The Leaping

by Tom Fletcher

  I opened the fridge door. The interior of the fridge too was refreshingly pristine, and it almost started to make me feel better. ‘There’s not that much milk left,’ I said, ‘but there’s enough for this morning. It’ll see us through most of the clean-up effort, I imagine.’ I swung the milk out of the fridge as the kettle boiled.

  ‘What the hell is wrong with you?’ Jennifer asked.

  ‘Nothing!’ I screamed, throwing the bottle of milk at the wall. It burst spectacularly, and mingled with the stuff on the floor, pooling in puddles marbled red and white. ‘There is nothing fucking wrong with me, alright?’ I kicked the bin over. ‘Now we’ve got no milk.’

  ‘How can you care about that?’ she spat. ‘Everything’s covered in blood. I’ve been sexually assaulted. Your friends have all just killed each other. They’re all dead.’

  ‘They’re not all dead,’ I said, looking out of the window.

  ‘We’ve seen monsters, Jack. We’ve seen that these things are real. You don’t seem to get it. It doesn’t seem to have gone in. I’ll say it again. I’ve been sexually assaulted. You hear me?’ Her voice was shaking. ‘He raped me. That bastard.’

  I looked at her but couldn’t process anything – thinking was like trying to look through misted-up windows. There was a long, long silence.

  I don’t believe he assaulted you, I thought. I think you might just be one of them too. How could he have been fucking you and not have bitten you? That threat he had made all those months ago. I’m going to make her mine, or something.

  I found myself looking at myself and thinking, how callous, how cold, as if I was splitting partly into an object that could be judged and partly into a consciousness that could do the judging and the two parts were drifting apart, losing touch.

  ‘What did Taylor want to tell me, do you think, before Graham went for him?’ I said. ‘Why would he want to tell me anything?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Jennifer whispered. ‘I don’t fucking know.’

  Maybe I should have tried to find him, but no, they were outside and we were inside and there was no good reason to interfere with that arrangement. I had everything that I had left the house to get in the first place – that was, Jennifer.

  ‘Jennifer,’ I said. ‘You know the only reason I was out there was to find you. There was nothing else. No other reason for it. You do love me, don’t you?’

  She looked at me blankly.

  ‘Jennifer,’ I said.

  ‘Yes!’ she said. ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘Good.’ I sat down. I felt that the seat was wet and stood up again.

  We drank our tea black.

  ‘We have to start upstairs,’ Jennifer said, suddenly calm. ‘If we clean up the downstairs, it’ll just get all mucky again once we start bringing all the bits down from upstairs.’

  ‘Upstairs,’ I said. ‘OK.’

  Jennifer was doing the bathroom and I was doing our bedroom in theory, although really I was just standing in the doorway, neither in nor out, looking at the mess. It looked like somebody had filled about ten buckets with blood and then set off a firework in each one, covering everything in a fine mist, although in places there were streaks and splashes where denser things had landed. The landing was the same. Our whole blasted house. Our house.

  ‘Jennifer,’ I shouted through to the bathroom. ‘We’re going to have to burn everything. Everything.’

  ‘What?’ she shouted.

  ‘We’re going to have to burn everything!’

  ‘OK!’

  The bed was still dripping and one of the bedposts was covered in hair, as if the hair had been ripped from somebody’s head and painstakingly stuck on to the bedpost with blood. There were huge gouges in the floorboards, the walls. Everything was coming home to me and everything that I had managed to push down, ignore, was floating close to me then, like a ghost, ready to seize me and shake me and force itself to the forefront of my mind. I vomited on to the floor directly in front of me and stepped backwards onto the landing.

  I heard Jennifer singing.

  I sidled along the landing so that I was outside the bathroom door and she was definitely humming something that sounded familiar. I knew it, I knew it now, it was like something the fiddler had been playing. I shook my head and narrowed my eyes. She had gone mental when I had tried to make a cup of tea and yet now she was cleaning up the stains and leftovers of our friends and singing? There was something wrong. Maybe she was pretending to be more upset about all of this than she really was – maybe when I had tried to make a cup of tea she had only been pretending to get angry. In front of me, she was damaged, distraught, but once I wasn’t looking, she was fine.

  Was she one of them?

  I went to open the bathroom door and then stopped, my hand hovering, and retreated quietly to the bedroom, our master bedroom, as Jennifer had once referred to it. She had to be one of them, but no, she couldn’t be, because if she was, she would have killed me.

  That was my thinking.

  The window was broken. I had noticed it earlier but had not thought about it. I went over and looked out and then I went back and opened the wardrobe, which must have remained closed all through the night judging by the cleanliness of its insides, and gathered up an armful of clothes. Realising that there was nowhere to drop them without their getting covered in the fluids that coated everything, I put them back inside the wardrobe and closed the doors again. The wardrobe was to the left of the window. I moved to the left of the wardrobe and pushed it so that it blocked the open hole.

  It left a strange space – a rectangle on the floor that had been spared the fine spray of blood, but was slowly being eaten into by spreading pools of the stuff. In between the drying puddles, the rectangle on the floorboards was clean and clear, the varnish shining brightly. On the wall, it was slightly different. We had painted the walls in this room pale green. There was a much larger rectangle on the wall. The pale-green wall. There was a much larger rectangle on the pale-green wall. This too had escaped the cloud of gore that seemed to have settled across everything else, and the rectangle of pale green was beautifully obvious and hard-edged and pure. Except that blood was running down into it from the wall above, blood-red blood, streams and trickles of it that gathered together and dribbled downwards at the behest of gravity, that ran together and dissected that pale pure space, the rectangle, that pale green pure green clean green square-edged space, invading it. I put my hand to my mouth. The thin lines of blood didn’t make the space any less visible, in any way. It was still clearly there. A beautiful even green against the mottled red of the wall surrounding it.

  The two opposed rectangles somehow created an object that wasn’t there. That absence – the physical space that something should have been occupying but wasn’t – drew tears, and I started to cry. I fell to my knees and my head hit the floor and I carried on crying, like a newborn.

  Eventually some kind of sensory perception came back to me, but all I was aware of was lying with my cheek to the floor, fascinated by the way that perspective narrowed the discoloured floorboards the further away from me they were.

  I woke up, disorientated. I had been dreaming that we were still at the party, Francis shoving CDs into my hands. ‘You have to listen to this. And this. Oh, and these. Have you seen this?’ In my dream, he wandered off into another room and returned with a DVD that he wedged under my arm and I went upstairs and put all of the CDs on at once and watched the DVD. It was Postman Pat, but all of the characters had strangely shaped noses – like long, wiggly worms – and stumbled around in the fog, accidentally groping each other. Then I was in a stone space underground, some sort of hallway, with archways regularly spaced and Postman Pat and the others wouldn’t let me out, and they were all getting closer, their wormy noses wriggling furiously. It was bad, scary, because they were still like Plasticine. And then Taylor appeared from nowhere, and just held out his hand, and I took it, and there was a staircase just there, just in front of me, and he led
me up it until we were outside, in the bright sunlight, the bright blue sky, a cool spring breeze, daffodils lively along the walls of a kindly-looking old church, and Erin approached from between the gravestones, her red hair a crown, and she said, ‘We have to find them.’ I knew she meant Francis and Graham. We followed her out of the churchyard and the whole world was just a long, wide, grassy path, and the grass was so soft, and the sides of the path curved upwards into space so we couldn’t fall out, and space was illuminated by purple clouds like at the beginning of Star Trek: The Next Generation and in the distance, at the end, was an infinitely tall castle. I knew that was where they were, safe and warm, and we got there and listened to Francis’ CDs all night and played chess and ate walnut bread and drank mulled wine and looked out at the sky and we knew that all the world was there, we could see it all and it all made sense and Erin took each of us to bed in turn, and it was not cheap or meaningless but the ultimate in tender, loving friendship, and she was a beautiful girl, such a beautiful, beautiful girl, and in my dream she wanted to free us all in every way imaginable and she did and she wanted to in real life too, she wanted to, I believe that. But what about her? What about Erin? I lay there in her arms in the biggest bed and she was so warm and so perfect. The castle was infinitely tall. Towers springing from towers.

  The dream made me sad. As a child I had loved Postman Pat more than anything. I stood up, put my hand to my head and stumbled out of the room. ‘Jennifer?’ I said.

  ‘Yes?’ she said, sweetly, making her way up the stairs towards me.

  ‘I’m sorry. I fell asleep.’ I cannot even begin to work you out, I thought.

  ‘Jack,’ she said.

  I walked towards her and slipped on the stairs and landed on my coccyx. ‘Ow,’ I said.

  ‘You’re tired,’ she said.

  Back in our bedroom, Jennifer threw all the bloody bedclothes on the floor and turned the mattress over and said, ‘Sleep on that.’ The underside of the mattress was spotted with small red dots that signified columns of blood between one side of the thing and the other. I lay down all the same and fell asleep pretty quickly. Even when I woke up, periodically, I felt like I was still asleep, and the house at that point in time was not a good place to sleep and maybe it never had been.

  For a short period of time I was standing over the bed in the other room, the one with the blue and white wallpaper, and there was a human spine there, and a skull, and a spread-out skin, and a tangled-up matted cord of red hair on the floor, covered in slime. I saw the white dress that Erin had been wearing and then I knew the spine, the skull, the skin, the hair – they were all hers. Thank God Taylor didn’t have to see this, I thought, but then, Taylor was one of them now and of course, that was why. Her dress looked so, so small, the way clothes do once they’ve been discarded.

  Then I was somewhere else.

  In my dream – if it was a dream – Taylor and Erin made love in that room, and her spine was there too, underneath them, between them, beside them, and a man hung from a rope, his legs kicking, and the wallpaper tore itself from the walls, curling into bone-white scraps that accumulated around the edges of the room, piling into drifts that blurred boundaries, making it hard to tell the door from the wall, the wall from the floor, the floor from the bed, the bed from the bodies, the bodies from the bones, Taylor from Erin, Erin from Taylor. The man kicking on the rope spun around and I saw that he had my face, my face was his and I was the man kicking, dancing, spinning on the rope. Kicking kicking kicking on the rope.

  I drifted in and out for I didn’t know how long. Jennifer was there sometimes and sometimes she wasn’t. Sometimes looking out of the window and sometimes holding my hand.

  ‘Are you sleeping?’ I asked. ‘You’ve had a longer, harder night than I have.’

  ‘I’m asleep when you’re asleep,’ she said. ‘That’s why you never see me sleeping.’

  ‘Where do you sleep?’ I asked. ‘You’re not here on this mattress with me. Where do you sleep?’ But I must have asked that question in a dream, or half in and half out of sleep, because I was sitting upright all of a sudden, looking round for an answer, and she wasn’t there. I shook my head, on the one hand amazed by her mental strength, but on the other not surprised, because she was incredibly strong, she had to have been, ever since her mother had started falling over, thinking their house changed shape just to trip her, confuse her, thinking her dreams were real, slapping Jennifer across the face if Jennifer suggested that it had only been a dream. Mum, please.

  ‘Jennifer,’ I mumbled occasionally. ‘Don’t go outside. We don’t know what’s happening out there.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

  At other times, I sincerely believed that I was being held captive. Was she drugging me? How was it that she stayed upright, smiling and making sense? She had to be one of them. She had to be. When I was thinking like this, I stood up, my legs feeling heavy and weak at the same time, like breezeblocks on the ends of elastic bands. I would show her that I was capable. I would show her that I would not be held there like a sick child. I walked over to the window and looked out on another world. The fell-side was black, blasted free of all grass or earth, and the sky was pink along the horizon, deepening to a dark red straight above, and the features of the valley were lost in shadow, but there were fires down there, lots and lots of fires. I would not be kept like a sick child, I thought, and then was at an utter loss when it came to working out what to do next. Always, the next thing I knew was that I was waking up again.

  Sometimes she was there and sometimes she wasn’t.

  I was quite prepared to believe that most of what I thought was happening was only happening in dreams.

  I did not believe that dreams meant anything. I did not believe that they meant anything at all.

  ‘Why don’t you sleep?’ I said.

  ‘Where do you sleep?’ I said.

  ‘Don’t go outside,’ I said.

  How could she have been keeping me captive? Not how, but why? Why would she be doing that to me after I had risked everything for her? There was something colossal that I was missing, something fundamental to the story, the situation we were in. Sometimes I woke up and heard her talking, but not to me.

  ‘So when you hang still, that’s just because you’re tired of kicking?’ she said in the next room, the one with Erin’s spine in it. I heard her clearly and it struck me as strange at first, and then when I remembered the dream of myself hanging, kicking, on the rope, I made the connection and it froze me all up.

  ‘So when you hang still, that’s just because you’re tired of kicking?’

  I rolled around on the mattress, on the forever-stained floor, and my mind rolled around in my head like a globe, always coming back to the same point. This is where you live. Why was she keeping me captive?

  I remembered Graham, leering out of the dark on some night earlier on in time.

  ‘The thing with women,’ he had said, ‘is that they’re all basically split down the middle.’

  I rolled around and around the house, my mind rolling around and around inside my body, Graham and his poison slopping around inside my mind. It was a haunted house and I was haunting it as much as anything.

  Eventually I came back to myself and I could walk around the room without verging on a breakdown. It looked to me like it would be possible to clean the room after all, and if I could clean the room, then why not the whole house?

  I listened at the top of the stairs. I could hear Jennifer’s movement in the kitchen so she was still there then, thankfully. ‘I’m OK now, everything is OK!’ I shouted down to her. Not that she had been as overwhelmed as I had, of course. ‘I’m going to have a shower and get clean and get changed if that’s alright?’

  ‘Of course that’s alright!’ she shouted back up. ‘Why wouldn’t it be?’

  In the shower – which was spotlessly clean – I started to wonder if I had actually been ill and, if so, why Jennifer
had not called a doctor. Maybe the phones still weren’t working, or maybe I had appeared more stable than I had felt, or maybe the whole period just had not lasted as long as it had seemed. Whatever had happened, she had been nothing but caring, dealing with her own trauma silently and internally. Really, I should have been stronger for her.

  Those were the things that I told myself, but still I couldn’t shake the impression of some emptiness right there at the centre of it all, in the house. A vacuum that we were circling around. The reason for everything that had happened, and the meaning behind it all, if there was one, just faded in and out around the edges, around the outside, around the fell.

  The hot water coursed down my body and I started to feel more awake.

  I remembered Jennifer squeezing my hand while I had been delirious. Her lips against my ear. ‘Jack, my darling. My kitten. My lover. My Jack.’

  Had ringing the police ever really been an option? I thought about this as I approached the barn. I mean, we hadn’t had any working phones, but at no point had any of us thought of running down the fellside to find some other house in order to make a telephone call, because it just hadn’t seemed feasible somehow, or realistic. And it wasn’t feasible at this point, either, because how many people had died before our eyes, without us preventing it? I had killed Kenny myself. Did he have a family?

  How old was he?

  The sky was a dark pink colour.

  I reached the barn door, which was still slightly open, and braced myself. Graham’s warning not to enter the barn resurfaced in my brain. Don’t go into the barn. Don’t go into the barn. His wavering voice circled round and round. The bodies I would see in there were the bodies of people – not lycanthropes, not monsters of any sort, just guests, visitors, people who had found themselves in the way. I could have set fire to the whole building, but that might have led to a well-meaning valley-dweller ringing 999 for a fire engine. No. I had a shovel with me, and that would have to do.

  The things we become.