Ten Open Graves: A Collection of Supernatural Horror

by David Wood

  He came closer, took my face in his hands. 'My God,' he muttered, probing my face. 'They cut you, didn't they?'

  'Yes,' I admitted, remembering their knives and enduring his fingers as they felt out the seriousness of my wounds.

  'You need to get this seen to properly.'

  'I'll be fine,' I said flatly, knowing full well that I would heal given enough time. Better that than trying to explain away the eyes of two different breeds of dog to the doctors in the RVI.

  'Well, let me clean you up at least,' he insisted, tilting my head back enough to catch the light. It was hard to argue, but in the end I didn't have to. He caught the cord of the pendant Matthew had hung around my neck and started to draw it out. The body of the bird fell through his fingers before its angular wings were free of my neck.

  The vicar recoiled, ashen and shaking, and kept backing away as I moved, trying to put as much distance between us as he could.

  'Oh, Jesus. . . Get out! Get out! I don't want any part of this. I don't want to be involved. . . Please go. Please. . .'

  His change in attitude was stunning, its speed dizzying. I shook my head carefully, trying to slow everything down, wishing I might make any other gesture but knowing I couldn't. Not this time. He knew what it was. What it meant. Knew more than I did.

  And if he knew, how many others knew about the strange double life of the city? I shuddered to think, but didn't give myself the chance to. 'We have to talk,' I rasped, hoarse and fearful; probably more frightened than the priest was, truth be told. I took him by the collar, lifted him, forcing him to look at me.

  Felt myself shaking.

  His eyes were wild, roving, trying to look anywhere without focusing on me. I drew him closer until we were touching brow to brow, nose to nose. Let him feel my breath in his throat, my blood on his cheeks. Let him see my eyes. I said it again. 'We need to talk, you and I, and that is what I mean to do.'

  'No. . . No. . . Leave me be, please. I won't stop you. I won't interfere.'

  I don't know what I expected to happen, particularly after the street corner evangelist biting out his own tongue as he tried to decry me. Whatever next? Spiders? The thought leapt into my mind and suddenly I was seeing them, a multitude of spindly black legs spilling out of the padre's gaping mouth, his cheeks opening up like a ruptured birthing sac, more of those legs emerging, twitching as they tasted the air.

  They weren't there. I knew that, but I had to shake my head to stop seeing them, the part of my brain that decodes the visual input of the outside world insisting that the impossible was there and had been all along.

  'No,' I said, duplicating him… and then said nothing more for one. . . two. . . three heartbeats, just that spiritless word hanging between us, then: 'You're going to talk to me and you're going to tell me what I want to know.' I touched a finger to his eye, God forgive me. I touched a finger to his eye and slowly, deliberately, traced cuts similar to those around mine and let him work it out. 'Do we understand each other?'

  He swallowed and nodded, visibly scared as he digested the full, sick meaning of my tight gesture, and I hated myself. It didn't matter that I couldn't have done it, not what I was threatening. It didn't matter that I wasn't capable of that kind of monstrosity – he believed I was, which was far worse in its own way. Something about me had changed so much so that a complete stranger could be menaced into submission by the soft stroking of my index finger against his cheek. But something about me had changed, and I was beginning to think that it had changed for the worse after all.

  I rubbed at my eyes, unconsciously reinforcing the threat of a moment before; not letting him forget just who was in charge. It was a torture technique, nothing more. A way of extracting information that I wanted to know.

  I let my grip on his collar slide. Licked my lips because their dryness was suddenly unbearable.

  'What is this?' I asked finally, my fingers resting on the strange metal bird hanging around my neck. 'Why did it frighten you like that?'

  The vicar's eyes were wide, and it was more than fear that had them like that. Far more. The depth of the man's terror was incredible, like a great gaping black maw and I could feel its hysterical pull, feel it trying to drag me into that blackness with him.

  I hit him; cuffed him across the cheek. Not hard, but hard enough to draw blood, his teeth cutting his gums as his head rocked back. I couldn't believe I had just hit the man. . . But I did not feel any guilt; I did not feel anything. I knew then that I could and would do it again if I had to, so maybe in retrospect I wasn't as innocent as I like to think. I could only hope that the end justified the means.

  He started to talk all right; most of it senseless, all of it babble. 'Slow down, padre. Nice and easy.' I said, sounding like a refugee from a bad Spaghetti Western.

  The church was too damned quiet around us. Hollow. The masonry cold and stark enough to draw the sounds out of the atmosphere between us and replace them with a suddenly frigid emptiness. I wanted to scream, make any kind of noise to fill the void. Instead, I said, in a voice far calmer than the situation deserved: 'I want you to tell me everything.'

  He didn't get to, though. Not everything and not enough. Far from enough. He slumped into a seat, gesturing for me to follow suit. I stayed on my feet and began to pace while the vicar of St. Thomas's gathered his thoughts. Looking at him again, I realised that my original diagnosis was wide of the beam. There was a limit to just how often this man could keep getting back up. Like elastic, stretch him too far and no matter that he wanted to, he just wouldn't be able to spring back, not all of the way.

  Footsteps (In the Holy Water)

  One

  I listened to the sound of my own heart beating, a myriad sweet miracles inside my souring self, and wondered again at the miracle that kept me breathing.

  I realise I have said very little about myself through this headlong dash, and that I need to explain so much more. I am no proactor, I am a reactor; and a slow one at that. Things happen to me, around me. Prick my skin, I react. Something – a thought – chipped away busily at the dank little compartment inside me that was my subconscious. A montage of images from pulp fiction, Bela Lugosi, Vincent Price, and Gary Oldman, vampires kept alive after death on a diet of rhesus negative.

  This was some form of life after death, my existence now. Was that need, that sick hunger, going to fall on me? I couldn't remember the details of my last meal, something mashed to a pulp at the hospital, and I had been out of there how long? My stomach should have been painfully empty but even the thought of food turned the acrobats in my belly.

  Was I undergoing some sort of transition? Would I wake soon to find the taste for blood resident on my palette?

  The thought was stupid, comical, and scary.

  I hadn't thought beyond moving forward, and with the light at the end of this particular tunnel seeming so close, I could not stop thinking. . . What happened now? What happened to me?

  I saw visions, alternatives, and not one of them was comforting. I burned out, I faded away, I rotted into a shambling zombie like something out of the old movies. If this was living, could I simply keep on? I couldn't run, Malachi had shown me that. There was nowhere for me to go.

  Would I ever be able to just close my eyes and drift into sleep?

  I was scared.

  It's such a pitiful understatement, but I was scared.

  Light or no light, I couldn't for the life of me see a way out of my self-entrenched tunnel.

  All that I had, my innocence stripped away from me, was the clergyman in my hands. I thought for one horrible moment he was about to start pleading again, but he didn't. He fell back on the crutch of his religion. I envied him as he went through to the altar and took one of those little candles from the black metal box and lit it for the prayer closest to his lips. My own faith had lapsed with childhood's end. I followed him, taking advantage of the time it took to look at him, really look. I didn't like what I saw. Tremors undermined the taut muscles of his fa
ce. Cheeks mottled. Eyes flared wide. Naturally enough I assumed he must have seen something I had not, so I followed the direction of his frightened gaze to where the smoke from the votive candles was congealing into a wraithlike mass around him. Something tangible and tactile. I thought nothing of it; a trick somehow emphasised by the passage of sunlight through the stained glass windows and the concealed lighting inside, but a trick nonetheless.

  'It's nothing,' I assured him calmly, and he was fool enough to take me at my word. He buried his face in trembling hands again and didn't look up. His fear frightened me. It works like that, fear being contagious. An incipient finger that worms its way first into one and then another, spreading like a bug or a rash.

  His hair was damp with perspiration and clung to his scalp, emphasising the first glimmer ofbaldness already working its way out from the crown. There was a film of dirt grained into his fingernails and a smear of red ink along the middle phalanx of his index finger. Little things like that. I waited impassively, taking it all in and knowing he would speak given time.He looked up from his hands a full minute before beginning to talk, and for a second tried to hold my gaze but couldn't. I half expected to hear the elastic band twang as the perished rubber finally snapped. Instead, he spoke.

  No more than a whisper, but condemnation just the same:

  'That, that thing,' the words spat out with the acidic taste of the smoke and the prayer burning on and through his tongue, his mouth's inevitable betrayal guilelessly backing him into a corner. Now he had no choice in the matter, no way of backing out, back-peddling. I wasn't about to step aside with at least one answer so tantalisingly close. I pushed. By his own admission this man of our lesser God knew something of the secret life of his city, but how much?

  What a question, and could I have asked it yesterday?

  'I've seen drawings of it, I know what it means, what you are, how it marks you. I know. . .'

  What did he think I was, some kind of freak? Some monster from the fringe? I was sickeningly sure that he was party to my own doubts, my thoughts of cinematic vampires and bloodletting there for him to condemn. 'Then tell me,' I said, coldly.

  I could see him wrestling with demons of his own, his trembling being slowly subdued.

  'You really don't know, do you?' he reached out to touch my face. There was something else in the way that he looked at me. Pity? Graham Greene was right: pity is cruel. Pity destroys. 'It is nothing to be proud of,' the vicar said softly, his voice hushed now, as though, at last, he realised where he was. 'I know that much. That bird of damnation. . .' He broke off and I thought he was finished. He wasn't. 'This place has an evil history.'

  He fell silent again as if the effort of speech were somehow draining him, I don't know if he was hoping I would let it lie. Leave him be. I couldn't.

  'I need to know.'

  Had I been awake to it, I ought to have noticed the change in the room's temperature; the drop was gradual but substantial. Instead, I kept pushing. I read the cold draft squirreling down the length of my spine as anticipation, not chill. It soon nurtured into a darker sensation as dread took hold and carried me with the vicar’s words.

  Two

  He looked me in the eye and for the first time didn't flinch or draw away. His gaze was hateful and hollow. 'Time doesn't lessen the wrong. Doesn't condone it. Years merely distance us from it. Put a dark secret out of people's minds, and that is the way some people like it. Secret's best kept secret, locked up in some dark asylum.

  'Listen to me,' and he leaned in close, the intensity of his gaze too penetrating, too uncomfortable. 'People died. People like you killed them. People wearing that disgusting emblem and calling themselves free. People sick enough to be proud of their true colours when their hearts ran blackest.'

  He lapsed into silence once again, but I had nothing left to push with. A few words had eroded my certainty so easily. I was cut adrift at a point where I was no longer sure I even wanted to know. I thought of his veiled message, and thought that maybe in some cases ignorance could be a form of bliss.

  He started talking again but it took me a few seconds to bring myself to focus on what he was saying:

  'It was a riot of sorts. Riot is a good word for the anger that was unleashed, so yes. . .A mob ran the streets on the last night of the year, brandishing whatever weapons they had to hand… cudgels, knives, torches, it didn't matter. They had some sick idea in their heads to cleanse the streets for the birth of the new century. To eradicate the ills of the old. A kind of sick poetry at the downfall of such a romantic era.

  'But how did they hope to achieve this? By dragging sleeping children out of doorways and braining them? By dumping bodies in the river to rot away to nothing? They were a plague on the old and the infirm, the cripples and the homeless. Any with weaknesses or deformities. They broke down doors and dragged husbands and wives into the street, forcing the man to watch while they beat his wife to death, and then they turned on him. Those poor people were culled from the streets by a mob with money enough to call itself respectable. By people with the power to define normalcy and document it in the histories remembered by our books. For those few, the tainted followers of the New Dawn's creed, it was as if that night never happened, never mind that the church has records of every man, woman and child that died that bleak December night. Never mind that the world lost four thousand souls to that vile madness.

  'They were wiping the slate clean.

  'While they were burning down the workhouses and setting light to the workers’ cottages they imagined they could lie to the future with a clean conscience because they were making it a better future. While they purged the ghettos of this city, gripped by whatever dark madness had taken hold of their senses, they thought they could hold their heads high, oblivious to the stench of death rising from the floor around their feet, because no one would know.'

  I felt sick to the core. Sick because some part of me sensed his words as some small part of the truth, and that part of me could smell the skin and fear of the ordinary man on the wind, could see the cobbles stained with the blood of the innocents, the bodies piled up in pyres, could hear the raucous cries of the witch hunt as it battered down the doors after more meat for the beast… could taste the smoke fumes on the back of my throat.

  The necklace felt cold against my skin. Dead. I wanted to snap the drawcord and throw it into the fire where it belonged, but I couldn't move my hand against it for all sorts of reasons. I saw Matthew's face as he pressed it into my palm and that memory more than any of the others held me back.

  I couldn't bring myself to believe the worst of it.

  A boy in rags, an urchin of no more than six years old, was lifted before my Mind's Eye. I saw his face, the grime and the soot, the tears and the fear that had replaced the laughter, the pale skin. It must have been my imagination, but I saw a lot of Matthew in him, but then I had been thinking about Matthew only seconds before so perhaps the smudging of remembrances was inevitable. A cudgel made lethal with splinters of rusted iron hammered into the boy’s body and rasped across his face even as he reached for the bird around his attacker's throat. The rusted iron ripped through the flesh of his cheeks as if they were no more substantial than tissue paper while the meat of the cudgel stove the boy's skull in. Inside my head the cudgel swung again and again until the boy folded. The attacker left him, unseeing, to rejoin the turmoil of the fray, necklace left behind in the dead boy's fist. My head was dizzy with the screaming.

  The screaming stayed with me when I opened my eyes.

  Three

  The tiny indentations of red half-moons dug into the clergyman's face.

  This was no smudging of remembrances, no blurring of past and present reality. The attack was sudden and ferocious. The tension in the room simply exploded and everywhere there were screams. A cacophony of terrified voices surely more than just mine and his. All of those spirits from the fake memory, all of those damned and lost souls screaming to be heard in this charnel house t
hat was a church.

  I couldn't see what force was behind the sudden attack, but that didn't matter because I knew enough without seeing. My mind supplied the invisible fingers that clawed at the clergyman's face with shocking savagery. My eyes showed me the rest.

  The indentations became punctures which degenerated into gashes and gaping rents with all of the speed of a nightmare.

  I felt it then, a tangible presence, saw the claws that the smoke from the votive candles had somehow become, saw them reach, ripping at the vicar's spastically jerking body and saw the fabric rip and the flesh tear with the rakes of those smoky talons and knew they were too real for an hallucination, the assault too bloody and too permanent.

  And in those dizzying seconds the vault of St. Thomas's chapel had become an ice box; even the breath from my lungs seemed to be solidifying in the air before me, joining substance with the claws as the smoke drew form from the air about it.

  I was screaming. We were both screaming.

  He reached out to me, his face contorted, eyes denied tears by the malignance tearing up the skin around them. I backed off a step, my own hands reaching out defensively, trying to fend him off should he somehow reach closely enough to touch me. Should he somehow make the wraith's claws aware of me. His mouth twisted and his screaming stopped. The two things happened simultaneously. The vicar's jaw opened on a fresh scream when surely his throat and lungs were empty, and somehow kept on opening, kept on until the soft flesh of his lips started to tear and the bones of his jaw cracked and dislocated, the splinters paring through the sinewy flesh, kept on until his tongue swallowed into his throat and mercifully he started choking.

  I couldn't move. I froze like an idiot, revolted by what I saw and yet compelled to watch as his cheeks were spread wide by the hands of smoke, peeled back from the poor man's face until his mouth was all that was left for me to see of his ruined face. Teeth stood out like splinters of bone amid the debris, the shattered remains. And there was blood, so much blood. . .