by Greg James
The pews were crowded to bursting by a congregation that made many curious sounds such as that of heavy, wet cloth being dragged back and forth over numerous small stones, a constant rustling that seemed evidently elastic but was not, and a series of calls, coughs and a thin, frayed wheezing. There was not a man amongst them as I have said, but neither was there a face.
Every visage I beheld as it turned to stare at me was without eyes, mouth, nostrils or even the slightest of lines. All were as smooth and as white as the solemn clergyman’s face. As I was dreaming I did not start or run away, I continued to drift, to follow the hollow ringing footsteps of the old man, and all the while, I searched for a space in the pews that might be my own, but there was none.
There was none but the one that was reserved for me, and the clergyman indicated it with a slow, sedentary thrusting of his forefinger – the pulpit. I was to speak, to preach the Good Word to the gathered masses. Amen.
Thoughtlessly, I told him that I had no idea what the Word was, and even less of its meaning. Surely, a man such as himself was better appointed to perform this duty than an unbeliever such as I. His lips crooked into an expression that would bring shudders were it to be called a smile, and he thrust out that self-same forefinger at that self-same pulpit, and I knew I must ascend and make do with my appointed task as best I could. It was only a dream after all, and dreams, why, they mean us no harm, none at all - do they?
So I climbed the little ladder, brushed clean the lectern and set about searching for the book from which I was to read. As the clergyman had neglected to give it to me I felt sure that it must be here, awaiting my attention.
It was not.
I looked askance to the clergyman below me and upon his face he still wore that crude attempt at a smile. Oh, it was such a bland yet hateful expression. I felt the unaccountable urge to batter him with my fists until he bled freely – I had been deceived by this creature and the congregation were growing restless as they waited. But I found that I could not descend. For moving to the ladder brought about a vile vertigo that made me lurch desperately back into the steady security of the pulpit, until my heart slowed and my stomach was still. I was no longer able to drift in this dream; I had been bound as surely as a dog unto its leash.
Licking my dry lips, I knew that I must speak for the sounds coming from the congregation were frightful, though nowhere near as frightful as the seated creatures were to look upon. What place on earth, what weird womb, could have given birth to such pale, under-formed monstrosities as did wriggle and writhe before me here in this dead and blighted place?
I opened my mouth, in fear of my life, and made to speak, and I was wracked by the most excruciating sensation I had ever experienced. It was as if I had been pierced by a long, hard thorn and that this had been driven specifically through my larynx for I could not form words, no clear sentences, nor recognisable speech at all. The pain was unspeakable and the sound I did make was a torture to the ears – it was a screeing, strangled and high, almost avian, and it was coming from the thorn-hole in my throat that I could not locate with my prying fingers. I closed my mouth momentarily and again tried to speak normally with no success – that horrendous scree tore once more out from my lips. Through tears, I looked down to the still-smiling clergyman and I saw the answer and the truth in his eyes.
“As was my fate, so now is yours. You must speak the Word to them without ceasing, otherwise they shall tear you to pieces. Fare well, young dreamer.”
And with those words, the old man faded away. His spirit, bound here so long, finally able to depart and rest whereas I must linger on. My mouth ever-open, ever-speaking the Word before that gathering of twisting foetal things, hoping that my true voice will be heard somewhere in a dream or a nightmare, and that another sad, lonely soul, like myself, might come here, drifting and unaware, to be so deceived and so bitterly bound to this demesne.
I can but hope.
I can but dream.
There was a Hole Here, it's Gone Now
I came to the house each time before as in a dream. These were not dreams of trepidation and nightmare, rather the atmosphere was one of a strange serenity - the hills and trees were underlit by the tones of a long-lost twilight, and there was no sound as such but an almost audible sense of sighing, of life, time and space coming to rest, finding some peace at last. It was through this scene of umbrous groves buried deep in sepulchral countryside that I came to the house time and again. It stood tall though it was not tall in stature, lengthening shadows lending it grandeur whilst the deepening darkness of approaching night coloured its secluded spaces in austere colours and shades.
Coming to the fringes of the porch's shadows, which were fluttering as a black blossom butterfly might, I came to a moment of pause. One that held me still as I took in the high windows of the house, the sloping gables of the roof and disintegrating matter caking the outer walls - was it plaster, mould, loam? Or, some less pleasant possibility that could crumble, flake and discolour so?
I did not know and dared not guess, as certain shadows moved in around me, brushing by with whispering lips and briar patch fingertips. The house was now revealed to me as a place of disquiet, seemingly unearthed from its slumber. Yes, as the last light left the world around me, I came to understand this dwelling place was much like a vault or a tomb but made and decorated in such a manner as to be a habitable home.
What manner of man could conceive of such a thing?
On this thought, the dream would each time end, leaving me standing there, indecisive, upon the threshold of the haunted darkness cast by the house's porch.
The time that I truly came to the house was after many years of living and many more of dreaming. Alone, I hiked through the hills of a country I had called home for some years, having grown into a nomad during the latter half of my life. It was a late hour and I knew, in this part of the world, the days and nights behaved strangely. The light was wont to shift and change with mercurial abandon. In doing so it made me lose my way, and I found myself wandering through groves familiar and yet foreboding, listening, hearing nothing, but slowly realising that I was feeling that all-consuming sigh exuding from all things around me.
Out of the groves I came and there was the house and I will not bore you with the repeated details of my approach to the property. The one and crucial detail that changed this time, that caused me not only to flee the vicinity but also that country I had called home for some years, was this. I crossed into the porch's shadow and went up to the door. And the door was a stout object not remotely affected by the queer decay tainting the exterior of the rest of the house. I meant to go up and rap upon it using the cast-iron knocker, meaning to speak to the owner whom I was sure had been sending me these dreams over the years. What was his reason? Why this long, drawn-out summoning that had robbed me of so many precious hours of sleep due to fear and contemplation?
I never did rap upon that door.
For, as I approached it, hand raised in readiness, it opened before me.
Not much, a mere crack, enough to see in and see no light within. The only illumination was cast by the steadily retreating glow of evening and, in that glow, I saw his face. It was long and drawn and the eyes and mouth and nose were holes. For immeasurable moments, I was held mesmerised by the hopelessly black and gaping orbits in his pale face. In that narrow space, with the door and jamb framing it, I noticed the face becoming somehow disturbed, rippling as if touched by a light breeze, the edges of it, they were peeling, coming undone, coming away from the bone beneath.
It was then that he spoke to me and his voice was a terrible thing to hear.
So it was at that moment, with the mask of ancient skin slithering away to earth before my eyes, baring what waited beneath to the light, that I turned away and fled. Away from the house, back through the groves and down to the road. Leaving the hills, the secrets they guarded and the nightmares left unburied there far behind.
And now, all these years later,
I write these words down within my house. A house I have not left in such a very long time. I saw what was beneath the mask of skin that day and it made me see, it made me understand so well the world and time and everything that passes ephemeral into nothingness. Through the dreams and down through the years, he had led me to the threshold of his dwelling, moulding me, shaping the course of my life for the simple matter of our meeting so as to look upon me and know my face. One that would not come loose when touched in the slightest way by the open air, and to then pass something onto me, something he no longer had need for or could hope to bear.
Now, I sleep here in my house and I dream, and in those dreams I travel as my body once travelled. I barely stir from my bed for months on end, maybe even years have passed now, as I wander with ease through the dreams and the nightmares of others. Some see me walking abroad in their most private thoughts, some do not. Others, curious nomads as I once was, they approach me, reaching out, they come forth, braving the whispering shadows closing in upon us all. They come to the threshold of my house, hands raised in readiness to rap upon the door, to thus awaken me.
One day, I think, I will open the door, and I will speak, and my voice will be a terrible thing to hear.
Rotten
It had been a long time since he last laid eyes upon the pier. It was as he remembered it in a number of ways; the crust of barnacles and drying sea-salt upon the stanchions, the Art Deco curve of the half-dome that hung over the entrance, the stripes of paint that, as a child, suggested the circus and the fairground. But things had changed in the years since he was a child, growing up away from this small seaside town, now with some grey showing at his temples and fluttering across his brow in the late morning breeze. The wood of the stanchions was deeply warped and buckling. The Art Deco half-dome was crusted over with red and black rust. The stripes of paint, once bright red and vivid yellow, were now a weary beige and a tired sepia.
He had driven here to get away from the world he had grown to be a part of and wanted no part of anymore. Here, in this seaside town gone to seed, he hoped to recapture something of happier times, brighter memories. But all he found, now that he was here, was the old pier, creaking, dank and dreary, on this mild summer day. There was a sense of something washing over him, not grief or remorse but a strange numbness as if he were seeing a treasured photograph degrade into blurs, smears and blankness before his eyes. There were no tears in his eyes, he felt no closer to crying than the night before. It had been years since he last wept.
Drawing in a breath that tasted of childhood, he approached the old pier so that he could see it better - how mouldered were the edges of the coloured glass panes, how the smell of salt and summer was subsumed to that of a ripe and raw neglect. Another thing left to rot alone in a town where the money was all but gone. The promenade was silent and the beach was bare of life. The sea lapped grey against the shore and litter of all kinds rustled and blew across the sand.
It was then that he saw the hand.
Small, pale and bright against the dirtiness of the glass. A child's hand slapping and dragging across the coloured surface, cleaning away the dark streaks to reveal the shade it had once been. Red, blood red, and he felt his stomach lurch at the ominous sight as the hand dropped out of view.
A child was inside, trapped and alone, maybe a prank of some kind, a dare gone very wrong. His breath hitching in his throat, he looked about, from side to side, and then found himself dropping his shoulder-bag and manhandling the rough wooden planks nailed across the entrance of the old pier. He tore at the tarpaulin glued over the spaces where windows once were and called inside, into the dark.
"Hello? Are you there? Are you hurt? I saw your hand. I'm coming to help you."
A sound, a light shuffling and rustling but no answer by voice.
Didn't matter, he didn't care, he had seen the hand. A fragile plaintive signal of distress without a doubt. There was no time to wait, to call for another's assistance. This child, lost in the dark, needed him now.
Hands torn by splinters and prickles of old glass, he shouldered the doors open and stepped into the damp interior. The atmosphere was particulate, he could see a light, low mist spreading across the bulging boards. The grubby glass tiles of the roof allowed some sun inside but not enough to illuminate. Instead it served to only define the shadows and the darkness all the more. Rubble, rubbish and debris were scattered and clustered all around. The walls that once separated the arcades were torn down to wood snaggles and glinting glass fangs. There was no child here that he could see.
Squinting through the gloom, stepping forward one creaking step at a time, he called out again.
"Hello? I saw you. I know you're here. I won't hurt you. I just want to help. I'll take you home!"
"Home?"
His heart beat harder. Yes, he was right, there was a child here. Why had he been unable to see him before though?
There he was; a bit thin, a bit pale, frail and underfed.
"You will take me home?"
The child was walking towards him, not hurt it seemed. Thank god, he thought, unsure if he was feeling so good because the child was uninjured or because it was real and not a piece of his wandering imagination. The child was close and so too, he noticed, was the atmosphere of the old pier. Close, almost palpable, the stench of something unwanted left to decay in a cold, wet place for far too long. Unaware until after he had done so, he took a step away from the approaching child - he still could not see, for sure, if it was boy or a girl. The child stopped in its tracks, its face creasing into an awful expression. The soft doughy complexion became lined, dark and hard as stone, "You won't take me home. You never take me home."
"No, look, I'm sorry. You just surprised me...I wasn't expecting..."
"Always! You always say you'll take me home, but you leave me always. Always, always. Always behind. Always alone."
He could see that it was neither a boy, nor a girl. What he had taken for hair and clothes were something else altogether that clung and drifted around a tensing spidery body.
"You never take me home. So this is my home. So you will stay here with me."
The child was reaching for him, and its fingers were growing long, and its arms were bleached shadows cast by a light that could not be seen, and its eyes opened and he saw there, not himself, not someone else he once knew, no reflections but something still familiar. A taste of old days, mother's embrace, of the sun going down, a bright, burnt copper penny falling fast, of memories coloured by sand, salt and unclouded summer days. And then those lithe fingers touched him, and he tasted a bitterness, pulpy and sour on his tongue, like things soft, wet and black crawling about under dead leaves of winter. He tore the fingers free from where they pierced him. He saw charred cloth though there had been no fire, blister-white skin though there had been no burning pain. Only a cold, a certain and terrible cold.
Running, he was running from the child, knowing it would not follow him outside into the light, that whatever had made it let it have but one chance each time. That chance was gone, over and done, and as the light of the summer day pierced him, burned him, the tears came freely. His heart hurt with a hard pain and he fell to his knees, weeping, fingering the holes in his shirt and the raw blisters on his skin. Underneath the surface, he felt something soft, dark and pulpy moving, something rotten burrowing deeper in. And he knew that he would carry it with him for the rest of his life.
View of a Desolate Landscape
The painting was ugly, truly awful, and it hung on the wall in a small gallery-cum-shop that was on my way home from work. Every day, I passed by this place, and every day, I went inside, not so sure why, to look at the paintings and other exhibits that were all crude in their execution and not at all appealing to buy. The price tags were always reasonable, cheap even, but still I never found myself moved enough by what I saw on display to take out my wallet and make a purchase.
The painting though, it caught my attention by stirring something
in me. A feeling that could be called revulsion, but also had some aspects of sickness, sadness and unutterable depression in its character. Like everything else in the gallery-cum-shop, the painting was crude and unappealing, but there were certain things about it that made me continue to look and study what was rendered upon the canvas.
It appeared to be a painting of a near-featureless landscape over which hung a near-black and cloud-stained sky. The landscape could equally have been a grey and grotesque sea, and the sky above it some depthless void marred by the leftovers of dead souls shrieking through its abysms. As you can see, the painting was an ambiguous thing as well as an ugly thing, which is why it arrested my attention.
Now, the city I live in is a grey and desolate place and, after many years of residence in it, I have found that one's life comes to take on the character of the city. Strange and curious breakdowns in the transport system and government often become mirrored in the people with whom I journey to and from the interminable office-blocks that make up the majority of the workplaces here. Every day, I notice how more and more curtains seem to be drawn across windows in the houses along the streets, and how many more of my fellow travellers seem to go to and from work with glazed and sick expressions upon their faces, maybe trembling, sometimes shivering. The signs of breakdown, imminent and ongoing, are everywhere in the city, which has become such a grey and desolate place to live. I remember moving here, all those years ago, and I wonder why I did so, and I also wonder why I remain when I know another breakdown is just around the corner, for me, for the city, for everyone. I wonder why I do not put my affairs in order and make an exit, take my leave, in as quiet and unostentatious a manner as possible. Enough of the pharmacies and doctors in this city will prescribe pills at the drop of a hat that, in sufficient quantity, will become a potent poison and assist me in turning everything to silence, darkness and dust.
