The Broken Ones

by Stephen M Irwin

  The world spun one last time as Oscar bent to pick up his keys. He straightened and felt his scalp. Wet, but only a little. He looked around, unsure if he was checking for witnesses or vultures. Neither appeared. He saw a red blink from the corner of his eye and turned. Whatever it was had gone; the windows of the street were dark and empty.

  He found a loose section of wire and pulled the rusty links upward. He crawled under, careful not to catch his tender head. No light came from the sky; the lot was a crater held close in shadow. The air smelled burned and rancid. He played the flashlight beam over the dark, slick curves that looked like beached things harpooned with burned, rotting piers. He started out across the lot. Every step was unpleasant: damp ash and wet charcoal would crunch, then his foot would sink into the squelching slurry. Dalmar had said Florica’s rented space was behind the brothel. He slogged across. The black mud sucked at his shoes, and broken roof tiles clacked underfoot.

  The burned and broken posts and debris tapered off. Oscar reached what he guessed had been the rear of the building and turned in a slow circle, running the light across the black, glossy ground. He picked up a length of steel pipe and began methodically jabbing it through the pitchy sediment. The pipe caught regularly on strands of electrical cable crusted with melted insulation, cold bricks, more pipe. Under a slight hillock, it caught the corner of something hard. He knelt and felt cold wetness seep through his trousers. He carefully balanced the flashlight on a blackened tile and forced his hands down into the muddy ash, tracing the object’s shape. He found another corner—it was metal, about the size of a domestic clothes dryer. The kiln.

  Oscar straightened, and his damp arms grew instantly cold in the chill air. This was a thin lead: a fortune-teller who’d pinned stars to her walls. He shivered in the cold. “Go home,” he told himself. His flashlight had rolled a few feet away. He reached out for it, putting all his weight on one arm. Suddenly, the ground beneath let out a wet, splintery crack and gave way, and his arm plunged into the ash to his shoulder; his chest and face connected with wet slurry, and a sharp corner of broken tile nipped at his cheek. His arm was underground and hanging in empty space. He must have pushed through a charcoaled table.

  Something crawled on his fingers and up his wrist.

  He yanked his hand up and out of the ground. Three cockroaches rode it, each as long as his thumb. He shook them off, and they flung away like nasty black comets.

  Oscar carefully circumvented the hole, reached for the flashlight, and shined it down into the darkness. In the circle of light at the bottom of the hole, the ground flexed and shifted, a rustling pelt not of black fur but of two-inch wings, shiny and hard as black-lacquered fingernails.

  Cockroaches. Thousands of them. And they were crawling over something.

  Christ, he thought. What if that’s her down there? What if she’d died in the blaze and those ten thousand sly-feelered, black-mandibled things are feeding on her? If he pushed his hand through their shifting mass, what would his fingers touch? A twisted arm—a root of charred bone and loose, spoiled flesh?

  He gingerly put his weight on the unsteady hillock and slid his hand into the hole. First, just cold, damp air on the skin of his sensitized fingertips, palm, wrist. Then something jumped onto the back of his hand and whispered there. His hand flexed. Don’t squeeze, he thought, that might be worse. He willed his hand to stay steady as he pushed it down. More and more tiny, flickering weights jumped onto his hand and began to crawl up his wrist and burrow beneath his sleeve.

  “Oh, man,” he whispered.

  A dozen more cockroaches skittered over themselves to feed on his fingers. His stomach began to tighten and quiver. But beneath the scuttling mass he felt something hard. Oscar brushed the insects aside, but the spiny little legs kept returning; one had burrowed its way up his sleeve to his elbow and was crawling steadily up his biceps toward his armpit. He ignored it, hunting for a place to grab the object. Whatever he’d found was cold; not smooth like metal but rough like brick or stone. It felt about a foot and a half long; its shape was irregular and impossible to guess under the shifting veneer of seething insect flesh. The cockroach in his sleeve was now near his underarm—it felt as big as a matchbook, and its sharp little feet nipped into his skin for purchase. A dozen more were making their way steadily up his forearm.

  His hand found a hole in the object, and he slipped his fingers inside. The cockroach in his armpit began to nibble.

  He yanked upward.

  The object exploded up through the crust of ash, bringing with it a contrail of cockroaches that scratched at the air and took lazy flight. Oscar dumped the object on the ground and shook his arm like a dog gripping a snake—tiny black sparks flew off in all directions. Then he drove his fist into his armpit and felt a wet pop against the skin. The roach there scritch-scratched twice, then stopped moving. He squeezed his forearm all the way from the elbow to the wrist and felt cockroaches squash and explode. Stomach heaving, he plucked open his sleeve and shook his arm wildly. A dozen dead and dying insects tumbled out.

  Oscar’s heart hammered, and he tasted bitter adrenaline. He forced himself to take slower breaths.

  He stooped and picked up the flashlight and returned to the object he had unearthed. As the beam of light played over it, he felt something tighten in his chest. His mouth grew dry, and the hairs on his neck rose like parade-ground bayonets.

  The thing was earthenware—fired clay—and was the length of a man’s thigh and the diameter of a dinner plate. Even with all the ashen slurry and mud and resistant cockroaches still playing over it, he could make out its disturbing shape. At first, he thought it was a clay monkey, then a gargoyle, then a hunched woman, then an owl. Then he realized it was all of those. Horns topped its head, not feathered but actual horns, caprine and twisted. It had wings, but instead of feathers at its wing tips it had clutching, skeletal fingers that reached down between squat, avian legs and held open a wide, vaginal gash. The idol’s eyes were round and staring. Its beak was alien and deformed: both upper and lower beaks had split sideways, and the mouth was open unnaturally wide, as if to feed on something that would otherwise be too large.

  I have parted the curtain of bone.

  Again, the thought came from nowhere, but was as clear in his mind as a lover’s whisper. Oscar had the sudden urge to drop the idol back in the hole. Instead, he leaned closer and shined the flashlight carefully over it. Its surface was scratched to approximate feathers or scales. Up one wing was a large flaw, a fissure that must have occurred during the firing. He reached down to set the idol upright. Instantly, a wave of cockroaches vomited from the thing’s quartered mouth and the ugly cleft between its legs. He dropped it again with a start, and the idol rolled, waving its spread legs at the dark sky before stopping on its split-beaked face. Oscar waited, then gave it a few sharp raps with the flashlight to unsettle the last scuttling roaches—the vessel rang tunelessly and hollow.

  Oscar stared.

  On the idol’s back was marked a seven-pointed star.

  Chapter 15

  The car jostled on the drive back through the city. Oscar’s head swam, aching behind his eyes and stinging where the girl had hit him with the bottle. He suspected that he should go to the hospital, but he didn’t relish the idea of a six-hour wait in Emergency. He wound the window down, and cold, wet air blustered in. On the passenger seat, the garbage bag around the pottery idol fluttered with the sound of wings.

  A star. An idol. A fortune-teller. A fire.

  A star. A dead girl. An auger. A robbed womb.

  Another rumble, this time his stomach. Oscar tried to remember the last time he’d eaten properly, then the thought of the swarming cockroaches made his gut spasm. He could still feel them scuttling like black crabs up his arms.

  Crabs. River.

  Purden. Murder.

  Haig.

  Haig—his smiling, polished face was everywhere and nowhere.

  At a stop sign, Oscar glanced in the sid
e mirror. Twenty paces behind, the dead boy stood on the footpath, watching. There was no other traffic.

  Oscar turned and called to him, “Do you know?”

  The boy’s hands waited, hovering at his waist like a pianist’s at a keyboard, wondering what to play.

  “No,” Oscar said after a pause. “I didn’t think so.”

  The rain started again. First, light drops, then a steady, cold downpour. The dead boy didn’t seem to notice.

  A patrol car roared past, lights strobing and siren wailing. Oscar’s heart jolted stupidly in his chest. His head throbbed.

  Five minutes later, he turned the wheel and stopped the car in front of the graffitied shutter. Out of habit, he killed the engine, left the headlights on, and stepped out into the rain. He shivered and knelt at the padlock.

  He froze.

  It’s in there.

  The dog’s head, wrenched from its body and crushed like an egg under a man’s boot heel, was just a warning.

  Whatever did that is in there. Waiting.

  Oscar’s heart pumped hard in his chest.

  He shook his head, trying to dislodge the thought. It was ridiculous. In the last hour he’d had a bottle smashed over his head and been arm-deep in a nest of cockroaches. He was tired, he was hungry, he needed to sleep, that was all. He’d locked the window with the chain. There was nothing inside.

  He steadied his breathing, slid the key into the padlock, and pulled it clear of the staple. The shutter clattered loudly as it rose.

  The two cones of white light speared through the empty garage, onto moldy boxes and empty oilcans. No dark gods. No dismembered dogs. Just dust and silence.

  “Idiot,” he said aloud, and got back in the car. He restarted the engine and rolled the car into the garage. The worn engine and tired exhaust rattled and echoed off the musty timber walls. Oscar twisted the key, and the engine coughed once and silenced. The nose of the car was centimeters away from the stack of oilcans, and the headlights reflected bright flares off the grimy tins. He flicked off the headlights, and the garage fell into darkness. He quickly opened the door, and the dome in the car’s hood lining sputtered on, a weak light not much brighter than a candle. He got out, retrieved the bag holding the idol, and closed the car door. Oscar put the key in the door lock and twist-jiggle-twisted until it locked.

  A drop of water fell on the back of his neck.

  He turned around and looked up.

  High overhead, all the hopper windows were wide open.

  Oscar looked behind him at the chains that should be fastening them. They hung loose.

  The shutter rattled down hard and fast, hitting the ground with a loud bang. Oscar jumped. He was suddenly in pitch darkness.

  He dropped into a hunch on the concrete floor.

  He listened. Each rapid pump of his heart rocked his body.

  “Who’s there?” he said loudly.

  Silence.

  All he could see was the imprint on his retinas of those damned oilcans. He was blind. The bag rustled in one hand. With the other, he reached out and found the cold steel sides of the car.

  “Police!” he said. His voice echoed emptily.

  High overhead, a loose window frame tapped. Just once.

  The garage was quiet.

  He stood.

  Scratch. Something moved in the darkness on the other side of the car. A tiny shuffle. A sly, faint rubbing. Enough for Oscar to know that he wasn’t alone.

  He silently cursed the empty gun in its holster and placed the plastic bag on the ground: its crinkling rustle was loud in the dark silence; the pottery idol inside it clack-clacked as it rocked on the hard concrete slab.

  Scraaatch. A little closer. Whatever was in here was coming around the car.

  Oscar’s eyes were wide but blind, still seeing ghostly imprints left by the headlights. His heart banged in his chest. He bit his lip and reached into a pocket. His fingers closed on the metal cylinder of a small flashlight.

  And if you do see something, he wondered, what then?

  Oscar listened.

  Nothing. Or maybe it was just a rat.

  Scratch-flick—from beside him at the nose of the car. He whirled and pointed the flashlight like a weapon, thumbing the switch on. The circle of light seemed stunningly bright: a dazzling reflection in the rearvision mirror. As Oscar squinted, something huge and gray flurried like a cape and—Bang!—struck him in the face. He whirled instinctively as wind rushed about him, smelling of dry soil and old rot. Dust flurried up into his eyes, stinging and dry. His feet danced to stay upright and one came down on the plastic bag—there was a quick crunch of pottery breaking, then his foot slid away from under him. His knee came down hard on the concrete, sending a white bolt of pain up his leg. The flashlight landed near the shutter, casting a tiny, useless crescent of light into the corner of the garage.

  He was on all fours, blinking to clear his eyes of the dust. Bang! He was knocked to the ground, and his forehead smacked into the cold cement. His vision swirled with bright spirals.

  The car, he thought. Get inside the car. His fingers scrabbled on the cold metal and found the handle. Locked. He’d locked it himself.

  The air pulsed above him, like two mighty breaths, and something large beat the car door like heavy curtains. The car shuddered under his fingers. And he heard grinding scratches in the dark, like bone on stone.

  It had landed on the ground in front of him.

  He snatched his hand away and ducked just as something large punched through the space where his head had been and speared hard into the glass of the door’s window, shaking the car on its springs.

  Oscar dropped to his stomach as a shape swooped above him, slicing the air he’d just occupied. Sharp shards of broken pottery bit through his ash-damp trousers into his thighs. He dared to twist his head and look up. All he could see was the twin, blurred rectangles of the high windows, dark gray against black—then something above him, blocking out all light. It descended.

  He yelled and rolled under the car. Behind him, something hard as horn struck the concrete with an angry snap.

  He squirmed deeper under the car, palms scraping on the concrete. His heart ran inside his chest like a trapped cat, and his breaths came in snatched, panicked bursts. He could see nothing: darkness, shadow in shadow.

  But it was out there. He knew it. It was close, waiting at the sill of the car. And he could smell it. The scent filled his nostrils: an unpleasant stink, like old fur or an abandoned nest. Or dry dead things.

  Scriiiiitch-scratch.

  Oscar stared through wide eyes. The flashlight still shone from the ground into the garage corner. And into that tiny arc of light he saw it move. It stepped slyly with a bony clack, cast into silhouette. A dark crescent as long as a man’s finger and shining like polished granite. A claw. A talon. Then a second. And a third. A foot. The weak light revealed only the very edges of its long, fingerlike toes, ridged in scutes as rough as crocodile skin, and those three long, old talons. Then he heard the thing shift. The whisper of feathers upon feathers; a hushed rustling like an old crinoline dress unfolding itself from an empty wardrobe. The foot silently placed down again, toes first, on the plastic bag that held the cracked idol. The weight of the creature pressed down, and Oscar heard the already broken pottery shatter into smaller pieces. Then, with sudden violence, the foot swiped the bag away as a rooster might scrape away a clod of dirt, and the bag smacked against the oilcans with a shockingly loud bang.

  Oscar gasped.

  And the creature went still.

  Slowly, silently, the thing lowered itself to the floor. Oscar’s mouth went as dry as a tomb. He saw from under the car, just an arm’s length from him, the glint of an orb: a disk twice the size of a poker chip, as black as oil but rimmed in glistening bile yellow. An unblinking eye, watching him.

  Then it struck.

  Bang! The creature’s head hit the sill of the car and the vehicle rocked. Oscar jolted backward, and his own head struc
k the cold, hard steel of the drive shaft.

  He had just a moment of swimming, sliding vision—seeing the huge gray avian head twisting, looking for a way under. Then dark stars swallowed his sight, and he slid into unconsciousness.

  Chapter 16

  The girl was dreaming of custard. She liked custard. She could eat it all day. She hated green vegetables and tried to say so, but the words always came out as a grunt or a groan. But this dream was happy. In this dream, she could speak. She’d asked for custard, and had received a clean white bowl that was sooo big—

  “Taryn?”

  —and the custard was soooo yellow, and in this dream she didn’t need Miss Zo-zo to feed her, she was feeding herself! And then—

  “Taryn?”

  She blinked awake. Someone was touching her shoulder. She opened her mouth to ask who was there, and a noise came out.

  “It’s okay, Taryn. Sorry to wake you.”

  There were two people standing in her room. It was night. Night was for sleeping. Everything was blurry. She didn’t think she knew these people. She couldn’t see them, because they were blurry.

  Taryn asked, Who are you? but another noise came out.

  Then one of the someones put her glasses on her face and all the blurry vanished. Two men. The man who had put her glasses on her face was small and wrinkly. Like the pixie from the book that Miss Lucy read. In the book, he was a nice pixie, and this man looked just like him. When he turned, Taryn saw that he had a silver tail on the back of his head, just like a pony’s! Taryn looked across the dark room to see if Becky was awake, because Becky liked ponies. She called out to Becky—

  “No, Taryn. No,” the pixie-man whispered, and put a warm finger on her wet lips. “Don’t wake her. We just want you.”

  Taryn liked his voice.

  The pixie-man smiled. “And we have something for you. Look.”