Siren of Depravity

by Gary Fry

  Once that cupboard’s doors had been eased open not by my brother but by whatever was hidden inside, I saw a figure exit, one half-rotted and stinking of wet earth, with a dislodged eye hanging low on the optic nerve that had escaped its partially fleshed face. Its nose and mouth were sagging ruins, limbs staggered with insufficient musculature, and what little remained of its genitals were visible through inadequate coffin garments.

  On the basis of its haphazard body language and expressions of lasciviousness—toothless lust that resounded in the amplified cellar—it was certainly hungry and not necessarily for food.

  After several years in the grave following a decadently seedy life, it wished to indulge in a little intimate coupling: it wanted sex.

  It was our reanimated father.

  30

  “Oh, look at this,” said Dex, appearing pleased while pacing forward behind the outcome of his finest trick yet. “If our respective mothers were also here, Harry, we could be one happy family.”

  I was unable to reply, not knowing how to handle this terrifying new development. I felt blood drain from my face, my hands begin to tremble; my stomach had become a repository for a toxic cocktail of chemicals, each prompting disequilibrium, nausea and acidic discomfort.

  All I could see in my mind’s eye was the churchyard I’d visited earlier that day, the one in which our dad’s body lay…or rather, judging by the sight before me, had once lain. His grave’s grass had been too perfect, I recalled thinking; in such a run-down area, it hadn’t been carefully tended, after all—it had been returfed after someone had recently violated it.

  That had been Dexter, of course, adding body-snatching to his list of nefarious deeds. He must have travelled north overnight to Newcastle, using the same vehicle in which he’d possibly picked up that missing young woman on a separate occasion. Then he’d conducted his refined magic upon each victim, combining one with an animal’s DNA while resurrecting the other with the ultimate implementation of his dark arts.

  Making sure my daughter had her eyes closed (she had), I observed this second figure, standing in front of that dark cupboard, as if trying to orient itself to the sudden freedom afforded by the wider cell. Although most of its mental faculties seemed compromised by internment in a coffin, it appeared to retain the ability to function independently, its reactivated central nervous system and corroded brain responding to aspects of this new environment, especially my brother alongside him (the thing that had once been my dad visibly flinched from its new master, a terrifying inversion of roles) and—most troublingly for me—my unconscious wife directly ahead.

  After a brief hesitation, during which the corpse finally adjusted to sudden exposure, it continued to shuffle forward, bringing with it a fetid odor, that single eyeball dangling on its withered stalk, and tattered lips issuing a low grunting, which, like all the other sounds heard since I’d arrived, reverberated in that unfathomably deep pit.

  As my father headed for Olivia, I screamed at him.

  “Keep away from her, you sick fuck! Touch her and I’ll…I’ll…”

  At that moment, perverse delirium arising from how this situation had developed pledged to turn my fear into laughter, as if I were a maniac incarcerated in a house of the demented.

  But as the rotting husk of our father reached my wife on the slab, I noticed something that offered me hope.

  Dad had definitely responded to my shout.

  It was only a slight concession, a tilt of his head, as if the mushy contents of his almost hairless scalp retained the capacity to comprehend activities of the world in all their constant flux. He certainly appeared to retain habits he’d developed when alive. As he tugged aside the pants in which he’d been buried—it was a dark pair, stained and rotting at the seams—his hands shed a few layers of skin, which dropped to the ground in a reptilian whisper.

  “Do it! Do it now, you old cunt!” Dexter shouted, making the room resound again with a fresh clink of rattling glass as that sunken speaker went about its familiar business.

  I glanced away, first to eliminate sight of what Dex and his new accomplice planned next, and second to make sure my daughter wasn’t about to disobey me by observing what was afoot. She kept her eyes closed and now had her back to the spectacle unfolding in the neighboring part of her barred room. This allowed me to look elsewhere, at the cellar’s walls again, where various renditions of that same creature battled for dominance, like a monster at war with itself.

  That was when I twisted back to address my dad, who, following an accident underground many years ago, had failed to reconcile a tender nature—as evidenced by that poem he’d written for my mother—with a more corrupt identity.

  Or was it an accident? I wondered. If he’d been mining in the northeast at the time, was it possible he’d chanced upon an aspect of one of these buried beasts—a part of its body, perhaps; a multi-eyed limb that had twitched with lingering life—before developing a long-term interest in such hidden horrors? Was that how he’d got involved with Hartwell, who’d had an interest in similar age-old myths?

  Whatever the truth was, I felt as if I’d hit upon a way of tackling the mind-rupturing event about to be enacted in front of me and Eva.

  Returning my attention to the unreal figure about to mount his latest victim with his half-decayed penis impossibly erect, I looked at my brother standing beyond, who knew most of what I’d learned lately, but not all. In fact, I doubted Dex would have been interested if I’d offered him a missing piece of information that despite everything I’d begun to understand since my mum had revealed it, had given me hope that our father wasn’t as bad as he’d always appeared.

  As the typically sadistic dead man started climbing higher up my wife’s body, I leaned close to those bars.

  “I dig all day and sometimes at night,” I said with a singsong tone, as if such a rhythm might communicate the poem more honorably to its once-decent author. “To make enough money to limit my plight…”

  Two things happened simultaneously: Dex hurried forward, asking me what the fuck I was doing; and Eva started screaming, the microphone system helping her hit surely the highest note she’d ever achieved.

  The whole room began shaking with earsplitting terror, making even that revived monster now fully on top of Olivia pause in its vile actions. I think it was the sight of this flailing body—my brother’s greatest achievement, a masterwork of perverse experimentation—that had induced in my daughter so much shock. When I looked her way, I noticed that, against my implicit instruction, she’d turned around and opened her eyes, probably because she’d heard me starting to sing.

  Although she continued screaming and Dex tried swiping at me through his cell’s bars, I never ceased in my attempt to communicate those moving, touchingly naïve lines, which had once been full of genuine love and compassion.

  My dad hadn’t been a dyed-in-the-wool monster; I knew that for certain now. He’d merely been compromised by one of those ancient creatures, a God of sex and death. This early encounter with one of these things had resulted in a desire to rouse another of its species, similarly trapped deep below the earth’s surface, and bring devastation to the world.

  “But when I chanced upon a jewel like you…”

  Eva screamed harder, possibly having worked out what the less-than-human figure planned to do to her mother. Dex made another attempt to shut me up, punching out from his place of confinement where he’d surely noticed that Dad had paused in his assault on my wife, his fleshless penis wilting as he backed off a little. Dexter must have sensed, if only at a primal level, that the words I sang had a bonding power anathema to his darkly harnessed magic.

  As Eva shrieked again, caught in a process of incipient trauma, I spoke the poem’s final line, making it sound more like a song: “The darkness lifted and my efforts felt true.”

  Then, as my undead father started dropping away from Olivia, his fleshy stew of a face twitching and exposing occasional teeth through incomplete lips, I
sensed a stirring beneath the house.

  It was scarcely audible over the amplified cry of my daughter, but that didn’t mean it was imperceptible. Although Eva’s outrageous scream made glass vessels smash all around, it wasn’t this that caused many others to fall off shelves and tables, along with other items that tumbled and shattered on the stone floor. Some vast, underground movement was at work, which compromised the structure of the cellar, forcing its walls to rupture and all those portraits of the possible cause of this latest unrest to twist dramatically out of shape.

  As great cracks appeared in several places, painted limbs were randomly rearranged; multiple eyeballs glistened with lifelike vitality, an effect of lights in the cellar catching on elevated crusts of black-green paint; gaseous heads grew even more opaque as rising clouds of churned dust fell from the fracturing ceiling.

  I started panicking, but not because this mind-shattering event continued; rather, because we were all—Olivia, Eva and myself—in serious physical danger. I glanced at my brother, who’d begun backing into the corner of his cell, as Dad now stood in front of Olivia, obviously wavering with indecision. In one direction lay his former corrupted self, a continuation of evil he’d once practiced many years earlier; in the other, there was Dex and…and a chance to…

  At that moment, as my daughter’s screaming never let up—a gross siren to awaken a creature in its deepest slumber—a notion occurred to me, which I put into action immediately.

  “Eva,” I said, now shouting. “Eva, sing a song for me. I’ll say the words and you join in when you can.”

  I started chanting that poem again, at such a rapid rate that my daughter, as most children could with their pliable minds, might acquire the lyrics and participate.

  “I dig all day and sometimes at night / To make enough money to limit my plight / But when I chanced upon a jewel like you / The darkness lifted and my efforts felt true.”

  I paused to draw breath, glancing briefly at the rotted figure that had already responded to the words he’d once composed. Now caught between love and death, creation and destruction, he staggered away from Olivia, heading back toward Dex, standing in front of the black cupboard in which he’d probably kept the resurrected horror since digging it up in a churchyard miles north.

  As Eva’s scream began to falter, the whole room shook again, more stone cracking in multiple places, as if something was about to emerge from that great hole, which must descend at least a hundred feet.

  That was when I sung those words for a third time.

  “I dig all day and sometimes at night / To make enough money to limit my plight…”

  I was joined in my performance by that pig-woman hybrid howling from its/her cage nearby, and then my daughter, her terror subsiding, began to get a feel for the poem, adding a few phrases between lingering shrieks, sweetening each as they grew more familiar to her.

  “…But when I chanced upon a jewel like you / The darkness lifted and my efforts felt true.”

  Something in the gloom behind me burst through the floor with the violent crack of breaking concrete, but I didn’t turn to look. I heard my brother protesting at the approach of the corpse: his late father, influenced by his own poem now rendered positive again by song, coming to unleash its worst on him, something unthinkable that Dex would struggle to handle. But my eyes were fixated on my daughter.

  “Sing it again, Eva,” I called, and as that newly arrived intrusion in my peripheral vision began wriggling around the cellar in search of purchase or sustenance, my daughter and I dealt with our combined trauma by lapsing once more into combative singing.

  “I dig all day and sometimes at night / To make enough money to limit my plight / But when I chanced upon a jewel like you / The darkness lifted and my efforts felt true.”

  Once we’d finished, I turned to look at that presence rapidly destroying the cellar. Although dust had begun to bloom in the area, masking most of its activity, I eventually caught sight of a limb of sorts, around three feet in diameter and poking out of a fresh gap it had forged in the ground. I could tell it boasted claws, having seen one lash through debris it had raised, its spiked tip a savage glint. Despite this property being far away from the Dwelham woods, there was little doubt that these gut-spearing instruments were the same Dex had found there over twenty years ago.

  The invading appendage also bore many eyes along its length, each a blackish green and varying in size, but none smaller than my head. As the beast pushed this tiny part of itself farther into a world it had once occupied, long before humans had colonized the area, I noticed another feature: a long, labial slit along its back, bearing tiny teeth as sharp as razors. This raw opening leaked with frothing salivation, as if its owner hadn’t dined in millennia and would make use of any orifice to ingest foodstuff into its system. Perhaps, with all its sluggishly blind actions, it needed such fuel to fully reawaken.

  It would receive no further help from my daughter, who, even in proximity to the monster she’d once claimed to dream about, had responded with relief after observing that her mother had been left alone. For the next few minutes, we continued singing that song, whose words my father had composed, long before he’d got involved in this horrifying business. We strove hard to reinvest the poem with their original intention: innocent love, not hateful death.

  As that giant limb behind me started tearing larger grooves into the cellar’s floor (it was still mercifully out of reach of me, let alone all the figures behind cell bars), I wondered what other activities might occur elsewhere, whether such an intrusion was localized or happening all over the village, where that amateur map Peter March had provided had plotted the creature’s body, stretching from one end of the place to the other.

  But then I switched my attention back to that corner, where my father continued to approach my brother. Dex continued to protest, issuing remarks like, “Come on, you sadistic fucker! I’ll happily return you to the darkness!” which soon, possibly because he wasn’t equipped with a defensive tool, became less combative, maybe even defensive: “I…I had enough of your abuse as a…a child! I won’t take…any more!” Moments later, as the undead man finally reached him, my cattishly craven brother cried, “No! No, keep away from me!”

  Then, as the house above started pitching at foundation-shattering angles, forcing up clouds of dirt and debris, I witnessed an event that tore a hole inside me every bit as deep as the one in the earth behind, which had just allowed Dexter to awaken a world-destroying creature. This simply involved my dad—our dad—finally hugging his second-born son, an act that, had it ever been administered in the past, might have prevented all these horrors from manifesting.

  I felt the breath leave my body and stopped singing at once. I glanced away and noticed Eva had gone quiet, too. Moments later, I looked again at my brother and the half-decayed figure that had once been my dad. The living corpse still kept a firm hold on the boy who’d never properly grown up. Dex looked terrified, his eyes staring over one of the rotting man’s shoulders, but deep down I thought I perceived acceptance there, a need at last satisfied in the simplest and yet most convincing way possible: the love of a parent.

  But then, following the restless efforts of that single limb at work only yards across the cellar, all the masonry above collapsed upon them both, crushing each flat with a sound of breaking bones and blended flesh.

  This rumpus had an even wider impact, forcing new sections of the walls and ceiling to fall with a savage sequence of ear-breaking sounds. A stray lump of dislodged stone hit me on the head, and as I heard more of the building dropping, the last noise I detected before losing consciousness was my daughter screaming again through that sunken speaker, this time with even greater fervor.

  As the ground ruptured from beneath, there was no longer anything I could do about it.

  31

  I don’t know how much later it was before I awoke, but the first thing I noticed after opening my eyes and shaking agonizing pain from my skull was th
e bright light reputed to greet everyone upon their deaths. With a delirium bordering on concussion, I believed this was what had happened: I’d died, never to return to my splendid family life. But once I finally picked myself off the floor, I realized what had happened.

  My childhood home had been ripped apart. Daylight pushed through several gaps above me, all of which also let in countless snowflakes, whose kisses felt like fire on my face. It all came back to me, every vile terror that had occurred the previous evening: my brother’s impromptu plot, the terrifyingly familiar person he’d raised from the grave, my daughter’s shrill scream, and that creature’s limb tugged from some subterranean void.

  I felt my body tremble the way it had during most of these events. Still trying to suppress the worst part of last night—even worse than seeing my dad resurrected and what he’d threatened to do to my wife—I turned to observe the center of the cellar, where little light fell and all was still.

  Boxes and cages had been knocked over, and there was no activity from the hybrid creature I’d seen. But then my attention was drawn to that eye-laden, claw-tipped appendage standing erect in the cavity it had created in the floor, after punching through to the world following innumerable years of burial.

  It looked frozen, hanging in space like a model replica of some nightmare’s subject, its multiple peepers vacant and ghosted, extended mouth split open like a drugged animal’s.

  Maybe that was what had happened: while seeking food to help it to rise further, it had imbibed a chemical from Dex’s supplies, poisoning every inch of the body lying beneath the earth, just as it had been about to emerge with triumphant rage. This creator/hater of existence, this God of sex and death, had perhaps died only moments after it had been revived, leaving limited carnage in its wake.