Sufferer's Song

by Savile, Steve

  IT HURTS!

  And through the scream, blazing with the white-fire intensity of pure undiluted hate, bad memories:

  A boy and a girl together, the girl playing cards, the boy hungry for the friction of sex. . . Wants to be needed. . . Needs to be wanted. . . Then she's laughing at him and the world is collapsing with one word. . . Pregnant. . . Swearing. . . She's screaming at him. . . Bitch! Fucking Bitch!

  Words and pictures, fragments of the whole:

  A body spinning in the trees. . .

  Teacher at the front of the class, throwing the chalk-board rubber at a head three rows back. . .

  Spitting in the face. . .

  Bastard didn't pay me for that. . .

  Fire. . . Need. . . Fire!

  Son of a bitch, fucking cow screwing around behind my. . .

  Hand squashing a tomato until the flesh bursts over and through the fingers, dripping red. . .

  Watching a girl. . . His girl, driving her car too fast. . . Running away from him. . . Bitch. . . Fuckin' Bitch! The back end of the car slewing around a corner then a huge detonation as the nail-spiked log he'd lain in the road trips through the rubber tires. . . Screeching then a collision and a massive whumpff as the pumps blow. . .

  Pops slapping him across the face. . .

  Daddy. . . No. . . Please. . . No. . . NOOOOOOOOOOOO!

  I'll kill the little shi. . .

  Crying. . . Tears. . .

  Lowering a coffin into the dirt. . .

  My baby!

  A man, out of breath, running, pushing himself desperately hard. . . A face at the window. . . A woman beating at the glass in a strange stumbling drumbeat-dance, burning as if she had been dipped in wax. . .

  Followed hard by another incandescence. More than one voice:

  Panting. . . Gasping. . . Free! Free! Trees. . . Up ahead, a house. . . An old man staggering toward the barn. . . Calling out. . . Scare him! Want to scare him. . . Sneak close enough to taste him in the air. . . Feed. . . Yes. . . Yes. . .

  Flabby white buttocks pistoning up and down between mother’s milk-white thighs. . .

  Only wanted a drink. . . A fuckin’ drink man. . . Bastard had it coming to him. . . Fingers! Who the fuck does he think. . .

  God. . . Oh, God. . . Dogs. . . They've got dogs. . . Blood on my hands. . . Can't get blood off. . . Need a hit. . . Need to score. . . Hurt. . . Oh, God. . . It hurts! Old man turned me in. . .

  Bastard barman. . . God it hurts!

  GET OUT OF MY HEAD!

  Getting hard. . . Feel it. . . Want. . . Need. . . Fuck. . . Yes. . .

  A baby girl at the door. . .

  A punch. . . The other kids in a circle. . . Clapping. . . Laughing. . . Lash out!

  Clutching Comfortable Dog. . .

  The sun out burning fiercely. . . Skin warm. . . Walking. . .

  Then hurts. . . Hurts. . . Needles make it hazy. . . In a wagon, juddering over rough ground. . . Being led. . . Where. . ? Cages. . . White coats banging cages. . . Pain-rods. . . Hurt-rods. . . Scared of rods. . . Not bad. . . No. . . Be good. . . Be good. . .

  Coalescing into a single voice to shriek:

  HATE!

  Need. . . Need it. . . Cold. . . So cold. . . Where is he. . ? Where. . ? Too cold in here. . . Need light. . . Music. . . Yes, music! Cold again. . . Dogs. . . Fuckers’ve got dogs!

  WHERE IS HE. . ?

  Little Soldier. . .

  Coffins, row upon row of wooden caskets. . . Faces melting in with the wood. . . Friends. . . Covered with dirt. . . HATE GOD! HATE DIRT! HATE!

  And it all gets back to that, needing and hating.

  - PART FIVE -

  - AND THE LIGHTS BURNED OUT -

  - 60 -

  Charlie Adams staggered out into the drizzle of Northumbrian-fine mist; his head alight with the incessant voltage of power. His thoughts fairly crackled with the obsession:

  Power, power. . .

  And it was an obsession. He remembered little of the day gone before, nothing concrete beyond Annie Lockewood's burial, a few fever snippits conjured from the depths of delirium. Charlie had suffered for his sins. He knew about people who heard voices, they were as good as crazy. Being crazy terrified the policeman in Charlie. But things had been happening, eight hours had seen the hollows between his ribs emaciate beneath his frightened fingers, and he could hear the voices for Christ's sake. On top of everything else he was wasting away. The sweats were fearsome, stripping away the fat like turpentine on still wet emulsion. He dozed fitfully, all the while dreaming of power and burning. The burning was on the inside, a furnace – white-hot – a conflagration primed and set at melting his soul. Needles of pain rained upon his flesh, all the nerve-endings torn from their roots for hours before being replanted with a vengance. His sleep-talking screams of torment pierced his own nightmares as he suffered the physical pain of the transformation.

  Now this, piddling bloody drizzle getting in his eyes and making his head spin. He hadn't realized just how weak his legs were. Strangely, stripped down to the minimum tendon and muscle, they weren't numb; dead described best how they felt, as he shambled into the garden, the voice in his head impatient with his chrysalising body.

  Destruction surged through the blackness of Charlie's sudden fury. Power, the voices sent, and with it a vision, startlingly clear for all of its confusion, of iron golems striding across a landscape in negative, cables hooking from pylon arm to pylon arm, crackling with the intensity of electricity.

  Charlie knew then what he had to do.

  “Knowledge is power,” he told himself, and laughed aloud at his attempt at a funny.

  All of a sudden the garden was filled with unearthly delights. Things he had seen time and again for days without end were suddenly vital and filled with lustrous vitality. Next-door’s cat, a mangy ginger tom, padded across Charlie’s path. Charlie had always hated that cat. It had eyes that looked down into his soul, and sneered at the sins that were staining it. The ginger tom didn’t hang around for Charlie’s boot of condemnation; it was off and away down the street before the muzzy-headed policeman had even thought of giving it a parting kick up the backside.

  Kneeling in the drizzle-sodden grass Charlie started unhooking the single metal chain link and diamond fence and coiling the slack over his shoulder like so much spiky cable.

  Rainwater was streaming into his blinking eyes, but it didn’t matter to Charlie; he was seeing with an instinctive sense that was distinctly primitive by comparison. Emotions that he thought had died during the change flooded through him, spurred on by tiny voices. There was horror and hate, fear and spite and malice, all strange and unwelcome feelings before this morning. He felt ugly. Felt the nasty tang of lust on his taste buds, felt the frustration of unslaked revenge.

  All of a sudden Charlie had needs to fulfill, to indulge. Urges that might once have seemed wild, to satisfy.

  The voices crowded his head like tiny demons, competing with him for control over himself, and winning. These small voices bound for darkness.

  Charged with all the zeal of a lion bounding out to greet the Christians, Charlie Adams strode through the streets of raintown spitting curses at himself and at the heavy sky, and slapping the links of chain coiled over his shoulder like they were a best friend getting an encouraging pat on the back when times were hard. Something about the loosely coiled metal was horrifically comforting.

  There was purpose to every step. He knew where he was going, and he knew what he was going to do when he got there. It couldn’t scare Charlie if he couldn't think about it, and the voices inside his head weren't leaving him any room to think. Charlie was burning up despite the rain. Flash-images of hunger sent shivers the length of his spine. Like one of Pavlov’s dogs Charlie found himself salivating at the sight of food, even if that sight was nothing more than a picture inside his screaming head.

  Charlie ducked into an alley running along the side of The Railway House. Shielded from the rain he looked up to the sky for the lines
to follow. The nearest pylon was rooted in the middle of the fallow field out back. Power lines cut the black velvet, the rain sizzling and evaporating against the heat they carried.

  Grinning, Charlie walked out into the open space. His cheeks smarted from the sting of the wind, the rash of sensations supercharged by his replanted nerves. In the middle of the field Charlie stopped walking, shucked the weight of the chain from his aching shoulder and planted his feet squarely in the dirt.

  There wasn't room for him to be frightened. Charlie’s stomach fluttered with excitement, the growing knot in his throat his last weak chance of denying the voices. They weren't to be denied.

  Stooping, Charlie wrapped one end of the length of chain around his left hand, and then straightened up, holding the other end like a lasso. He swung it in a quickening circle, letting go and whipping it out in a parabolic arc that sailed over power line.

  Too late, a spark blossomed and lit inside Charlie's mind. He realized then what he was doing; had done.

  Horrified, Charlie watched the chain fold itself over the pylon’s lowest artery, unable to shake this end's anchoring grip from his left hand. Twelve thousand volts of electricty arced and chased down the short circuit to earth provided by the chain and Charlie’s rooted body. His voice locked on a glass shattering scream that filled the night five times over, the signal they had been waiting for.

  The lights of the village burned out, disappearing as if a huge black blanket had been thrown over the rooftops by an angry God.

  Only the ghosts of sounds and Charlie's weakening shriek clung to the night.

  Then, incredibly, Charlie was engulfed and rapidly devoured by flame that appeared to erupt from within his own body, a living ball of fire rooted to the spot, dripping flame on the wet grass.

  His skin crackled and spat, blistering and almost instantaneously charring, pustules bursting and spitting out small flaring missiles like fireworks, and still the electricity wouldn’t release his locked muscles to flail and thrash, but kept him fixed rigidly to the spot, roasting alive.

  The air fed the flames, redoubling their intensity. Remnants of clothes, black and smoking, grafted themselves to Charlie's torso.

  His eyes, the first things to go, burst with the heat and dribbled down the bared bone of Charlie's cheeks, his last tears as his body finally realized what his mind had known from the very first moment it started hearing those tiny voices: He was dead, and nothing was going to help him now.

  - 61 -

  Johnny and Alex woke together, the dying lights dragging them out of their virtual comas and shaking them into groggy consciousness.

  The effects of the transfiguration on Johnny were startling. He came out of the coma a gaunt skeleton with twig-bones for arms and legs, eyes sunken back into a skull where the skin appeared to have shrunk back from the bone like melting polythene, ablaze with the madness his addiction had always threatened.

  Johnny smiled vacantly, his head cocked on a peculiar angle, as if he were listening to some tiny internal voices only he could hear.

  Alex looked at Johnny for a hard moment, until it became clear what was happening. Then he stared at his own emaciated hands, stunned by the wasting sickness that had worked this evil magic on his body while he slept. His thirst was like an unquenchable fire burning inside his throat. He clasped his hands together, frightened by whatever it was that was happening to both him and Johnny, and as that fear reared its ugly head his face froze as the clamor surged into each and every space there was inside his mind.

  After half a minute, Alex heard the hunger in the tiny voices invading his head, the need, and found himself responding to it. He knew he was smiling, mimicking Johnny's idiot grin, but that only pushed him into smiling all the harder.

  “Come on,” he said to his friend, the fear of a moment before quelled by the comforting power of the words in his mind. He saw the lights of Westbrooke fail a second time, in his mind’s eye. Saw Charlie Adams' charred and still smoking corpse bucking under the torrent of electricity raining down the chain link and diamond rope.

  Felt dead, but good for it. Felt as if there were fishing weights hanging from his fingers. Felt as if the world had been breaking his back and as of now he was the one who had the power in his hands. Not Beth McCusker. It hit him then, hard -

  Beth playing cards, ignoring him. . . Alex hungry for the friction of sex. . . Only wants to be needed. . . Needs to be wanted. . . She's laughing at him now and pulling the world down across his back. . . Pregnant, he hears her sneer. . . Screaming at him. . . Bitch. . . The fucking bitch!

  - and he had to get out of the Judas Hole before he went crazy.

  That much he knew. There were changes taking place inside him that ran far deeper than just the shedding of a few pounds. There was a starkness, a blackness, to his every thought now. He couldn’t bring back the good times. The only memories he had access to were waking nightmares that he would have done literally anything to avoid dredging up.

  Alex had never hated anyone like this in his life, he wanted to bury his hand in her chest, pull her heart out and crush it in his fist like an overripe tomato.

  Johnny smiled at him as if he had shared his every thought and shared the same dark desires, and Alex thought that maybe he did at that.

  Together, they crept down from the cauldron of hills into the village of the damned below, their own brand of black hunger in their hearts, Johnny whistling as he walked.

  - 62 -

  Daniel Tanner had a sledgehammer pounding away at the headache he’d brought home from Annie's funeral when he finally roused himself. That headache blazing through his skull and a substantial way down into his face, had fear surging through him, purer than any fear he known in his life. That fear backed up a compulsion he couldn’t put words to. That compulsion made him laugh, his laugh harsh and cold, a broken sound that quickly turned into a series of wrenching sobs. His entire face was filled with pain now – even his lips stung – the thin, high-pitched keening sound coming out of him was, in that one quavering note, a symphony of fear and suffering.

  Kathleen stirred groggily, making a placating murmur as she rolled away from his discomfort. Daniel slipped out of bed and lurched into the bathroom, colliding first with the door jamb, and then bumping into the sink. He tugged the cord for the strip light. His headache became rapidly more severe, the fluorescent lights burning white fire into his brain.

  He vaguely recalled feeling sick when he arrived back after the funeral, and retreating to the warmth and comfort of bed earlier than usual. He had no memory of anything after that, only an irritating trace-thought that kept generating the whispering voices that wouldn’t let him sleep.

  Daniel splashed water over his face, wincing at the shock of it cascading over the fresh sores breaking the skin around his mouth and chin. He fingered one curiously, the blister rupturing under the slight pressure to weep watery pus. He stared at himself in the mirror, leaning in closer before shying away from the sight of himself, terrified by what he saw looking back through the glass.

  Every thought was fuzzy at the edges, his memory clouded.

  His face still dripping with water, Daniel staggered back into the bedroom and dressed as quietly as he was able. The curtains were drawn and there was a middle-of-the-night quietness to everything. His felt as if a thousand nails had been driven into different parts of his body. Every inch of his skin fairly throbbed with the numbness of the plague even as he lurched down the stairs and out into the fresh, rain-filled, air of the back garden.

  Sweat ran down his forehead, indistinguishable from the drizzle plastering his hair flat to his scalp. He was shaking. He staggered away from the doorstep, stumbled the three steps to the shed and fell to his knees as the cramps and nausea rolled over him. Daniel vomited into the weeds cracking up through the fragmented cement, crawled backwards, battered by torrents of rain as the heavens finally opened, dropped to his elbows and continued to heave until the only thing he brought up was that s
ickening noise. After a moment he dropped onto his side and hugged himself, sure he was going to die.

  The thought of death flickered only briefly through his mind and then was gone, battered down by the rasp of distant voices and images echoing through his skull, driving him to the verge of insanity:

  GET OUT OF MY HEAD! He screamed, clutching at his temples. The voices hushed for a moment, supplanted by a vision and a sound that answered the needs of the compulsion that had been with him since first opening his eyes.

  He got to his knees, and then his feet, using the shed wall for support. He hadn’t realized just how much this fever had weakened him. His leg bones felt like gelatin. Daniel wasn't sure he could stand without the wall to keep him from pitching forward onto his face, and didn’t want to let go in case he found out he couldn’t and ended up in a heap on the floor anyway. For a moment he was lost, confused, and directionless. He leaned there, shoulders slumped, head hung low, until the weird, eerie burning in his flesh was supplemented by a new sensation: hunger. His stomach grumbled, and almost as soon as he had put a name to it, his entire body started to shake with hunger.

  He began to work his mouth, chewing and swallowing continuously, involuntarily. His hard swallows physically hurt as if his body were demanding to be fed.

  Summoning every ounce of courage and obstinacy, Daniel thought through the objections, reasons he couldn't be hearing, feeling, what it was he was feeling (the presence in his head, the need) but almost as soon as he started putting words and pictures to those thoughts, more words and more thoughts seemed to slide into place in Daniel's brain.

  The sweat of need poured from his pores. He knew something then. Knew rabid hunger, out of control, painful, tearing at him. His thoughts clouded, funneling down toward one overriding sensation: The Need. . .