A Hatful of Shadows

by Richard Ayre

  God that night was wonderful, despite what happened afterwards. I don’t think I have ever been so satisfied by sex. It went deeper than penetration if you’ll pardon the expression. I felt satiated, as if at peace with the world. As if Annie completed me.

  I asked her to marry me only a month or so later. I didn’t want to lose her. It was a lavish affair, as you can imagine. The bill ran into the hundreds of thousands. The honeymoon was a golden haze of sex and cocktails and sunshine. I told Annie she didn’t have to worry ever again. That I would always look after her. She snuggled her head against the greying hairs on my chest, and with her eyes still open and a smile on her lips, she simply said ‘I know.’

  I found out about her first affair about a year later. He was some singer with a grunge pub band whom she’d met when out with so called friends. She’d fucked him in the toilets like a back alley whore. After I’d hit her and she’d fallen to the plush carpet in our house, in my house, she swore she would never do it again. That it had been a mistake. She had learned her lesson.

  I think that last sentence was the reason why I let her off with it. She had succumbed to my authority. (The grunge singer didn’t get let off with it though. A couple of my boys met up with him that same night and made sure he would never play the guitar again. Or indeed, walk).

  The second time she had an affair was much more serious. It had lasted for a couple of weeks before I found out. Again, I took her back. She had to stay indoors for the best part of a month though until the bruising healed. I told her then that if she ever did it again, I would kill her. This wasn’t in the heat of the moment either. It was the next morning when I had calmed down and she was sitting in the kitchen wearing large dark sunglasses to hide the bruises. And I meant it. She was mine. She was my possession now. She owed me the lifestyle she led. The bitch would not make a fool out of me again. (Her latest beau ended up lifeless on the mudflats of the Thames. This time it was me, not my boys.) When Annie found out about this I think she really worried, for the first time, about her own safety.

  But of course, being Annie, she did it again. But at least this time she tried to do the right thing. She told me about it. She said she was in love. She had met someone, that she loved him, and she wanted me to let her leave. She didn’t want the money, she just wanted to leave. And of course, that’s when I killed her. I’d promised her I would, hadn’t I?

  I smashed her head in with the nearest table lamp. Then I dumped her body in the boot of the Rolls and drove it to a building site that my money was funding. It’s a cliché, but there’s nowhere better than fresh wet concrete to hide a body. I wept as she disappeared under that cloying grey shroud. But I soon stopped.

  I lived for another twenty two years after that. Pretty good years actually, with no worries about anyone else. I made more people unemployed, terror struck or dead. I made more money for myself. I lived my wonderful, debauched life. I must admit I let myself go after Annie ‘left’ me. I piled on the weight, I drank too much and I fucked whores. I never married again.

  After those twenty two years, a scarlet pain flooded through my body, the last in a long line of debilitating strokes, and I went from lying in a hospital bed staring at the ceiling to suddenly finding myself in darkness. Pitch black darkness.

  I was frightened I tell you. Well actually, I was terrified. I screamed and swung my arms about but to no avail. The first time I moved I felt the restriction of the padded casket around me. My voice sounded hollow. In that clawing, terrifying stillness, I realised where I was. I was underground. I was in my coffin and they had buried me. But I was still alive. In the beginning that’s what I believed. That I was still alive. If only that were true.

  I screamed and screamed again. I actually pissed myself in my fear and the smell was electric in that tiny, black cell. I think I’ve already said I hate enclosed spaces. Imagine how I felt. Imagine how you would feel.

  They had buried me alive!

  I tried to lick my dry lips. I tried to pray to the God I had abandoned decades before, but nothing was going to save me.

  That’s when I heard the scratching, the gnawing on the outside of the casket. At first I thought they had realised their mistake and were getting me out and I wept in relief. But of course, it wasn’t that.

  It was Annie. It was Annie’s once beautiful teeth scraping on the wood outside.

  The scraping became louder and louder. Then it stopped and there was a knocking; a dry, hollow knocking that sounded like skinless knuckles rapping against the casket. Knock, knock, knock. I whined in terror. I knew it was Annie. She spoke to me.

  ‘I wasn’t dead,’ she said, and her voice was not the lovely husky tone I had fallen in love with all those years ago. This was a parched, dry, crackling whisper. ‘I was still alive when you dumped me. You couldn’t even kill me properly you useless fucking prick. I was still alive.’

  I think she laughed then, but the noise I heard was nothing like a laugh I had ever heard before. And what she said next chilled me to the bone.

  ‘I lived for fifteen minutes. Drowning, choking on that concrete your money paid for. Fifteen minutes Harry. Think on that. Think on that!’

  And I have thought on that ever since. Because fifteen minutes is what I have until my air runs out. In the awful, hollow darkness where I now exist, fifteen minutes of wonderful fresh air is all I get. Then it starts to thin. As it is doing now. My chest starts to heave as the oxygen runs down and the carbon dioxide builds up. My terror rises, my heart bangs in my chest and I scream and scream and scream. As I am doing now.

  But I always die. A hideous, terrifying, agonising death, choking and jerking as my body eats up the air it needs to survive. It takes fifteen minutes for the air to run out completely. Fifteen minutes to die. A long time I think you’ll agree.

  But what is so strange is that I always wake up again. And I’m always in my casket. And I always hear Annie just outside the coffin laughing, and the air always starts to run out again. And it is no less terrifying or painful, no matter how many times it happens. It has gone on for decades, this fifteen minutes, and it will go on forever. I know this now. Because after all, Hell is forever.

  And Hell is fifteen minutes.

  Fifteen Minutes was originally an entry for a short story competition. The theme was the essence of what a short story is. I took that to mean time and engagement and I decided to write a story based around that. The winner was to be picked by Stephen King himself and I sent this off and eagerly awaited his approval and the world wide domination it would entail. (It didn’t make the short list and he never got to read it. Typical)

  The Faceless Man.

  The stories have been around since1854. The year the mine lift snapped and crashed down, jamming the shaft. Fifty seven men and boys had died, suffocating slowly in the pit. All for the black gold that kept the Victorian world above working.

  There had been sightings over the next forty five years. He was seen just before anything bad happened down that pit. And there had been plenty of bad things happen. He was an omen of death.

  I had never seen him. But I believed in him. At the coal face, as I hewed and shovelled, shovelled and hewed, his presence was always hovering around me. The other blokes felt the same, I’m sure, although none of us talked about him. Not down the pit anyway. Perhaps at the club on a smoky Saturday night as we sat around the fire playing dominoes someone would talk of him. We would listen and nod, but mostly we kept quiet. We didn’t want to discuss him.

  It was said that when the shaft collapsed all those years ago he had been the one who instigated it. He had caused those men to die, scratching their goodbyes to loved ones with nails on their tin bait boxes. Their breathing getting shorter as their lamps died down. Fathers no doubt hugging sons as their air ran out. Coughing and choking and jerking their way to eternity.

  I was at the coal face all those years later. Cramped on my knees in the two foot high seam. The other men on my shift were hundreds of yards aw
ay. I shovelled and hewed, shovelled and hewed. My lamp was bright in front of me, creating deep black shadows everywhere. The wooden props beside me kept the millions of tons of earth from flattening me.

  I stopped. Something was suddenly wrong. My sweat soaked vest had turned icy cold and my lamp now threw a different shadow. One that crouched behind me in the seam. The shadow moved and flickered as the form solidified and took shape. He was here. I knew that instantly. Behind me. Breathing his death cold breath on my back. The light from my lamp threw jagged relief on the props as I slowly, ever so slowly turned. To look upon his face.

  Where it should have been was an emptiness as black as the pit we crouched in. In that blackness were two burning red eyes. They glared at me with a hatred as deep as the shaft itself.

  With a scream I jumped away, scrabbling through the thick coal dust on the ground. I scrambled madly, only distantly hearing the wooden props above me start to crack as the seam began to close. Pieces of the props shot like shrapnel, striking my face and body as the seam came down, creaking and shuddering and screaming with its banshee death voice. I scrabbled, on my stomach, the lamp left behind as I tried to escape that rapidly closing tomb. But it was closing too fast! I whined as I saw the props before me bend and snap. My trousers were around my ankles now but I didn’t care. My only thought was to get out before the seam sealed itself completely. My eyes were fixed on the main tunnel ahead. Salvation lay there. But it was too far. I dimly heard the other men screaming as the seam closed onto their legs, crushing them. Trapping them before moving up to their waists, their chests. Popping their lungs with its immense weight.

  It was too far. Too far. The rock seam was now caressing my back. I would not make it. I always knew the pit would be the death of me. I had been proved right.

  I turned as I heard that dark, horrifying spectre of death behind me. He was the last thing I expected to see. His presence my death warrant. He was staring at me with that faceless head and the glowing red coals where his eyes should have been. He was kneeling, with his back to the rock above. He was keeping it from me! Those hellish eyes glared at me, then flickered to the main tunnel up ahead and a voice erupted in my head. ‘Go!’

  I turned once more. Crawling again. I reached the end of the seam just as it closed with a shudder.

  I lay panting, my face deathly white, my stomach and thighs scratched and bleeding. I was unable to move. Unable to think. I could not talk even when raised voices came running towards me. Asking me what had happened. I could not even shake my head.

  Only later, as I lay in my cramped bed in my cramped house, with my wife lying beside me, did I think about what it had meant. I, like everyone, thought the Faceless Man was a precursor to disaster, but I know now this is not true. He does not cause the disasters. He tries to protect men from them. He is simply a poor soul lost in that black pit. He chose to save me, the only survivor of that catastrophe. He had wandered, lost, down there through the blackness for decades.

  And he wanders still.

  The Faceless Man was originally a 300 word (Successful Yay!) entry in a competition for Story Emporium #2. This version has been extended slightly, giving a bit more depth. It’s based in part on a tale my late father told me once. This happened to him (not the ghost bit, but the seam closing in on him and having to scrabble his way out before it flattened him.) Thankfully he got out just in time, with his trousers around his ankles and unable to speak. I’ve got quite a good imagination, but I cannot begin to understand what it must have been like for my dad and grandad and all the other pitmen working in that black hole. I couldn’t do it that’s for sure. Check out the original story and others here

  http://steampunktrails.blogspot.co.uk/

  Home at last

  Found my new home at last. Love it. It’s warm, cosy and is just right for me. It’s a bit small I suppose, but for me it’s everything I ever wanted. The only problem I have is the occasional knocking and moaning coming from the under stair cupboard.

  Of course I had to kill for it. But then again, what prize isn’t worth killing for? If you want something bad enough, if you deserve something so much, through a lifetime (a very long lifetime) of servitude and slavery, then any sacrifice is worth it in the end. And it’s not like I’m not used to killing is it? This is, after all, the reason I exist, my raison d’etre if you like.

  My boss isn’t very happy that I’ve struck out on my own, but fuck her. She should have listened when I told her I wasn’t happy with the way she was running the joint. And when I went and did things my own way, the way things are supposed to be done, she threw me out! Can you believe it? I mean, it was a Hell of a long way down! She is a Grade A loser!

  Anyway, that doesn’t matter now, it was a long, long time ago. And I’m home now. Home at last.

  When I first saw my home I knew it would be mine. Never mind that someone else was already living in it. I was having it and that was that. My home was walking down the street with its mother and father. It had long blonde hair and was wearing a blue dress. It held a balloon in its hand, and it skipped and smiled at something its father said to it. I let the trio pass and then followed them to their home. I watched them go inside, and I waited until night came. I like the night.

  When it was dark, I went and knocked on the door. The father opened it and I immediately stabbed him in the face with the knife I held, just below his right eye. As he screamed and pulled away, the knife sliced an even deeper cut in his cheek, the wound huge and white for a second until the blood started to flow down his face. He tried to slam the door but I put out my arm and stopped him from doing that. (I’m very strong.) I stepped into the hallway and he stared at me in shock, his face white and sticky red, the blood now soaking into his shirt collar. He clapped a hand to the wound in his face and shouted to his wife to ‘Run Maisie, Run!’

  He then threw himself at me, punching me in the nose, my head rocking back with the blow (he was quite strong too. For a human). I grabbed him by the throat and lifted him from the floor with my left arm and drove the knife into his stomach. Again and again. It made a popping sound every time the knife punctured him. It was lovely. He squirmed and jerked like a gaffed fish and the incredulous, pain filled look on his face was really quite funny. I clearly remember laughing as I killed him.

  His struggles were becoming weaker by now, as his wife (who hadn’t run, silly woman) sprinted into the hallway. She screamed when she saw me holding her husband in my hand like a doll and the blood from his almost gutted body pooling on the floor and splashing up the walls. She screamed even louder as I drew the knife slowly across his punctured stomach, her hands cradling her face as his intestines slowly unfurled and slopped at my feet like the biggest pound of fresh, bloody sausages anyone has ever seen, the lovely cream carpet now completely ruined.

  I threw the corpse to the floor and looked at her, grinning. She gave one, last, horrified, lingering look at her dead husband and then turned and sprinted up the stairs.

  ‘Heather, Heather!’ she shouted as she raced away from me, hurtling up the stairs. Heather. I liked that. It suited my new home.

  I pelted up after her, three steps at a time, and grabbed her by her hair (long and blonde like my new home’s hair.) I yanked her back and threw her down the stairs, laughing as she bounced and banged back down to the hallway. I slowly floated down after her, and I still remember her face as she watched me do that, my feet not touching the stairs. I think that was the moment when she realised she was not just facing some homicidal maniac, which of course would have been bad enough, but something far worse. Something not of her world. Something entirely evil.

  When I landed softly beside her I saw that her leg had been broken by the fall down the stairs. Bone and gristle gleamed dully through her shin, and the leg was bent oddly under the knee, the torn flesh around the wound showing pink edges with white dots of fat embedded in it. She managed to scream again as I bent down beside her and smiled at her.

  I took t
he ankle of her broken leg and slowly twisted it. Her screams became ear shattering and she writhed and jerked on the floor as the intense, scarlet pain flooded her body, her fingers gripping the blood stained carpet, actually lifting it in her agony. I twisted the leg until it was facing completely the wrong way and then I placed my other hand on her thigh and, with a heave, tore her leg off along the compound fracture.

  There was a very satisfactory gout of blood then (I think the wound had severed an artery but the broken bone had somehow blocked the flow. I don’t know. I’m no doctor,) and I was amazed at how quickly her shocked, agonised face changed colour, fading rapidly to white as her blood pulsed from the severed leg and covered my face in gore. (That was a particularly happy moment. I even opened my mouth and guzzled down some of the crimson flood.) She didn’t make another noise after that. I think the pain was so intense that her body couldn’t perform even this last, pathetic function. But she was taking too long. I could make out shadowy figures behind the front door and I heard a frantic banging as neighbours tried to get in, wanting to know why the screams were coming from this house. So I took the knife and pushed the needle point into her eye. It burst like a hard, wet balloon. Then, as the bangs became louder and as I heard faint sirens coming, I pushed it in harder, into her brain. She managed one more jerk, then lay still.

  Apart from the banging on the door, all was still. Blood dripped and pooled all over the hallway. I turned to look up the stairs.

  And there was my new home. It was beautiful. It stood on the top of the landing and it was dressed in pink pyjamas and held some sort of stuffed toy in its arms. It stared at me, round eyed, and urine spread in a dark stain across the front of the pyjamas as it took in the sight of me, blood drenched and grinning, and its slaughtered parents, broken and twisted and torn.