by R. H. Dixon
Are they still there? Still watching me?
It was silent. Hard to tell.
Perhaps the mass visitation had been nothing more than a sleep-deprived, hunger-induced hallucination. Or manifestations of guilt summoned by her own death-wish.
No, the stink of decay was still there, clinging to the back of her nose. Death-flesh festering in a world it no longer belonged to. Ripe badness, a terrible smell she couldn’t ignore. The spirits had been as real as real could be. There was no denying them.
But had God answered her prayer? Had He made them go away?
‘Oh please be gone. Please be gone,’ she moaned, her breaths ragged with terror.
When still there was no sound and the complete quietude made her ears pound with the remembered noise of the exploding television and her nigh-on exploding heart, Sissy took a deep breath and opened her eyes.
Immediately she wished she hadn’t.
They were still there. All of them. Surrounding her bed. Watching. And worst of all, a naked woman was hunched on the bed before her. Straggly grey hair fell over her face and there was a feral quality to her demeanour as though she was a wild animal regarding its prey. The scream that formed in Sissy’s throat came out as no more than a strangulated whine, and she thought for a moment she might choke on her own tongue.
The phantom woman inched closer to Sissy, her insubstantial hands and knees making impossible indents on the bed, validating her presence. Sissy felt light-headed, but still her consciousness held tight.
Please, God, please, God, please, God.
Behind ratty strands of long old-woman’s hair, Sissy could see that the spectre’s eyes were like inkwells, black in their entirety. Her wrinkled corpse-face was unfamiliar and yet strangely familiar.
I don’t know all of your names. And I’m sorry that I don’t. But you…don’t I know you?
The old woman raked hair away from her face with gnarled, clawed fingers, as if to cure Sissy’s curiosity by revealing herself more clearly.
Sissy immediately gasped, the absolute recognition winding her.
‘Eleanor?’ The name cracked from Sissy’s throat like dry wood, sending splinters to lodge in her heart.
The phantom woman, a formidable younger version of Sissy herself, opened the black gash that was her mouth and grinned. Then bringing forth the smell of rotting flesh and sixty-four years’ worth of corruption, she crooned, ‘Yes, Mother.’
_
9
_
Several times John awoke disorientated, all too aware that he wasn’t in his own bed. An orange glow crept around the edges of drawn floral curtains, lingering as intractably as his own consciousness and lending enough light for him to see the smiling faces of his mother and Norman on the bedside table next to him. Turning onto his back he studied the light shade suspended from the ceiling. It looked like a dead jellyfish, greyscale and lacklustre, floating beneath artex ripples. It was one of those fabric dome structures with tassels around its circumference, which he remembered were popular in the eighties and nineties. He wondered if it was the same fixture that had been there when his dad had lived in the house, though surely not.
His thoughts stayed with his dad. He hadn’t spoken to Billy Gimmerick, not properly, since Seren was a toddler, just after Amy had passed away. Not because John held a grudge about what his dad had done to the family all those years ago, but because they were both lousy at staying in touch. John promised himself he’d make an effort to pay the old man a visit while he and Seren were in the vicinity. That is, if he could catch him while he wasn’t at the pub. His dad’s preferred pastime was drinking, alcohol being his remedial anaesthesia to matters of yesteryear. The irony of which didn’t surpass John.
Like father, like son.
Somewhere off in the distance he could hear a dog shouting and a house alarm wailing a repetitive plea to an uncaring night. Neither sound was loud enough to have roused him from sleep, but both were persistent enough to deter him from dropping back off. He tossed and turned. Turned and tossed. Water pipes somewhere above, in the loft, rattled a cooling noise of discord; a tick-tack-clang that heightened his awareness, again, of not being in his own bed.
John closed his eyes and concentrated on blotting out all sounds and emptying his mind of all thoughts, which proved to be an exercise in immediate defeat because the more he concentrated on concentrating on nothing at all the more he focussed on one sound over another. The wooo-ooo-wooo-ooo of the alarm and ruh-ruh-ruh of the dog. And when the water pipes stopped groaning a different sound took their place. Bzzzzzzzp. Bzzzz. Bzzz-bzzz-bzzzzzzp. A fly must have found its way into the bedroom at some point and was trapped between white net and impenetrable windowpane. It had chosen now of all times to make a useless bid for freedom.
Bzzzzz. Bzzz. Bzzzp.
John gripped the duvet and tugged it up to his chin, mindful now of a growing chill – a chill characteristic of November, not July. He rolled onto his side, wrapping himself tightly and bringing his knees up to his chest, foetal position, then submerged the lower part of his face beneath the duvet. Exhaling deeply through his mouth he tried to heat the space within the cotton cocoon he’d created, but after ten minutes of breathing heavily and listening to the fly’s kazooing, he was still tense with coldness and more awake than ever. Sleep wasn’t revisiting any time soon.
Fuck’s sake!
John cast the sheets aside and sat up, his bare skin tightening uncomfortably with exposure to the room’s unseasonal cold, a rash of gooseflesh pricking up all over his body. Shuddering, he snatched his robe from the bedpost and flung it around himself.
Bzzzzz. Bzzzzp. Bzzp. Bzzzzzzz.
Frigging fly.
He marched over to the window and dragged the flowery curtains along the curtain pole before sweeping aside the lacy netting behind. A plump black speck skittered across the white sill. It skimmed over his fingers, tickling and offending him with its unwelcome touch. John flung the window open and chased the fly out into the night with the back of his hand. Its departure was an instant relief. He stood unmoving for a moment, looking out at the garden below, expecting a greater chilliness to slap him in the face. But there was a stillness to the orange darkness of the front street, a warmth which contradicted the morgue-like cold of his mother’s bedroom.
The insistence of the barking dog and faraway house alarm could be heard with defined precision now the window was open, both sounds lending a sinister undertone to the night because, evidently, all was not well on someone else’s doorstep. Just left of his mother’s house, where the railway bridge began and the streetlights ended, everything was doused in thick shadow. Clouds blocked the moon’s natural light, creating an eerie landscape of unknowableness. Residential area and wilderness had become two separate entities. Off in the distance, somewhere, the sea was black, camouflaged against darkest sky. There was no knowing where one ended and the other began. It was at that moment, while gazing into the night’s umbra, that a sobering thought occurred to John: Anything could be lurking out there.
The barking dog already knew it.
Overcome with an unshakeable, discomfiting sense that someone he couldn’t see was looking right back at him from the blackness down by the bridge, or somewhere along the railway embankment, John shivered. Unease, similar to what he’d felt when he’d returned to Horden the previous day, was charged with such negativity that his scalp began to tingle and he felt short of breath. The threat of something unseen, something unknown, overwhelmed him to the point of irrational fear; a silent, stealthy predator stalking him in the dark, or a childhood bogeyman hiding beneath the bridge, waiting, watching, breathing. Whatever it was that caused him to feel this way, primal instinct was now grabbing him by the throat and screaming at him, telling him he was in danger. Warning him that unseen eyes were mocking and taunting, waiting for the right time, the right moment…
To do what?
He didn’t know.
Ghost fingers crawled a spidery
trail up his spine, making him shudder. He clapped the window shut and stepped backwards, swishing the curtains closed against the night. Running a cold hand over his face, he gasped for air.
Jesus, get a grip.
Exhaling heavily, he leant against the wall, listened to his heart whumping and shivered against the cold.
Go put the heating on and get yourself a drink. Then have a bloody word with yourself.
Out on the landing a smell redolent of household rubbish and bad meat caught John off guard. A dirty blow to the gut that knocked him sick as soon as he stepped out of the bedroom. The smell wasn’t the worst of it either. A long grey shape swayed about in front of him, making him recoil in abject terror. Two hind legs and a tail that stretched down from a slender torso immediately identified the suspended entity as being the body of his mother’s dog Otis. The lurcher’s neck was crooked, bent at an awkward angle, his leather lead had been wrapped around his neck several times and was attached to the brass bolt of the loft hatch. He’d been hanged. And gutted. The lower half of the dog’s body was festooned with its own glistening entrails, and a steady blop, blop, blop filled John’s head as blood dripped down onto a saturated dark spot on the carpet.
Clamping one hand over his mouth to stifle a cry, John scrabbled around the wall with the other to find the light switch. When his fingers found it and stark light filled the landing, he was both relieved and appalled by what he saw. There was nothing but empty landing space. His mother’s dog wasn’t hanging from the loft hatch. Nor was there a pool of blood spoiling the beige carpet.
The taste of bile soured his mouth and John thought he might be sick. The grisly image of Otis with gaping intestinal tract, broken neck and lifeless eyes remained distinct in his head. Every single bit of it. Ingrained there forever. In fact the vision, or hallucination, had been so graphic and clear he felt shocked beyond comprehension that it wasn’t real. And the smell. The bad smell was still there. Lingering. That part was indisputable. But after looking about the landing there was no obvious clue as to what might be causing it. Flicking the light off, in case it disturbed Seren, he stood in the dark and massaged his forehead.
Keep it together, mate. Just keep it together.
Downstairs the severity of the fluorescent strip light in the kitchen prompted Mindy to look at John and groan. The whipplington was lying on a large bone-printed beanbag next to the dining table. At first John was alarmed to see that Otis wasn’t lying with her, but then he saw the grey lurcher over by the back door, sitting on the doormat. Alive and unbloodied.
‘You need to be out, fella?’ he said, feeling the need to speak aloud just to inject a smidgen of normality into the room with the sound of his own voice.
Otis whined.
John opened the back door and both dogs shot outside. He watched their light forms mooching about on the driveway till they moved round to the lawn at the front of the house, then he stepped outside and followed them, walking down the path till he got to the gate. He stood looking seaward, directly into the black, challenging himself not to be intimidated by whatever unseen threat he’d imagined before.
See, nothing there.
Earlier he’d taken Seren over the bridge, past the allotments and onto the field beyond. The dogs had had a good blast in the long grass while he and Seren had walked to the edge of the beach banks to look at the yellow sand and pebbles down below. The beach was cleaner than he’d ever known it to be; miles of shale with no hint of black coal. Seren had wanted to climb down the banks, but the rain had drenched the tops of her jeans so he’d insisted they go back to the house. On the return walk they'd stopped to look at some New Hampshire Reds that were strutting and bawking beneath a corrugated iron shelter in someone’s allotment. And strangely, now, looking down across the bridge, John found himself thinking about those chickens.
It was hard to imagine that all the allotments were full of unassuming things such as the chickens. Leafy veg, brightly coloured water vats, other livestock and delicate flowers. Or, indeed, that the field behind was luscious green. Night had stolen all the charm away from this place of grandfathers’ favourite pastimes, making the allotments an eerie place where the chickens probably slept warily in their coops, waiting for morning, and where yellow chrysanthemums didn’t even exist, John thought. Because if something can’t be seen then it ceases to exist. At night-time there were only grey chrysanthemums.
A lone star low in the sky, or a ship at sea, shone like a beacon for lost souls. It caught John’s eye and winked. Apart from this tiny light on the horizon, everything to the east dwelt in shadow. And it was this substantial blackness that gave John cause to reconsider the idea that anything could be lurking out there. But standing out in the open he didn’t have the same feeling of foreboding that he’d had in his mother’s bedroom. He felt calm. Alert, but calm.
The sound of an engine and muffled late-night radio made him turn his head. A car had turned into the street, its headlights reaching as far as the stretch of pavement outside his mother’s garden. A white taxi cab pulled in some way down the road and the front passenger door swung open. John could hear a woman talking loudly over the top of Phil Collins begging for one more night. He watched disinterestedly as a figure with long black hair and a dress that could be any colour stepped from the car. She staggered sideways, steadying herself on the side of the car. Then tottering back to the open door, she leaned down and said to the driver, ‘Aye, I’ll be alright, Mick. It’s these bloody shoes, man. Murder.’ She said something else which John didn’t catch, then slammed the door shut. Before passing through a gate a few doors down she looked up the street, her eyes faltering on John. He continued to watch openly as she walked the length of the garden path, her murderous heels scraping concrete. Less than a minute later a house door banged shut.
A drive belt screeched and commanded John to watch as the taxi reversed from the street. The sound of Phil Collins had been replaced by a couple of radio hosts whose voices were nothing more than a low murmur of unintelligible conversation, which, for whatever reason, made John think of dead people mumbling; smothered voices coming through on death-plane radio waves, having found their way into the periphery of reachability to convey messages to the living through the chasms of non-space only to get caught up in the magnitude of non-belief and misinterpretation.
Yep. Keep trying. I can’t hear you.
A gust of wind whistled through the laurel hedge at the far side of the garden, whipping up rose bushes and ruffling the lawn. It hit John, surprising him with a sharpness that cut straight through the fleecy fabric of his robe. He hugged himself and looked round. Both dogs were waiting by the back door, their tails between their legs. Happy to oblige their request to be let in, John jogged back up the garden path.
Inside he fiddled with the thermostat on the kitchen wall and it wasn’t long before the boiler hummed to life and the nearby radiator clunked and then churned with the sound of water and air heating. He chugged Southern Comfort straight from the bottle then switched out the light. On his way back to bed, he stopped halfway up the stairs. The malodorous smell from earlier remained. Like stagnant water, nauseating in its persistence. And there was a sound now too. Gripping the balustrade to steady himself in the darkness, John tilted his head and listened. There was a low voice, incomprehensible but rapid – urgent, almost – coming from upstairs. He imagined Seren sitting up in bed, make-believe conversing with Petey Moon.
Inching up the stairs, careful to avoid the ones with loose boards, he continued to listen to his daughter's whispering. By the time he got to the landing she had fallen quiet. Must have heard him coming. He paused outside her room, his ear to the door. All he could hear was his own pronounced breathing above the weighty silence that ensued. Slowly, softly, he twisted the handle and pushed the door inwards. And instantly he knew there was something wrong.
The smell from the landing was stronger and much more putrid in here, testing the strength of his gag reflex and souring the
whiskey liqueur in his belly. An icy surge of wintry cold air enveloped him, and he exhaled swirling grey vapours from his mouth with a low moan.
‘Seren?’ His voice came out as a hoarse whisper, as though his usual timbre couldn’t quite cut through the spoiled, freezing air. ‘Are you awake?’
The question was met by silence. Not even the sound of his daughter’s breathing could be heard. He went over to the bed and found his little girl sprawled on top of the sheets, her eyes closed.
‘Seren?’
When she still didn’t react to his voice, he leaned over and touched her cheek with the backs of his fingers. Astonishingly she was warm. He waited a moment, expecting to see the smallest of smiles crease the sides of her mouth. Or her eyelids to quiver as she peeked at him from beneath her lashes. But her expression remained neutral and her chest rose and fell, keeping the same deep, regulated pattern. Covering her with the duvet, he went to the window. Despite the coldness, he was keen to rid the room of its awful stink. He cracked the window open and breathed in deeply.
Turning back to face the room, the glossy shine of the white radiator caught his eye. When he ran a hand over its bevelled surface it felt like a sheet of crimped ice against his palm. He turned the temperature valve clockwise as far as it would go then winced as the radiator rattled to life with all the brashness of loose change chinking into the metal tray of a slot machine. Gritting his teeth together, he looked over at Seren. She didn’t stir.
Leaving her door slightly ajar, John went back to his own bed. Beyond exhausted, yet wide awake. Beneath the duvet he lay listening to the house shift and sigh in response to the central heating, while his thoughts ran amok. Unwelcome images of Otis hanging from the loft hatch kept popping into his head. Blop, blop, blop all over his mother’s carpet. Who would do such a thing? The bzzzz bzzzzp bzzz of a fly that was no longer there. And radio hosts whispering till his eyes grew heavy: Do you remember when…? The shame of…How could you? Don’t blame…You didn’t really…I need you…She needs you…Always…Cold…Don’t…What about me…? You mustn’t…Stop…Remembering. Love.
