Ten Open Graves: A Collection of Supernatural Horror

by David Wood

  Four

  I should have known better than to expect death; heaven or hell.

  No, I opened my eyes on blackness and silence but it wasn't any kind of death. It was dirt. The side of my face was pressed into the cold earth. I could taste the dirt on my tongue. The insides of my throat and nose burned, but they were clear and that was no small mercy. Dry blood scabbed on my cheeks and around my mouth and nose where the things from Crohak's fingers had gorged themselves.

  I stirred groggily, struggled to roll over. My head swam. Span. When it stopped I realised I wasn't alone. The silence had dissolved into other sounds; breathing, loud in the darkness. More than one person or a never-ending echo conjured and amplified by the weird acoustics of the crypt. I made it on to my back. Over to the left, light flickered from the bare bulb. I'd fallen outside of its circle of light.

  Water dripped, and in it I could hear the thoughts of Crohak's damned beggar army, screaming for blood.

  It took a long second to orientate myself.

  The Bird Man prodded me in the side with the toe of his booted foot. 'Not dead, then? Good.' His implacable stare was basilisk-like.

  I parted my lips to speak but it hurt. I coughed and gagged instead, the pain of it doubling me up.

  Crohak drove a kick into the base of my spine, hard enough to cripple me. I couldn't move.

  'Kill me,' I gasped finally, biting back the flames of agony those two words cost.

  Five

  Arms hauled me gracelessly to my feet.

  My legs sagged. I couldn't stand, but they wouldn't let me fall.

  I was too weak to put up much of a fight; I kicked and struggled but they were weak kicks and a not-quite wriggling struggle, there was no force to them, no strength. Between them they were a miserable defiance against the strength of the arms. Fingers dug into my arms as they dragged me through the patches of light and dark towards a deeper dark; a hole in the ground.

  'Oh, God, no. . . You can't. . .' I moaned, realising, too late. I started to struggle then, to really kick, jerk my shoulders, twist and squirm but the ground was yanked out from under me as the hands pitched me out into the darkness.

  I landed badly, coming down hard on my shoulder and arm, then my back as I went over. I crashed into the unforgiving wall of the pit. Agony's fire flared all the way down my left side.

  They pulled a wooden plank-lid across the hole above me, sealing me in. It was completely dark, but the absence of light didn't kill the sounds.

  Small, scratchy sounds that could only be rats.

  I heard them laughing as they left me in the pit.

  Six

  I didn't move; couldn't. Not at first.

  Spoiled water was dripping into my face my from somewhere above. I let it.

  The river. . .

  I was under the river. . .

  I felt suddenly cold. Something scurried close to my hand. I felt its fur brush against the fine hairs on the back of my hand and then it was gone but those fine hairs still crawled.

  The quality of the darkness was claustrophobic, not satisfied with surrounding me, it had to be inside me. Inside my mouth, my throat, my nostrils, my ears. It swarmed dizzyingly, pressing at me all of the time, like the water spilling down my face.

  I wiped at my face but the greasy water was insistent. It slipped through my fingers, into my eyes, down my cheeks, over my lips, into my mouth. I spat but more kept coming, hungry like rain.

  I shuffled backwards, my fingers pushing into the soft moist dirt floor until they were buried to the first knucklebone, until I felt my back press against the solidity of the wall. The constant stream of water had the pit floor sodden. Tentatively, I began exploring the dimensions of my prison, feeling out the closeness of the walls with nervous fingers and palms. The walls were rough and uneven – as if some sort of mural had been carved in to them by the previous tenants –less than six feet apart in any direction, and roughly circular. It had that smell, too. Smoking hickory wood and cinnamon.

  I pushed myself to my feet then, jumped and swatted at the air reaching a long way short of the pit's wooden lid, not sure what I was doing or why I was doing it. I did it again though, and again, hitting the wall this time, and I kept on jumping and waving at the blackness and throwing myself into the walls until I was gasping from the exertion, dizzy, sick, bruised and totally disorientated.

  Beaten, I sank back down into a huddle.

  I drew my legs in, wrapped my arms around my knees and began rocking gently, just rocking, rocking, feeling a jutting part of the wall mural press into my back every time I rocked back.

  Seven

  Time stood still in that cramped little hole; lost all meaning.

  I didn't shout or scream.

  I struggled to remain calm, to think my way through the confinement. To think of ways to pass some of that meaningless time.

  I tried music, thinking my way back through the web of the piano solos that had been second nature before the night of the crash, but it was useless because every note slowed down to the beat of a funeral march and haunted me.

  Then I tried counting it by breaths but tired of the game after three thousand and twenty seven. The number itself wasn't special, it was the extra little something that went along with it. The three thousand and twenty seventh was a rat serenade. I stopped counting because they started crawling over my legs. I couldn't see them, not properly, just vague outlines because my eyes refused to adjust to the utter dark. I didn't need to see them. I felt them, and I heard them, that was enough. One crawled over my foot. I felt it trying to nose a way beneath the cuff of my trousers. Felt its warmth as it nosed my bare skin. That was it. I kicked out, sending it skittering into the pitch. And I screamed. And I mean screamed. I opened my mouth and howled. The noise lashed back at me like nails being driven into my eardrums. That made me scream harder.

  Eight

  Minutes.

  Hours.

  Days.

  The time passed by meaninglessly with nothing to measure it but the growing pain in my gut as the rats came closer.

  They had started treating me like a resident part of geography of the pit. Something to be climbed, explored, conquered, and while I was warm, something to be gnawed on, to sharpen teeth on, food for the colony should I stop fighting back.

  And in all of that time the lid never came off once.

  Nine

  I was trying to force my body into coming to terms with the idea of starvation but it was a dead loss, if you'll forgive the pun. My belly grumbled like an old Jewish mother, it just kept on at me, nagging, nagging, ever-present in my thoughts, the hunger pang equivalent of Maureen Lipman's Beatty jazzed on amphetamines.

  Food wasn't the only craving, though. Something else wormed away inside my gut, like hunger but subtly different in a way that took me the longest time to differentiate.

  I felt myself starting to shake after a while. Little tremors.

  It was the damnedest thing, after everything I'd been through I was coming down with a bad case of nicotine withdrawal. All I could think was that God had a warped sense of humour.

  I patted my pocket, not expecting my tobacco tin to be there, but it was. Inside pocket. I pulled it out quickly and popped the lid off, knowing that if my tin was there that meant my lighter was there. Still not daring to hope, I explored the contents of the tin by feel; the slightly rough barrels of the roller, the loose pad of the tobacco, and not a lot of that, the wafer thin rectangle of papers, and last, there it was, the cold metal of my Zippo lighter. Feeling like that first caveman who discovered fire I lifted it out and touched it to my lips, wishing, before I thumbed the wheel and lit up my prison.

  Ten

  The small puddle of light from the Zippo opened a doorway right down into Hell for a single heartbeat before it too died. But in that fraction, the ruined face of a nameless death leered at me from out of the black.

  And it was a face.

  Bone white, speckled with brown slake, its b
leached skull pushed out through the skin of the mud wall. Face to face. The jawbone was wrenched out of its socket and hanging but it clung to the rest of the skull as an earthworm wrapped its slinky body around the bone and disappeared into the cavity that would have been an ear in its past life. The jawbone still harboured the roots of teeth that had long since rotted. Before the light died a gasp of purification leaked from the broken-jawed mouth. A many-legged earth dweller squirmed out of the rust-coloured mud, its black carapace crusted and streaked with a watered-down red.

  There were insects everywhere, crawling in and out of burrow holes in the mud walls. They kept the wall alive.

  Either side of the broken skull little calcite fingers, spindles of bone, clawed out to snag me. To snag me and drag me into the mud to share their darkness.

  The stench of petrol caught in my throat.

  Head down, I gagged and vomited, coughing and retching into the dirt between my legs until there was nothing left to bring up.

  And from out of the darkness the rats came to lap it up hungrily.

  Eleven

  My body craved an infusion of cigarette smoke more than ever, but light was the price of a nicotine fix. Light and all it had to show.

  That nameless death with its greedy fingers wasn't going to be alone in the dark. It would have gather others in to share its pain. That meant more deaths, more bones trapped in the walls of a muddy grave. More. More. . .

  I clutched the lighter tightly in my trembling hand, leeching the last of the warmth out of it. It couldn't warm me, though.

  So much pain caught in such a small flame. . .

  I couldn't help myself I had to think about those first tentative tactile explorations after my descent into the pit and how it had felt under my fingers. Like bones. . ? The sibilant whisper ofthe clergyman's words filled my mind's ear. Suddenly I wasn't alone in the darkness. Rapid flashburn images of bleached faces with flesh and blind insects crawling and clinging to them flared and leered on every side, above and below, broken fingers of bone clawing out to snare me; bones lit by my imagination and the clergyman's hideous recollection of that bloody night when the old century died. This wasn't memoryless earth. The rusty colour of the soil suggested a lot of blood had been spilled down here over the years. A lot. I was Crohak's prisoner, trapped in a mass grave of beggars and cripples. The spectres conjured by my imagination were broken and twisted and more disturbing than anything the darkness could hide.

  They wouldn't leave me alone until I lit the lighter; one flame to chase them away.

  Twelve

  The spectres ran as far as the mud walls where they melded into the jumble of bones and caricatures of bodies.

  In places there were more bones than there was rusty earth, bones seething with tiny life, insects swarming over them, eating into each other to get closer to the nutrition of the bone garden.

  Something fragile inside me broke forever.

  Thirteen

  I sat in the middle of the bones, drawing comfort from clutching my legs to my chest and just rocking, rocking, rocking.

  I listened to the conversations of the insects as they burrowed, and the rats as they lapped up my drying vomit, not understanding a sound they made, not understanding how they could bear to live in the mass grave of the bone garden.

  I tried to roll a cigarette but couldn't because my hands were shaking too much. I dropped the tin and curled up into a tight, foetal, ball, my arms locked around my shins, half of my face pressed into the rusty mud, and waited to die.

  Fourteen

  Minutes.

  Hours.

  Days.

  The pain in my stomach became a hollow numbness. It stopped hurting. My throat was parched. I drank the spoiled water that coursed down my upturned face. It tasted faintly metallic, of bromides and earthy elements but it kept me alive because I lacked the strength to let go and die.

  Like my belly, my head was empty.

  My skin crawled with insects, the air with my whimpers.

  I lay there until one of the rats started licking my eyes with its rough tongue.

  Fifteen

  I caught it before it could get away.

  Dug my fingers into its neck so its sharp teeth couldn't find a way to sink into my hand as I smashed it on an outcropping again and again. I felt the spasm of its death course up my arm and clenched my fingers tighter until my nails pierced its thick skin killing it again and again and again.

  I was salivating and that shook me badly.

  I started to tear at the fur, opening the rat up so I could get at its warm flesh. Parted its steaming entrails. It was warm and sticky. I tasted its blood on my fingers as I put them to my mouth, wondering if I could do it. . .

  Sixteen

  There were five rats down there with me.

  They didn't touch the pain in my stomach for more than a few minutes each, their moist softness, their repugnant taste, but the more I chewed the more I grew used to eating. That first mouthful was the worst, but I had time to get used to it. I swallowed again, forcing the dead meat down. Chewed, tasted that warmth as the agony burned within my belly. By the end I was tearing into the carcasses, skinning the rodents with my teeth before I shovelled the still warm meat into my mouth, trying not to think of what I was doing, telling myself I was going to survive, that I would do whatever it took to stay alive. . .

  Seventeen

  When the rats were nothing more than skin and bone left to rot on the floor I started on the insects, worms, beetles and earwigs that sheltered in the walls.

  I gouged my fingers into the rusty mud, clawing out handfuls of the stuff and sifting it for a grub, working blind. Because I couldn't see more than an outline through my animal eyes it stopped hurting. Part of my mind was able to segregate the trauma, keep it away from the other part of my mind where my sanity wavered. Make it unreal, as if it were happening to someone else. That part protected me as best it could but some of the nightmare was always real and refused to bleed away.

  My fingernails broke off. My skin became hard and dry, flaking. My face felt strange, my beard grown wild. The pit stank of my shit where I'd had to empty my bowels so many times it hurt to think.

  I became used to the ravening hunger because it was all I had to satiate myself.

  I quickly sank into myself like the flesh of my limbs which sank into my bones.

  Languished in my pit of despair, my own abyss where my tortured mind plagued itself with hallucinations of juicy steaks lashed with Milanese and peppered sauces, sausages smothered in golden brown fried onions, burgers drippy with grease and melted cheese, and strands of spaghetti run through with creamy pesto, garlic and herbs mixed in. Succulent memories of unholy grails where Ronald McDonald was God, Father, Son and Holy Ghost with double cheese and a side serving of fries.

  And then there was light. . .

  Eighteen

  Nothing brilliant or startling, a chink at first that slanted across the black sky like the sliver from a knife's shiny edge, but then the wooden lid came off and even the dim illumination of the guttering newspaper torches was painful to my eyes. I shuffled back against a wall, covering them. Expecting torment. It came in spades.

  The Bird Man had torches lowered part-way down on ropes so there was no chance of miss-seeing the bones of the beggars grave that kept the wall together. No chance of mistaking what they were. What they meant, those white shapes as they twisted lazily in the guttering light of the burning newspapers. The New Dawn.

  Hungry faces leaned over the side of the pit to stare at my squalid existence. I whimpered, curling up tighter, painfully aware of the small pile of rat corpses stripped of meat and caught in the puddles of light, of the bugs and the faeces clinging to my body, desperately wanting the torment to go away.

  But it wouldn't.

  I heard the mocking echo of the Bird Man laughing again, but this time I didn't care. I pushed my back up against the wall, trying to make myself small.

  He didn't sta
nd there and mock, didn't tell me that the bones that floated in the mud walls were the driving force behind his war with Malachi, didn't try to explain away himself or his actions. His need for revenge. He didn't need to. I understood for myself – darkness, time and solitude were good teachers. 'Get him out of there,' he ordered briskly.

  Another rope was lowered over the ledge, this one bare of torches. I stared at it as if it were the Serpent himself come to lure me into the next circle of Hell.

  'Climb it,' one of the tramps hissed, Jack Daniels strong on his breath even from this far.

  I shook my head, knowing there was no way in God's earth I was up to the climb.

  'Climb the fuckin' thing,' he insisted, hawking and spitting a wad of phlegm at me. Others took his lead, spitting at me, hawking and spitting, hawking and spitting until I reached out for the rope.

  I used it to pull myself to my feet. It hurt to stand after so long lying down. I was painfully weak, my body a bag of bones, a scarecrow, but one hand after the other, I started to haul myself up, using my feet on the rough bones for support. My stick-arms were trembling violently. My hands just couldn't hold on. I fell after less than five feet, collapsing in a heap. I lay there, gasping.

  In the end one of the hawkers had to climb down into the pit and tie the rope beneath my arms so the others could haul me out like a sack of potatoes.

  Nineteen