, he rubs his arms, his cricked neck. He walks forward, following the rhythm in his head. The beating of wings, lots of them. In frenzy. Trapped, battering against a hard surface. Arcade comes to a wall. The sound comes from within. He pushes at it with his fingertips. Solid brick. No way there’s loads of birds trapped in there.

  I’m hearing things. Those two cunts got me, somehow, they drugged me, stuffed me down here. I’m gonna more than mark them for this.

  A shimmer in the corner, a flinty glint of steel. A fire axe, dark red flakes peel off the blade. Winking light at him, it tempts him close. Arcade feels the grain of the wood. The shaft is heavy and right in his hands, he weights it. It feels so good. Still, he hears the sound of the birds, fluttering, battering, beating, struggling behind the walls. He shakes his head, grinds his eyes shut. Still, he hears them, loud and clear. Then, he hears footsteps. Coming down the stairs. Coming here. Arcade shuffles into the shadows. His eyes glint and shine like the blade of the axe in his hands.

  Libby walks down, down and down. Lower and lower into this house no longer rooted in concrete and soil. The foundations are much stranger, the depths of them deeper. You could sink in this stuff forever. She does not feel the dust and grime scraping under her feet. She does not see how the tainted walls crawl with ebola-holes, how they breathe out an acrid pale mist of urine. She does not hear her sister, calling to her, from above. She does not know the cut on her face is bleeding afresh. The blood glints and shines in the darkness down here. She does not feel the axe when Arcade buries it in her face.

  A small mercy.

  The bird lies in a ditch by the side of the road. Its beak is cracked and its eyes are beginning to crust over. There are numerous grubs moving about in the deep open hole of its belly. Its insides are hanging out, wiggly white worms. The feathers on its neck are puffing, in and out, very quickly.

  Guin picks up a stick, nudging the dripping, dangling worms. They are so soft and stretchy. She twists the stick in them, winding them onto its length. She tugs on them, feeling them elasticate and strain. The bird scratches fiercely at the earth with its scaly feet. She smiles because she hates it. She knows what the ‘worms’ are. She keeps prodding at them, pulling at them. The bird spits out a sticky dark stream. A buzzing cloud of flies hums over it, waiting for death. It snaps its beak, twitching at the insects with its broken wings. Wishing to keep a little dignity for itself. But, each time it snaps at the flies, Guin raps it hard on the beak with her stick.

  … naughty birdy … bad birdy …

  It looks at her, with such terrible eyes, when she does that. It looks like it is crying. Guin keeps on playing. She hits the bird on the beak again. It snip-snaps at the air. It is a funny thing. It takes half an hour to die. She is five years old.

  Guin goes down below. Into the night-time space under the stairs. She follows the cooing. She sees pudgy shapes that hiss and grow from old shadows. They have silver fangs, beaks and nasty teeth. Diseased feathered flesh pushes itself through the holes here. Birds died here. Lots of birds. This bad place. It ate them. Made them hurt insane. They can never leave it. They call for blood, for pain, for little morsels to quell their hunger, hate and fury. Libby lies dead in the cellar. Her face lies open. The ragged cleft there completes the cut Arcade began with his knife. Guin sees him. His trainers jut out of the nearby dark. She hurls herself at him. Beating and pounding on his legs and chest. Blind, crying, it takes her time to see the truth. Arcade lies dead too. His face too lies open. A matching cleft makes his corpse a twin to Libby. What he hoped to do to her has been done to him.

  Guin’s tears fall fast and hard, she steps away from the dead. She looks up at the ceiling that is not there, sees what is there, the light pattering of wings becomes fierce and frenzied. She covers her ears with her palms and screams at it. Screams for all she is worth, for her sister, for Arcade, for herself. Then, she is a statue, her face is a rictus and she cannot move. No feathers, no pieces of the dead, fall this time.

  The birds come instead, their scraggy skins crawl, teeming white with parasites. Clawed bones puncture their tatty skin, waiting to rake and tear at hers. Their little eyes look at her, trailing tears that are bulbous with worms and twitching black maggots. Blood-barnacled beaks cut the air apart, dripping, eager to bite, bleed and feed. Behind Guin, camouflaged by the din of the tsunami, stands Libby. Dead on her feet. Hair hanging in tangles, black and matted. A flux of grey matter and crimson gore cascades down over her throat and chest.

  In her hands, she holds the axe. She raises it high. The birds call to her. It descends. Biting deep. She gives her sister forty whacks.

  Darkness comes next.

  But, there is no end to things here. No, not in this place, this soured portion of time and space. Those who come into the street become a part of it; slaves to it, playthings, marionettes, its toys. Lives here can be long. Lives here can be short. As long as the blood flows and the screams can be heard. Lives can end in so many ways and then begin again in so many more. This time will be different and the same as every other time before. It puts the pieces back together and then it draws the darkness back.

  Guin hacks Libby to death. Arcade hacks them both to death. They both hack him to death. It puts the pieces back together. Makes them dance and jig when they are dead, sometimes. Feeds feathers into their dead mouths. They go from one room to the other. Orders change. Sequences shift. Down the stairs. Up the stairs. The dead fall, rise and fall again. When the axe blade falls, they forget everything.

  When they open their eyes though, something does stir. Each time, a little clearer, better remembered. Something that is more than a memory.

  Something waiting for a true awakening.

  Guin sits on a chair, waiting. The door to the room opens, in walks Arcade. He is smiling. His hands are behind his back. He is hiding something. The smile grows and grows.

  Guin tries to speak.

  She spits a wet clot of gristly feathers.

  Arcade shows her what h
e was hiding. Her stomach becomes hollow. Her lungs crumple, her breath whistles out thinly. Her ribs are vicious bars crushing her insides, caging her heart. Her skin feels too tight and suddenly sore. She can hear the fluttering. The birds are inside her. Scrabbling away, the horrible scratching of their beaks and claws, dirty razors parting flesh. Tearing at her so emptily, so mindlessly, these raging dead things. Tears run down her face. She can taste the feathers in her mouth, smell the decay on them, feel their dreadful softness. She is their puppet. She cannot speak or move.

  She looks into Arcade’s eyes.

  She feels it brushing through the air, so close to her skin. One little feather, what he was hiding. She shakes. She aches. She freaks as it touches on her cheek, her forehead, her eyes, her lips. Seismic shudders pound through her heart. She wants to curl into a ball. An ugly string of spittle slips out of her mouth. Rash and fever draw out sweat. Her tongue feels fat and useless in her mouth. She laps at the ridges of her palate. Her throat is tight, a constricted needle-hole, no sound escapes from it. She sees nothing, feels everything. She is a singularity, burning without heat, choking on paralysis.

  Arcade laughs and spits on her.

  That was it.

  It breaks the spell. She can move once more.

  Guin kicks out, she gets him right in the balls. He cries out. The feather falls from his fingers, away from her. She smiles. Guin kicks again, pushing herself back and away from him, away from the birds, away from the feathers.

  Back and away, to where it all began.

  Arcade awakens with a great pain in his crotch, then in his thorax, a burning creepy-crawling its way up through his insides. He grasps at his throat as the burning creates a bulging, tissues give way, muscles split, bone crackles, cartilage grinds. He can taste blood in his mouth and something else. The texture of it seems to splinter and separate as he works his teeth and tongue over it. He finds a hard root running through it. He spits it out onto the cellar floor – a mangled feather robed in fat and residue.