Hungry Hearts

by Gary McMahon

  But he’d realised the lie years before, as soon as he was old enough to think for himself; and instead of making him angry it had made him laugh.

  The photograph in the frame was a mock-up. Upon close inspection, it became obvious that the man had been cut out of a magazine and pasted next to Mother. She’d done a careful job that held up to distant inspection, but when you looked closer the colours didn’t match; the man’s image was slightly less faded than hers.

  Daryl had seen the man on television when he was young, and at school, and then in newspapers, in retrospective documentaries and articles about American politics. Yet somehow he had not made the connection until long after he should have done. The man’s name was Richard Nixon; he had been the President of the United States before Daryl was even born.

  Shaking his head, he smiled at the fact that he’d believed Mother’s story for more years than he liked to admit. What else had she lied about? What other stories had she fabricated to cover up the signs of her own madness?

  He put the photo frame back in its rightful place, adjusting it to the same angle it always occupied, with Nixon smiling towards Mother’s bed, hands held up in his famous victory salute. When Daryl raised his eyes he saw movement outside, on next door’s lawn. He moved closer to the window and craned his neck, staring down into the neighbour’s garden.

  Two figures were tussling on the lawn. Initially, Daryl suspected they were intruders, but soon realised that one of the figures was Mr. Willows. He’d never particularly liked the old man, but nor did he have any real reason to hate him. He was just some nosey old geezer who lived on the same street.

  Daryl watched with interest. Mr. Willows was caught up in some kind of wrestling match with a woman dressed in a white smock. The woman was very thin, her arms and legs like tinder sticks. Her hair was patchy, showing pink flashes of scalp, and her mouth was open wide in a ferocious snarl.

  The woman was Mrs. Willows.

  She had been dead for eight weeks. Mother had been upset because she was too ill to make it to the funeral.

  “Help!” Mr. Willows was shouting, straight-arming Mrs. Willows, one hand planted firmly on her flattened chest to keep her at bay. “Please... help!” he looked up, directly at Daryl, and when their eyes met Mr. Willows began to shake his head and shout even louder. “Daryl! For God’s sake... help me... Daryl!”

  Daryl cocked his head to one side. He was fascinated. Was this some sort of delirium vision, a hallucination brought on by excessive stress? It had happened before, on several occasions, and he knew enough about his mental condition to be certain that it was associated with his repressed urges to commit murder.

  “Hello, Mr. Willows,” he said softly, and smiled.

  Mr. Willows’ eyes widened when he realised that Daryl would offer no help. The strength seemed to go out of him then, and his face deflated like a popped balloon. His cheeks sunk, hugging bone, his eyes receded into his skull, and his arm slackened, bending at the elbow.

  Mrs. Willows lunged forward, her teeth bared, and latched onto her husband’s throat. Mr. Willows sunk to his knees, his legs buckling beneath the weight of his dead wife.

  Daryl continued to watch with interest as Mrs. Willows tore out the old man’s throat, greedily gulping down pieces of his wrinkled flesh. When she started on the wizened face, Daryl looked away.

  Mother moaned. It was a small sound, tiny really, but enough to announce her returning consciousness. Daryl looked back to the window, at the scene outside, and saw Mrs. Willows shambling clumsily across the lawn towards her house. She was carrying Mr. Willows’ severed right arm; it dangled from her hand like a toy. The old man’s remains lay unmoving on the grass near a tall rose bush – the same rose bush Mrs. Willows had tended lovingly every day when she’d been alive.

  “Is this it, Mother?”

  Mother did not reply.

  “Is this the End of Days you were always rattling on about? The Book of Revelations, the Great Beast, the Reckoning? Is this what your Bible warned you about, the hour when we will all be judged as unworthy?”

  There was nothing – not even the slightest movement – from where Mother lay, dying and withering on her sick bed.

  “Despite your lies and your myth-making, it looks like you were right all along. And the best thing is, you’re too fucking ill to see it. Your beloved apocalypse, the time you’ve prayed for, begged for, believed in for so long.”

  Breaking glass. A distant explosion. Was that a series of gunshots?

  “It’s here. It’s happening. Your best, most hoped-for dream. This is the end of it all.”

  Mother did not say a word, but he imagined her cold, hard, brittle laughter, could almost hear it echoing through the empty rooms and hallways of the house. He was surprised and shaken to find that the sound comforted him.

  He left Mother’s room and went downstairs, shrugging on his coat at the front door. He opened the door a fraction, peering outside. Something was calling him, a sense of death, the essence of murder. He could smell, taste, hear it; death was so strong, so heavy, that it was like a giant striding through the night.

  He could not possibly stay indoors when there was so much to be seen out there, so many fantasies to be acted out on the vast canvas of darkness.

  He stepped outside into the chilly air, fastening his jacket. He’d neglected to bring a weapon – perhaps a knife for self-protection – but something told him that he would not need it... something old and weighty: a terrible presence long hidden beneath the weight of his life that was only now stirring, lifting its shaggy head up into the meagre light to taste the potential for mayhem.

  He walked along the street, glancing at the houses on either side. Shadows danced beyond the windows, people embracing or rushing to shore up their homes against whatever was abroad in the night. Daryl did not fear this; he was rejoicing in the chaos he could sense around him.

  A young woman in a nurse’s uniform approached him at speed. She was running, one shoe missing and her stockings torn, her short chestnut hair in disarray. “Oh, thank God,” she said, clutching at him. Her fingernails were painted bright red. Her hands were tiny, but the fingers were long. Daryl took in every detail, breathed in each vapour. She was wearing a fruity scent, something fresh and modern, not at all like the stale, cloying floral perfumes Mother always used to mask her unhealthy body odour.

  “They’re chasing me. Three of them. In rags. Blood... covered in blood. Something going on. Riots. Killing.” The girl was breathless, her words coming out like garbled haiku. She had barely even noticed Daryl; he was just a body to cling to in her terror. “They came out of the hospital. The morgue.”

  Terror.

  “I’ve been knocking on doors but no one would answer. Everybody ignored me...”

  This was exactly what he sought: pure, undiluted terror. It tasted sweet, like honey, but possessed a wonderfully bitter aftertaste.

  “Oh, yes,” he muttered, reaching out a hand to stroke the girl’s hair. Her boyish fringe had fallen across her lovely green eyes, obscuring them. Daryl thought of a quote often attributed to the famous American killer Ed Gein, something about whenever he saw a pretty girl part of him would imagine taking her out to dinner, sitting with her eating a nice meal. Another part of him always wondered what her head would look like mounted on a stick. “I see it,” he said. “The fear. The potential.”

  For the first time since approaching Daryl, the young girl looked at him. She stared into his face, his eyes. Whatever she saw there, it scared her even more than her pursuers. She took a quick step back, almost turning the ankle of her shoed foot, and twisted into a shoulder-high privet hedge that ran along the front of someone’s property.

  Daryl stepped towards her, his skin tingling, fingertips on fire. Everything he’d planned and dreamed of was right here for the taking. The girl’s features blurred, becoming indistinct, and another face overlaid hers like a fine line tracing. It was a familiar face, but one he’d only ever seen from
a distance. A face he had coveted, along with the body it crowned, for too long.

  The streetlights went out. An unholy roaring erupted from somewhere along the street. More rapid gunshots.

  The girl screamed, breaking the moment and bringing Daryl out of his trance. She turned and ran back in the direction she’d come from, kicking off her shoe, her arms waving in the air. It seemed that she’d rather face whatever she’d been fleeing than remain with Daryl, the man she’d mistaken as a saviour.

  Veering out into the road, the girl ran directly into the path of a speeding car. It took her down instantly, dragging her beneath the wheels and swerving, careering into a low stone wall at the street corner. The driver shot out through the windscreen, trailing a skirt of shattered glass. His body fell heavily, limbs loose and broken.

  Daryl walked away, feeling more alive than he had in years. More alive than he had in his entire life until this moment, this glorious moment where he stood directly in the gaze of something majestic and so much larger than himself. His calling had come at last. After decades of dissecting stolen house pets, masturbating over pictures of corpses clipped from medical textbooks and pushing, pushing, towards some dimly realised goal, his time had come.

  Daryl’s head was filled with another image of Sally Nutman. He pictured her standing before him, unravelled, her skin punctured by his blades and the holes overflowing with his seed, babies of corruption being born through the wounds they had created together. She smiled; her teeth were eyes, her lips were the fingers of Mother’s fist opening, parting, taking him in hand...

  When he got back to the house he went to the kitchen and drank a glass of water. He put his head under the tap, washing away the stinking sweat of lust, the filth of transformation, and then climbed the stairs to his room.

  He stared at the photograph of Sally Nutman, licked it, and pressed it against his face, his chest, his aching erection – the first one he’d had in months. Then he placed it on the bed and bowed down before it, paying homage to the woman who had stepped forward from the crowd to offer herself up as his first victim, taking his cherry and allowing him into a select brotherhood.

  Faces stared down from his walls, their lips moving in silence: praying to a new young god in the making. Ed Gein. Jeffrey Dahmer. Dennis Nilsen. Peter Sutcliffe. Countless others; his chosen audience.

  Daryl dragged an old, battered cardboard suitcase from under his bed, threw it down on the divan. Then, moving slowly and with much reverence, he popped the clasps and laid out the contents on the mattress. He looked at them with an almost religious awe, the same expression Mother had on her face whenever she saw the Pope on television.

  Daryl had bought most of these things on the Internet. They’d been delivered right to his door. It was funny how the methods of murder were so easily obtainable, like an order of groceries or a print run of self-help books.

  He giggled, and then stopped himself, aware of the stern and disapproving eyes that stared down from his walls. This, he knew, was serious business.

  Twines of good grade fishing line. Two rolls of duct tape. Several short lengths of industrial strength bungee. A long hunting knife with a serrated blade, a tool generally used for gutting wildlife. A thin-bladed flensing knife.

  These were Daryl’s chosen tools of his wished-for trade, the artefacts of his dark religion. His ritual would be carried out using these perfect objects, each ideally suited to its particular task. He had practised often on Mother as she lay there dying, trussing her up and sealing her mouth, and only drawing back moments before the kill. Yes, a real victim would struggle more, but that would only add to the power of the moment, the intensity of the event.

  Soon the act would be over; he could take off the mask and become his true self, the being which had been growing inside him for so long. The butterfly could emerge from the pupa. The hatchling would come scrabbling out to dine for the first time on the manna of the world.

  No more pretending. No more faking it. Soon, and for the first time since childhood, Daryl would know what it was like to feel.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “WHAT THE HELL’S going on, sir?” Rick was standing on the grass verge, bathed in flashing blue light. The sirens were off but the warning lights pulsed, pulsed, forcing an unwanted rhythm inside his brain. He stared at D.I. Harper, meeting the man’s gaze, and refused to budge an inch.

  “I dunno, son. This whole thing is a fucking mess.” The big man shook his head, a sad look in his eyes. He was losing his grip, approaching an edge that he had previously skirted with ease.

  “But... but what we saw in there, what we did. That wasn’t normal. Any of it. There were people... dead people... fuck me, sir, you know what I’m talking about.” Rick tensed his jaw, maintaining his gaze, flexing his fingers over the handle of the holstered Glock. It was a nervous habit, one he’d only just acquired. He wondered if it would be a keeper.

  “Dead folk?” said D.I. Harper, his face a weird colour in the glow of the emergency lights. “Is that what you mean? Dead folk getting up and attacking us? Even our own men.”

  Men and women in uniform – police, ambulance, fire crew – were busying themselves at the scene, moving in well choreographed routines to secret music that Rick was unable to hear. His waltz was done, for now; but he was certain that it was too early to put away his dance shoes.

  “Like I said, it’s a mess.” D.I. Harper had softened. His voice was low, slightly menacing, as if he were sharing a grim secret.

  “What do you think caused all this?” Rick finally broke his gaze, glancing around at the activity. From the outside it no doubt looked frenetic, unfocused, but in reality everyone had a job to do and knew exactly what was expected of them.

  D.I. Harper lit up a short fat cigar with a battered tin lighter. He rolled the lighter in his beefy hand, rubbing its well-worn surface with his fingers, as if it meant something to him – a gift, a memento. “My guess is that I have no guess. We could be looking at a new virus, or chemical warfare, even some sort of mass hallucination. But this is happening all over the city – all over the country. I suspect tonight is the culmination of events that have gone on for days, maybe even weeks.”

  Rick blinked, his eyes stinging from the smoke they’d run through inside the building. He was still focused, still in fighting mode, but some of his reflexes had slackened. “What are you saying, sir?”

  D.I. Harper shook his massive head. His eyes were like those of a wise old dog, one that’s seen just about everything the world has to offer yet is still capable of registering surprise. “Call me a conspiracy freak if you like, but this is too damn strange for my liking. It could have been anything, really. Bugs. Space aliens. That experiment over in France, the one they rigged up to re-enact the Big Bang. Fucking hell, it could even be some kind of Internet super-virus aimed at Bill Gates for all we know!”

  Rick knew that he should think his superior officer’s wild theories funny, but he couldn’t find it in himself to laugh. The things he’d seen, the bloodshed he’d been part of... none of it made sense, not in a sane world. Maybe this was the result of something being passed through the world’s computers, or a mutated virus let loose during illegal genetic experimentation. Who knew? Not him; not them. Nor was it their job to know, or to even think. Their job was to clear up the mess. To always, always just keep the hell quiet and clear up other people’s messes.

  Dark clouds passed overhead, their shapes writhing in the sky like stricken behemoths. The air turned damp, edgy. It would rain soon, possibly even snow. Rick thought of Sally, sitting there at home worrying, watching the news reports of all this madness and checking all the doors and windows.

  He excused himself and walked to the edge of the building. Two men were loading a body onto a gurney, strangely silent as they worked. The body was covered in a white sheet with red stains. Near the top of the body, the sheet was a lot flatter than it should be. Rick wondered if the corpse was that of his friend Hutch.

  H
e leaned against the wall and retrieved his mobile phone from a zippered pocket in his trouser leg. He took off his glove using his teeth, and then switched on the handset. The screen glowed, faintly at first but then brighter as the battery warmed up. When he was asked for his password he typed in the appropriate digits and waited for the handset to allow him to access the phone’s memory.

  The light grew brighter, stuttered, and then began to fade. He had two new messages, each of them from Sally. He listened to them both and smiled at the sound of her voice. She seemed wary but not terrified; worried but nowhere near to panic.

  He dialled his home number.

  A message appeared on the screen:

  No network coverage.

  He tried again and got the same result. Either everyone was clogging up the satellite relays and ringing their loved ones, or there was a problem with the signal. Of the two options, he preferred the former. It was easier to remain calm and focused if he thought that the reason he was unable to contact his wife was because the networks were busy – just like they got on the big holidays like New Year’s Eve and Christmas Day – rather than imagining that the entire satellite grid had gone down.

  Rick returned the handset to his pocket, forcing himself to remain in control. It was crucial that he was in charge of his emotions. He’d seen too many good men go down because they lost their heads in a crisis.

  Like Hutch. He’d certainly lost his head in this crisis.

  Not funny. Not fucking funny at all.

  He stepped away from the building and joined a group of men he knew from his unit. They were jogging round to the back, checking that the perimeter was still secure. This was what he needed: routine, training; the ability to focus on his job, no matter how insane the situation. It had kept him alive in Afghanistan, and saved his skin in Iraq. Now it would keep him going long enough to get to Sally, and he’d work the rest out then, once she was in his arms, the warmth of her breath against his neck.