Swallowed By The Cracks e-Pub

by Lee Thomas, Gary McMahon, S. G. Browne, Michael Marshall Smith

  "More wine?" He grabbed the bottle and refilled his glass. She was suddenly beside him, holding out her own empty vessel. The neck of the bottle clinked loudly on the rim of the glass. He filled it to the brim, almost making it overflow.

  Judy returned to the sofa. She sat down, stretching her legs, moving her head from side to side as if ironing out the kinks in her neck muscles. "Tell me more about you. Your family."

  The pain was still there – it would never fade – but these days it was less of a burden. "I don't know if you remember, but my mother was murdered just before I finished school. It happened the day after I got my exam results." He blinked, expecting the threat of tears, but none came.

  "Yes. Yes, I do remember that. I was so sorry. It was such a tragedy. Did they ever... you know, find the killer?"

  Bitter memories: of a courtroom, a man in a cheap suit with a faded sparrow tattoo on the side of his neck, yelling barristers, a sour-faced judge and a solemn jury. Tears. Fury. Rage.

  "Yes, they got him. Banged him up for life." He swallowed the entire contents of his glass, and groped for more.

  "At this rate I'll have to open another bottle."

  He glared at the empty bottle in his hand; clutched the half-filled glass. "Sorry. I'm being rude."

  "No," she said. "But I am. I shouldn't have asked about your mother." Her eyes looked bigger, wider, yet strangely empty. The alcohol was already working on his brain.

  "It's fine. I can talk about it now. I couldn't back then, just after it happened, but now at least I can tell people about it without bursting into tears." The wine tasted even better the more of it he drank; it was like a soothing balm in his mouth, loosening his tongue.

  Judy shuffled forward on the sofa, her cleavage exposed as the wide-cut neck of the T-shirt sagged beneath her throat.

  "I went through a bad time just after it happened. Then, with the court case and all that, I almost lost the plot. Drink, drugs... casual sex. The lot. I was a walking cliché."

  Her eyes. So big, so empty, as if waiting to be filled... filled up with his pain.

  Her chest rose and fell as her breathing became more urgent, as if she were aroused. And he felt it too; his cock stiffened, his back began to sweat.

  "I wanted to kill him myself. Just five minutes in a room, alone, with my mother's killer. I would've given anything for that."

  Judy let out a tiny moan, so quiet that he suspected he might even have imagined it.

  "But I'm fine now. I've sorted out my life."

  Her shoulders sagged, her eyes receded, becoming smaller; she was spent.

  Slowly, she placed her glass on the floor. When she stood, she knocked the glass with the side of her foot, upending it, and red wine spilled on the carpet, forming a dark stain that would never come out. That stain would be there forever. It was a thought that seemed somehow relevant, but the sight of her looming in his vision sent it scuttling away.

  "You poor boy." She held him, her arms wrapping around his head and pulling him towards her. Jack breathed in her scent – it was dull, flat, and a little disagreeable. But he held his breath and enjoyed the moment: the soft press of her cool breasts against his cheek, the sound of her heart beating in his ears, its rhythm speeding to match that of his own racing pulse. His mother appeared in his mind, a stark image of loss, but parts of her began to break away. Large jigsaw segments vanished incrementally from his mother's silent image to reduce her presence to a mental echo, something he now struggled to connect to his past life. Rather than causing him more pain, the process was a relief from all the pain he'd suffered since her meaningless death.

  Then, all too soon, Judy pulled away. He felt like he had lost something; or, more specifically, that something had been snatched cruelly away from him.

  "I'm sorry. I shouldn't do that. I should exercise more self-control. But then again, you're a man now, not a boy." She paused. "I always knew you had a crush on me, you know." Her eyes sparkled, but it was the false allure of fake gemstones.

  For no reason that he could pin down, Jack was afraid. Her presence was threatening in a way that was both obscure and oddly direct. "Can I use your toilet?" He stood, almost knocking her down, and moved to the door, confusion robbing him of grace.

  "Upstairs," she said. "The little room at the top of the stairs." Her smile was wide and white.

  He climbed the stairs in darkness, and found the door open. Closing it, he opened his trousers and attempted to urinate through his throbbing erection in the dark. It was like trying to force water through a short length of steel tube attached to floating balloons: a strange airy heaviness that made his head spin and his crotch ache.

  He left the room without flushing and just as he began to ascend, heading for the front door, he caught sight of another open door across the landing. He stepped backwards, and then headed for the door. There was a lock on the outside, but she had failed to use it. He pushed open the door, unsure of what he was expecting. This whole situation was so weird, so like a dream, that he was ready for anything, however unusual.

  The room was empty. There was no bed, and no furniture; not even a computer or a desk and chair were present to identify the room as an office. But the walls were covered with countless framed photographs, each one showing a different face. People of all ages, all races, and both sexes, adorned those blank white walls, with no spaces between them. Like a cobbled-together family, a montage of orphans, they stared at him, pleading for something he didn't even think he could give, searching for a connection he did not feel.

  The only thing he knew for certain was that Judy Crossly had no son; and her husband, if he had ever existed at all, had not died of cancer. Normal human relationships were beyond her reach. She clung instead to something different, something extraordinary. She craved whatever was represented in these pictures.

  His head spun. He raised his hands to rub his eyes, but saw that his fingers were so pale that they were almost white. He moved his fingers, bending them, and realised that they looked thinner than they should. His ring – the one belonging to his mother – that he always wore on his wedding finger rolled loose below the knuckle. Before, it had always been too tight to remove.

  He returned to the bathroom and turned on the light. Standing before the mirror that hung above the shining sink unit, he barely recognised himself. His face was sallow, the bones prominent. His eyes had sunk into their sockets, the white parts bearing a slight yellow tinge. He looked... withered. Reduced. Less than he'd been when he entered the house.

  He turned off the light and went downstairs.

  "Are you okay?" She stood framed in the kitchen doorway, a freshly opened wine bottle in one hand and an old-fashioned corkscrew in the other. He could only describe the look on her face as knowing. She knew something that he did not; it was apparent in every gesture, each studied rearrangement of her features.

  "I... I have to go. Sorry. Thanks for the drink." Back-pedalling, he came up against the door. Groping behind him, he was unaccountably relieved to find that the keys were still in the lock.

  "Come back," she whispered, advancing towards him, dropping the corkscrew and much of the pretence. Her face was avid. "Come back any time."

  The worst thing – the very worst thing – was that he knew, eventually, he would do exactly that. He would return because, despite the fear, and the threat of the unknown, she had somehow, in some small but definite way, made him feel better.

  He ran out into the wet, hazy night; saw the yellow splash of the car headlights he'd foolishly left on. He unlocked the car and climbed behind the wheel, praying that the battery wasn't flat.

  She floated up the drizzly path, drifted to the low metal gate. Her hand rested on the concrete gatepost. She was smiling.

  The car started on the third try, the engine sputtering relucta
ntly to life. He pulled away from the kerb, wincing as the tyres screeched on the road surface, and watched her retreat in the greasy rearview mirror, her form diminishing but her power – whatever that meant – remaining just as intense, perhaps even growing stronger.

  A cluster of fireworks detonated above her head, bathing her in sickly colour, making her look like a vision from hell: a smiling, sexually-charged demon, the depth of whose hungers would always remain unfathomable.

  * * * * *

  Three days later he went back. Of course he went back: there was never any doubt that he would go, it had simply been a question of when.

  He had regained the weight so abruptly lost that aching night; his ring was once again tight enough to cause the finger to swell and the top layer of skin beneath to flake away. His face was his own again, and he had almost convinced himself that he'd simply been drunk and emotional that evening, that Judy Crossly was nothing more than a desperate widow looking for company on a bad November night she could not face on her own.

  He told himself all of this many times – so many in fact that he began to believe it. And always, behind the scenes, deep in his back brain, he thought of her still-lovely face, her wondrous breasts; imagined what she would look like naked. She had promised him nothing but suggested everything, planted the seeds in his mind and in his libido. And he could do little to fight what was growing deep within him.

  He found himself parked outside her house, a pizza destined for another street on the same estate cooling on the seat beside him. He could smell cheese and overcooked sausage. His belly churned while his mind raced.

  He left the car, this time turning off the headlights, and headed towards the house, his feet silent on the road, his hand clutching a photograph in an expensive gilt frame. He didn't want her to think he was cheap so he had bought the frame the day before, using the last of the previous week's wages.

  He didn't even have to knock. She saw him coming; he was expected. He wondered, idly, if they always were: those just like him, the ones who wanted to further unburden themselves and offer this woman the dread weight they carried and were sick of carrying. The people who had grown sick of the taste of their own pain.

  The door opened and he stepped inside. No words were necessary; she knew why he'd returned. This time when she smiled it did not look at all human. It was a rip in the mask, a gaping imperfection through which there peeked the very essence of what she really was and where she came from: a cold, dead hungry void.

  He followed her across the threshold and up the carpeted stairs. She stood outside the spare room, the sad gallery he had stumbled across last time, with her hand held out to accept his gift.

  Jack handed her the photo of his mother, relinquishing it, when the time came, with a surprising ease. It saddened him to discover that he was not even able to put up the pretence of a fight.

  She went into the room and hung the photograph on the wall, among so many others just like it. His mother's face seemed somehow diminished, as if those around her had absorbed something vital that could never be replaced.

  "Come," said Judy – or whatever she was really called. Did names even matter now? Where they in any way valid or meaningful?

  No, all that mattered was whatever came next; and not even what came after that.

  He followed her into yet another upstairs room, this one without a window. The only furniture inside was a dirty double bed without any sheets, its mattress stained and faded. The damp walls crawled with a thin black liquid that did not pool upon the floor but simply flowed across the plaster walls and along their rotted skirting, forming a series of dark mirrors which reflected nothing but nothing but nothing...

  She unfolded onto the bed, throwing off her clothes and her perfect, perfect skin; shedding her ordinary disguise to reveal the dark wonder beneath. Without the bland costume, she was all about desire: a hungry creature made up of all the second-hand grief that had ever been sent her way, every ounce of human agony that had been spilled in her presence.

  Beyond the shiny black liquid walls, a million sucking mouths opened; a billion blind eyes blinked across a vast and empty darkness without end.

  Jack felt nothing but nothing but nothing.

  Presently, he followed her down onto the spongy mattress, and opened himself up to her scrutiny. Weeping with a fearful kind of joy, he poured out his woes in a long, thrilling cascade, so that at last she might begin to feast. And those above and beyond her – the cold, sightless ones she served – fed vicariously, supping from the vessel she had become.

  «-ô-»

  The Ghost In You

  By Gary McMahon

  "An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself."

  -Charles Dickens

  "Ghosts only exist for those who wish to see them."

  -Holtei

  1

  It was raining again when I looked out of the office window and into the car park below. The tall sparse trees overlooking the tiny asphalt parking area gently lowered their moulting heads in the wind, the sky above was dour and unreadable, and light spatters of rain kissed the window pane.

  In the distance, beyond the constant murmur of traffic noise from the nearby road, I could hear the high arrhythmic dirge of a muted car alarm. A bus growled past unseen. Someone shouted a name I couldn't quite make out, and then shouted it again.

  Then there was a lull during which all sound compressed into a small conceptual space. My ears rang; my head began to throb gently, as if someone were pressing against the skull with large, hot hands. It felt like I was about to see or experience something beyond the realm of the senses, but the moment soon passed, leaving me empty and distraught.

  I looked at the photograph of my son on my desk. He was smiling, his hands thrust deep into his pockets. Danny. Five years old. Happy. Unknowing. His T-shirt had the words LITTLE MAN printed across the chest, and he was wearing a badge that featured a smiling cartoon sun.

  The tree branches rustled outside the window, whispering in a secret language. The traffic had gone quiet. The empty building opposite – an abandoned church – had wire mesh across its broken windows. The yellow stone walls were stained with grime and parts of the roof were missing – small gaps where the slates had either been blown off or stolen.

  I gazed across the outside of the structure, picking out the finer details: faded graffiti, the airbrushed, anatomically incorrect outline of a monstrous penis, a stone windowsill scraped bare of its dark paint, the scraps left behind resembling old scabs on ancient flesh. As I watched, a lone figure walked past an upstairs window, as if crossing the room. I heard music – something sombre and bluesy – but it soon faded: ghost-music, something felt in the blood rather than genuinely heard.

  The sky darkened by degrees, as if a thin veil were being drawn across it. The rain intensified.

  For some reason I thought of my mother. Her thin, frail arms, the way she moved across a dusky room when she thought nobody was looking, the plaintive sound of her voice when she sang late at night. My eyes were wet with tears. I brushed them away, disgusted. My mother was fine; I'd spoken to her a few days before. But eventually, just like everyone else, she would die.

  "Idiot," I murmured. "Maudlin twat."

  "Sorry?" Mick: the guy who sat opposite me. We shared a huge cluttered desk in the open office space.

  I smiled. "Nothing, mate. Just talking to myself."

  Mick nodded, went back to his work. His eyes narrowed as he examined his computer screen.

  I returned my attention to the window, the fluorescent office lights flickering at my back. I watched a plane as it rose into the dark ocean of sky above Leeds-Bradford airport, located just a mile or two away. It flew at an acute angle, nose pushing through the clouds, and eventually it vanished from view into the whirling grey haze.

&n
bsp; I blinked, trying to clear a slight prickling sensation from my eyes. For a moment there, lost in my own inchoate thoughts, I'd imagined that I'd seen tiny figures standing on the wings of the plane.

  When the telephone rang I stared at it before answering. Short double rings: an external line, which meant that it might be a personal call. I picked up the receiver, pressed it against my ear.

  "Hello."

  There was a pause during which I could hear music playing in the background – something crappy from the eighties. "Hi, Simon. It's me."

  "Polly. This is a surprise." Understatement had always been my forte.

  "How are you?"

  I considered lying, and then opted instead for the truth: "Not good. Shitty, actually. Why, what do you care?"

  "Still wallowing in self-pity, I see. Congratulations on that."

  I tried not to smile, I really did. "How about you. Everything okay? I mean, I'm assuming this isn't a social call."

  The line hummed; someone had turned off the background music. I wondered where Polly was calling from – was she at work, or did she have a day off?

  "Well?"

  "There's something I need to talk to you about." She paused again. I could almost hear her licking her lips. She did that whenever she was nervous: a quick flick of the tongue like a lizard on a rock. "Any chance we could meet for a drink one evening this week?"

  For some reason I glanced at my watch but didn't register the time. "I'm free tonight, actually. Unless that's too soon?"

  "Tonight will be fine. How does seven-thirty grab you?"

  "Yes. That's good for me. Where do you want to meet?"

  "How about The Porcupine?" Somewhere neutral, then; clearly she wanted a serious chat.

  "Okay. See you then. Do I need to bring a weapon? Ammo?"

  "Just bring yourself, Simon. Or, better still, leave one of yourselves at home and come alone." She didn't wait for an answer before hanging up the phone. She had always been good at exit lines.