by Anton Palmer
“You filthy fucking bastard!” McManus screamed at him, his disgust igniting a new found strength of venom. The cane hit the tailbone, again and again, stripping away flesh to reveal the gleaming white vertebrae. The assault continued, the cane whacking against bone until the bamboo began to split at its end. The signals to the nerves in the boy’s legs were finally jammed by the swelling of his injured spinal cord and he collapsed into a puddle of his own blood and shit.
But still, McManus’ fury was not spent. Grabbing the boy from the floor he threw him face down onto the desk like a slab of meat.
MORE BLOOD!
“More?”
McManus screamed at the top of his lungs, the veins on his neck pulsating, his face purple-black with rage, sweat dripping from his brow. “You want more?” He pushed the splintered tip of the cane into Curtis’ anus, blood lubricating its entry. “I’ll give you fucking more…” He thrust the cane with all his strength into the boy’s rectum, bearing down with his body weight. The bamboo burst through the wall of Curtis’ colon, dark blood mixed with liquid excreta, pumping in thick, foetid gouts from his anus. The headmaster bore down harder, forcing the cane onwards, piercing the loops and coils of intestine, rupturing the stomach and liver before finally tearing out through the boy’s neck, above his left clavicle.
McManus stared at the ruined body on his desk.
Blood and waste matter smothered the wood, soaking into exercise books and paperwork, running off the edges into dark pools on the floorboards beneath. He tugged hard on the end of his cane, twisting and pulling until it eventually slipped free from the body’s anus, stinking lumps of god knows what plopping out of the raw, gaping hole after it.
McManus stepped towards his desk drawer to pull out the whisky he kept secreted within. A floorboard squeaked under his foot, two dark knots in the grain staring up at him for a second before they disappeared beneath a splash of blood seeping from the desk. Swallowing the contents in several gulps, the liquid burning its way down his gullet, he tossed the empty bottle into the bin under the desk and held his beloved cane up before him. He allowed most of its gore-slicked length to slip through his palm, grabbing it tight six inches before reaching the shattered end. The broken shards had rendered the tip as sharp as a razor, little strings of viscera hanging from sticking out splinters.
The headmaster placed the pointed tip against the hollow beneath his Adam’s apple and, with two hands gripping the cane, pulled it hard and fast into his throat.
6
With planning permissions still to be confirmed, the demolition crews were, as yet, a far-off threat. Unofficial deconstruction, however, had begun almost as soon as Chillingworth House had been vacated. Vandals had put through almost every window - jagged holes corrupting the glass panes, allowing the frosted night air to seep in.
It was cold.
It was hungry.
For as long as it could remember there had always been a plentiful supply of food. The classrooms had provided a buffet of young emotions and energies; adolescent yearnings and furies upon which it could feed, and occasionally, raw hatreds and hormonal lusts that it could use to provide a feast of spilled blood.
But now, six months had passed since the building’s closure. Six months without food and it had slowly starved.
Now it was weak.
It was dying.
*
“Do you think it’s safe?”
Tommy Marshall turned to his smaller companion. “Course it is. They haven’t started taking it apart yet.”
Malcolm Hall wasn’t reassured. “But won’t there be alarms and stuff?”
“Nah! There’s fuck all of value in there now…probably just a load of old books and shit that nobody wants. Come on, we can get in through here.”
The two boys were standing outside a ground floor window around the back of Chillingworth House – away from the road and prying eyes. The window was in the same sorry state as the rest: remnants of glass jutting in lethal shards from leprous frames. Scanning the darkness around him, Tommy spotted a broken plastic chair in a porch way and instructed Malcolm to go get it.
As he handed the cracked, three-legged seat to his friend, Malcolm stepped back a couple of paces, anticipating what was to happen next.
“Watch yourself, Malc!” Tommy swung the chair back and forth across the window, smashing out the last remaining shards of glass, and, with the paint-flecked frames rendered harmless, he stretched a black-leathered arm through to unlock the latch, allowing him to lift the lower portion of the window, easing his entry. Leaning as far over the ledge as he could, Tommy lifted his right foot. “Give us a bunk up, Malc.”
Malcolm’s face registered a grimace that was an equal mix of effort and distaste as he gripped Tommy’s cold, wet boot, lifting him up through the window. Once inside, the bigger lad returned the favour, grabbing his friend’s belt and dragging him up and over the window ledge.
With both boys inside, Tommy pulled a small torch from his inside jacket pocket and flicked the switch. The batteries were on their last legs and the bulb cast a dull yellow glow over floorboards that looked as if they had long ago forgotten the taste of varnish - as if the building had been deserted for years rather than mere months.
Malcolm scanned around, his eyes scouring the dimly lit classroom. “Wow…don’t it look different now it’s empty? Looks twice the size…”
“Yeah…” Tommy wrinkled his nose, “still stinks the fucking same, though.” He strode over to the empty space at the front of the room where a blackboard used to be and picked up a wooden-handled board rubber from its little shelf on the wall, where it had been left – unwanted.
“YOU BOY!” Tommy’s voice boomed around the classroom shell, “STOP TALKING!”
He threw the board rubber hard against the far wall where it impacted in a cloud of chalk dust.
“Yeah…I can still hear old Jenkins voice now. Nearly took my head off with that thing…fucking psycho bastard.”
*
It stirred from its slumber, its senses aroused by the presence of the two boys.
Of food.
It felt their thoughts; their heat; the blood rushing through their veins – and its hunger raged. The taste of sustenance had fired it and it sloughed off the shroud of starvation-induced sleep…a sleep it had never expected to wake from.
Salvation was at hand: the slow death it had resigned itself to wait for slipping away with this new chance of survival.
Now, fully awake, it stretched, flexing the stiffness from its limbs.
*
Malcolm Hall’s heart jumped, missed a beat, and then returned with a vengeance, hammering like crazy behind his ribs.
“What the fuck was that?”
“What?”
“I heard something…upstairs, I think.”
A sharp cracking sound ripped through the walls and a roar like thunder boomed across the ceiling over the boy’s heads.
“Fucking hell!”
Malcolm ran for the window but was dragged back, choking, as he was grabbed around the throat.
7
As Roger was swept deeper into the tunnel, the intensity of the light diminished a little, a small circle of luminescence in the distance serving as a reminder of the brilliance at the entrance. The tunnel walls appeared to consist of some kind of viscous vapour, wavering and undulating around him like living wallpaper-paste. He reached out a hand, skimming a wall with his fingertips. The vapour felt thick and cool, almost clammy; like a cold sweat.
His journey towards the light must have been progressing quicker than he realised, the bright circle at the tunnel’s end growing rapidly larger and he was suddenly aware of the sound of voices.
Many voices.
As the noise grew louder he was reminded of a football stadium, the shouting and singing of thousands.
Were these voices shouting or singing?
He couldn’t tell. The myriad cries seemed as one, a thick, swirling soup of sound.
A choir of angels waiting to greet him?
The circle of light seemed now only yards away, the tunnel walls thinning a little as it got closer. Roger could see shadowy forms beyond the membranous vapour, grey figures that merged into one then broke apart, as if a crowd was surging and seething around him. As the walls grew still thinner, the voices became clearer. Shouting, wailing, crying: anguished and pitiful. The shadowy forms beyond the walls were also becoming sharper. He could make out humanoid shapes: heads, arms, legs…
“GRAB THE FUCKER!”
The voice was loud and crisp, full of anger. A dozen pairs of arms suddenly stretched through the wall, clouds of heavy vapour swirling around them as they broke through. Desperate fingers clutched at him dragging him away from the light and into the cold, thick fog.
The landscape on the other side was, for an instant, as dazzling in its darkness as the tunnel had been in its brilliance. The world around him was a canvas of grey and black. Boulders and rocks littered a plateau stretching towards huge granite mountains that towered into a hideous sky where black clouds smothered a firmament of deep crimson, churning like cooling lava, thunder roaring in the distance. The air was thick with a gritty dust that swirled all about him, scouring his skin, little twisters sprouting here and there before being blown asunder by freezing gusts.
“Over here!”
The hands pulled and pushed him towards a large grey boulder, slamming his back hard against it. The impact jarred his spine, the back of his head cracking against the rock. Roger felt both alarm and surprise that he could feel pain again, the revelation waking his senses and loosening his tongue.
“What the hell is going on? Where am I?”
“Not quite hell. But close enough for most.” The angry voice again.
A tall figure stepped forward from the sprawling throng that had massed around him. As the form approached, Roger could see it was a man; or at least, what was left of a man. His body was barely clothed, tattered rags hanging from his shoulders and waist, the scraps of filthy, dust-encrusted cloth barely covering his nakedness. The man’s skin was in a similar sorry state; scoured away by the grit laden gusts, revealing strands of muscle beneath. Across his broad chest, even the muscle had been eaten away, rib bones clearly visible in the dim light and, as Roger looked closer, he could see the dust was at work on these too.
Looking around at the assembled masses, he could see the others were similarly afflicted to varying degrees. Some were barely marked, the skin on their faces showing some early signs of erosion, their clothing mostly intact, just a few places looking a little more threadbare than they should. Others were in an even worse state than the angry man who stood before him. One figure in particular, impossible to tell whether male or female, was being supported by two others, this tortured soul’s body little more than a skeleton held together by fraying strips of sinew. Clearly, some of these people had been here longer than others.
What happens to them in the end? Roger wondered.
“Dust.”
Roger raised his gaze to the angry man, puzzled.
“The answer to your question. They, we, eventually crumble into dust. The very dust that eats away at us consists of the remains of the millions who came before us, they themselves eaten by dust and into dust.”
“Where is this place?”
“Somewhere between Heaven and Hell, or at least, between the mortal world and the afterlife. A place for those who cannot accept that they’re dead, or those that still have unfinished business to tend to and can’t let go of the ties to their previous existence - which is why you are here.”
“Why I’m here? But I have accepted my death. I have no unfinished business, as you put it.”
“Ah…but that’s where you are quite mistaken. You have lots of unfinished business – our unfinished business!”
“What are you talking about?”
“You owe us, Roger Davies. We know all about you. You and your special gift.”
Roger was taken aback.
“When you were exploiting your abilities, your thoughts reached out to contact the dead in the afterlife. Trouble is, it’s impossible to reach them there, your thoughts stopped here. And we heard them. It seems to me that you have been exploiting the dead for your own gain and now it’s time to pay us back.”
“Pay you back? But what can I do? I’m dead. I’m one of you.”
“Ah…but unlike ours, your body is still warm. Even as we speak you are being tended to at the scene of your accident, medics preparing to revive you.”
“But I’ve been dead for…too long. It’s not possible.”
“How long do you think you have been here, Roger?”
Roger screwed up his face as he tried to work out how much time had passed.
The man before him waved his thoughts away. “Don’t waste your energy trying to work it out, the question was both rhetorical and redundant. Time has no meaning here, we only register our perception of its passing by the destruction of our flesh. I can assure you that in your world, you’ve been here for mere seconds. You can return to your mortal body, but only if you are back in the tunnel at the moment of resuscitation. And that…” The hands at his body pushed him harder against the rock at his back. “…is down to us. If you agree to help us, then we will allow you to go back. If you refuse…then - welcome to your new home.”
Roger stared at the multitude of souls around him, looking desperately for help in a sea of long-dead eyes. He couldn’t comprehend what was being asked of him. “What will I have to do?”
“You will understand when the time comes. To make your decision easier, we are in a position to give you something in return…”
“Such as what?”
“The one thing your life has been missing…love; affection; intimacy.”
The angry man was growing impatient, aware that a clock was ticking – even in this timeless void.
“So, what’s it to be? Another chance at life? Or this…” he swept his arm around, indicating the masses of misery stretched out as far as the eye could see on the desolate plain.
Roger’s body suddenly jolted, almost throwing off the hands that gripped him for the briefest of instants.
“Looks like they’re trying to shock you back to life as we speak…so, do we have a deal?”
8
“Where the fuck d’you think you’re going?”
Tommy removed his hand from around his friend’s throat.
“Didn’t you hear that noise? There’s someone else in here, Tommy…I want to get out!”
“There’s no one else here, you chicken-shit. Old buildings like this are always making strange noises. Probably just air bubbles in the water pipes or something. C’mon, let’s take a look upstairs…”
Tommy pushed Malcolm out of the classroom door and towards the wooden staircase. The floorboards in the corridor outside were in the same sorry state as those in the classroom behind them, dry and dusty as if neglected for years, not a hint of the varnish that had coated them for so long. The walls in the corridor were also showing signs of wear, the pale green paint flaking badly, revealing scars of pink plaster beneath.
Tommy shone his torch around, “Look at the state of this place, Malc. Can’t remember it looking as bad as this before…”
“Maybe it’s because it’s empty now. Maybe we just didn’t notice how shitty it looked when it was full of people.”
“Hmm…maybe…perhaps the torch light just makes it look worse than it is…”
They started up the stairs, Tommy, despite his reassurances, treading just as cautiously as his friend. The wooden steps creaked loudly under their weight as they progressed towards the upper floor, every groan eliciting a stifled whimper from Malcolm.
“Shit, Tommy. What was that?”
A sudden scraping of scuttling claws sounded above them, Malcolm grabbing onto the handrail in fear.
“Probably just mice…or birds.”
“Oh fuck! Let’s
just go…there’s nothing worth seeing in here anyway.”
“Don’t be such a fucking baby, Malc. You’re fucking scared of everything. Fucking pisses me off!”
Despite his friends’ admonishments, Malcolm turned, his right foot treading air above the step below him as Tommy grabbed his arm.
“I need to go to the toilet,” Malcolm pointed to the ‘boys room’ below, “I’m gonna piss myself soon.”
“Well, just have a fucking piss then. You can piss where you like in here, it’s not going to fucking matter.” Malcolm’s chicken-shit attitude was getting on Tommy’s nerves. No doubt Tommy’s thinning patience also had something to do with the throbbing pain in his temples that had been growing steadily worse over the past few minutes.
Malcolm decided his bladder could wait and the boys continued upwards. When they reached the top of the stairs, Tommy shone his torch along the corridor, its dim light barely reaching more than a few yards in front of them. They walked slowly, the dull yellow glow of the torch revealing the same decrepit state of walls and floor as downstairs. Malcolm deliberately lagged a few paces behind his friend, ready to run at the first sign of trouble, hopefully keeping far enough away from Tommy that he couldn’t grab him back again. As they made their way along the passageway, floorboards squeaking beneath them, a loud ‘whipping’ sound filled the air. Malcolm turned to run but the boards under his feet suddenly gave way. He screamed as he felt himself falling, some aeons old survival instinct thrusting his arms out to stop his descent. Malcolm’s breath was hot and fast in his throat as he propped himself in the hole in the floor with his elbows.
