by Gary McMahon
This had happened twenty years ago, too. He was certain.
“What do they want?” Brendan’s voice was tiny; he sounded like a child.
“I think they want to watch us. Or maybe watch over us.”
There were no sounds other than those caused by the men.
The air was still.
The birds were silent.
Even that incessant churning of the earth was soundless, like a film clip with the volume set to mute. They all turned to watch the chaos of soil, shifting and turning as if a huge invisible shovel were digging there. Something erupted from the muddy surface, its segmented back breaking through the soft crust and rolling like the body of a withered serpent. Its hide was dark and wet, yet covered with a fine mesh, like old teabags. There were bright yellow boils along the ridge of its spine, and as it lurched upwards and forwards, thrusting itself out of the hole in the earth, Simon thought that he saw what might have been a face amid the mass of waste that had been compressed to form its long, thick neck. Then he realised that it was all neck. Like a snake, or an old-fashioned image of a sea monster, it arched its body and slammed back into the earth, sending showers of mulch flying.
The creature did not move any closer. It kept its distance, toying with them from afar, coy as a lover. Simon had seen this thing before. He knew what it was called, if not what it was.
He had seen it in his dream.
“The Underthing,” he said. “That’s it. That’s the Underthing. This time it’s showing itself.”
He glanced up, at the hummingbird sky, and saw that every tiny beak, every black eye, was turned in their direction. Whatever was happening here, it was larger than their experience. This meeting signalled a stage in the evolution of Loculus, and he was too dim, or too inconsequential, to be given insight into what form it might take.
“This isn’t how I had it planned...” He turned to the others, his eyes moist, his mouth open. “It’s not what I expected.”
A loud clicking sound broke the silence, splitting the air and causing the birds above them to shiver. It was the call of Captain Clickety, the damned and damning song of their childhood nightmares. If the vision of waste and corruption before them was the Underthing, then the avatar, the tentacle they’d named Clickety, was now to make an appearance in the endgame that was unfolding around them.
“He’s coming now. The Plague Doctor. Captain Clickety. He’s here.” Hailey stood beside them, her voice a whisper.
Simon wasn’t sure where she’d come from, but he felt glad that she was here, if only for moral support. Her wings were folded down, plastered to her back like a weird cloak. Her hair was as black as a raven’s wing; her leafy eyes were solemn. “The Underthing won’t come near you... he’s afraid. He can’t touch you, because if he does, he’ll fall apart. So much spiritual pollution can only hold itself together, in one piece, if it isn’t subject to human contact. It’s fragile, like an eggshell; too much pressure and it will break. That’s why it always sends in an avatar to do its dirty work.”
Pressure... the thought filled Simon’s head, as if the space there had been waiting to enclose that one word.
Pressure...
Pushing...
Wasn’t that the one thing he was best at – pushing, applying pressure? He’d done it all his life, to get what he wanted, and now he was faced with a real test of his talent. If he could push this thing, coerce it into doing his bidding, he might be able to save them all. The past would be shut out; the darkness would lift; the hummingbirds would move on and the sky would clear, letting back in the sun.
It was time to push.
BRENDAN COULD FEEL his unnamed brother on his back, like an unwanted passenger. The face that had haunted him from the inside without him even knowing, the familiar features he had never even laid eyes on until yesterday, was speaking to him silently. He could feel the lips moving between his shoulder blades, the frown forming on its brow, the diseased cheeks puffing in and out as they sucked at the air of this place.
He reached behind him and tried to slap at the face through his clothing, but it did no good. He grasped at his back, attempting to still those lips, to stop that unforgiving toothless mouth from moving.
But the face – the terrible face formed of ruined, besmirched flesh – mocked him; it taunted him with one word, repeated over and over again:
Loculus.
He could feel the word forming on the lips of his back, tearing from his own rancid flesh, and almost hear it spoken aloud inside his mind. His brother, his never-lived, never-really-died twin, was chanting the word like a prayer.
“No,” he whispered, “Stop it.” He grabbed a handful of the material of his jacket and pulled; he felt the face laughing. He reached behind and battered at the top of his spine, hurting himself. He beat at the edge of the face, hitting, slapping, and punching.
Then he began to scratch – he had not been able to scratch there, on his back, for years, and the pain felt good. Even as the skin split beneath his clothes, even as the blood seeped from the wounds...
THE CLICKING SOUND was deafening.
It filled the air like helium in a balloon, forcing it close to bursting point. Simon could feel it worming its way beneath his skin, entering his bloodstream, forcing aside his bones and vital organs to aid its passage.
The music was inside him, and it was hideous.
He looked at his friends and saw that they were experiencing the same discomfort. Brendan was scratching at his back, pulling at his clothing. He took off his jacket and threw it onto the floor, and then began to tear at his shirt, flaying it from his body.
MARTY’S SIDE WAS on fire. He clutched at the wound, feeling the stitches fray and the dressing come loose. Humpty – that awful, terrible creature from his childhood’s darkest nightmares – was moving around, picking at the wound from the inside, and trying to get out. This was where it wanted to be; it could smell the earth beneath Marty’s feet and feel the breeze of this place on its ugly, chubby cheeks.
He could feel its deformed hand-feet scrabbling, tearing away at his flesh. His side felt warm; blood was being spilled. He looked down and saw his abdomen blowing up like a balloon, doubling, tripling in size...
He went down onto his knees, crippled by the pain. He pressed the palm of his hand into his beltline, trying to push the thing back inside. Was it trying to exit through his navel?
Then, wriggling, the thing began to shift around, turning itself like a breech birth. Its head was close to the opening; he could feel the lips of the wound begin to pucker and open, like a mouth preparing for a long, deep, loving kiss. His body was preparing to vomit out the interloper.
Humpty-fucking-Dumpty was coming out to play. And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men wouldn’t be able to put Marty together again...
SIMON WAS ALONE, now; he had no back-up. Marty was writhing on the ground, clutching at his abdomen – which was swelling as Simon watched, as if the unholy clicking sound was filling it, bloating the man’s stomach like a pregnancy. His swollen belly undulated, bursting the buttons on his shirt, and Simon saw that it was taking on the shape of a giant egg: a tight, pale oval.
“What’s happening?”
“Look,” said Hailey, pointing towards the trees at the bottom of the slope.
About a mile away, like some kind of border, was a stand of undamaged oak trees, not unlike the ones from which they’d emerged. As he watched, a figure stepped forward from the tree line, using a short cane to walk. Even at this distance, he could make out the dark floppy hat, the dark clothes and the white beaked mask.
“Captain Clickety,” he said, the sound of the entity’s voice invading his mind. Like the frantic beating of castanets, it played out a surreal soundtrack, ushering the figure into view. Clickety moved without moving; he walked in place, as if exercising on a treadmill, and yet still he loomed closer, covering the distance in jinks and jerks.
Simon looked back at his friends. Brendan was hug
ging himself, but violently, as if he were trying to squeeze himself to death. If anything could be heard over the sound of clicking, then it would have been Brendan’s screams. His mouth was open wide, his teeth bared, and he was wailing like a penitent monk, flagellating himself before a statue of the Saviour.
Marty was rolling on the ground, wrestling with what looked like a large, pink, gelatinous egg. He was beating at it with his hands, gnawing at it with his teeth. The thing was rudimentary, only partially formed, still attached to his stomach by strands and threads of bloody flesh.
“What can I do?” Simon turned to Hailey, but she was no longer there. She had deserted him just when he needed her most.
Her voice came to him, between clicks, and he heard her say: “Do what you must. Do what you do best. Just push.”
Then it came to him: the way he could do this, how he could defeat whatever it was that had set itself against them.
Just push...
He had always pushed people, towards what he wanted them to do or away from himself. It was his skill, his only real talent.
He turned and looked at his friends, locked in their personal battles, and started to piece things together. He was the go-between here; he always had been. It was his role in life: to help others make things happen.
Just push...
He was the pusher. So he did what came naturally: he pushed.
“Get up,” he said slowly and calmly. “Get the fuck up and join me.” He stepped over to Brendan, who was still clawing at his own shoulders, tearing away the rags of his shirt. “Get up. Now. Leave the fucking spots alone and climb onto your feet. Help me now, or so help me, when I get back there, to where we live, I’ll take Jane away from you...”
Just push...
“I’ll take her to bed, and then I’ll take her away from everything she’s ever known. I’ll show her all the things she’s been missing, the life she should’ve had. I’ll take her and I’ll keep her and you’ll never see her again.”
It was working. Brendan staggered to his feet, his face contorted in pain and rage and bitterness.
“Stand with me... or you’ll never get to hold your wife again.” Simon raised his left hand, the palm facing outward. He splayed his fingers, and then slowly drew them into a fist, one finger at a time folding in towards the palm, little one first and the thumb last: the long-ago salute of the Three Amigos.
Brendan grabbed Simon’s arm, but rather than a gesture of violence it was one of love; a bond, once broken, was being remade. Brendan realised what Simon was doing. They both looked down, at the old scar on Brendan’s right forearm, and Simon remembered the time when they had built the den. A good time, a happy time, just before the darkness arrived.
Brendan smiled and nodded; he understood what was required.
“And you,” he said, turning to Marty. “You fucking pussy. Call yourself a fighter? Call yourself a man? Look at you, rolling around in the dirt wrestling with yourself. Get the fuck up or get the fuck out. You’re nothing; you’re useless. Your father was right about you. You’ll never be a real man.” Tears clouded Simon’s vision, but he kept up the assault. “Get up and be a man or just lie there like a little boy.” It hurt him to say these things, but he hoped that Marty, too, would get what he was doing. “Just lie there, like you did when Sally died!”
Marty screamed: a roar of rage. He gritted his teeth, stood and faced Simon.
“Be a man.” Simon squared up to his friend. This was it: do or die. “Okay, soldier?” His voice was an echo from a time before darkness; from the days when monsters were just things they read about in books or saw in films on TV.
Marty nodded.
Then, back together again – truly together, for the first time – the Three Amigos turned as one to face their enemy. Simon moved his hands away from his body and opened his fingers. The other two men took his outstretched hands, one each, and they held on as if they were afraid to let go.
Simon smiled.
Then he pushed again.
Three separate parts joined together to create a whole. He could feel the energy thrumming in his hands, spreading up along his arms to pool inside his chest, forming a hard little shell around his heart.
Captain Clickety stood before them, a nightmare in black. He stood with his weight on his left foot, supporting himself with the cane. His black hat was tipped at a rakish angle and his white beak pointed straight forward, like a stubby accusing finger. In his free hand – the one without the cane – he was holding out a photograph: a portrait of a young boy. It only took Simon a second to recognise the face.
The photograph was of Harry. It was old, tattered, taken a few years ago, but it was definitely Brendan and Jane’s boy.
He felt Brendan sway at his side, as if he were about to pass out. Simon clenched his fingers around Brendan’s palm, pushing his brotherhood, his love, towards his friend.
“Push with me,” he said.
Captain Clickety nodded.
“You can’t have him.”
Captain Clickety nodded again.
Behind him, down the slope, the Underthing was writhing in a paroxysm of fury or excitement – it could have been either: anger at being faced down, or delight that the game was almost over and the twin was within its grasp. Everything hung on the cusp in this moment.
“No,” said Simon. “I’m not afraid of you. Not anymore. I’ll fight you. We’ll fight you.”
His friends were effectively hobbled by their own fears. Brendan was silent and swaying; Marty was repeatedly whispering the words “Humpty Dumpty” under his breath. It would have been a comical sight, under other circumstances, but now, in this situation, it was simply horrific.
Simon could smell burning shit and vomit and Parma violets. He gagged, the stench reaching the back of his throat.
Captain Clickety flipped the photograph over, showing him the reverse side.
There was another image forming on the white paper, a shot of Harry in a hospital bed, his face slack, the features blurred yet still recognisable. Jane sat at his side, holding one of his hands on the clean, white bedclothes. On her face was a look of anguish, so intense it almost burned through the page.
Suddenly Simon knew what he must do. He realised why he was here, what his role was meant to be. He’d spent twenty years envying the others their horror, and wondering why it was that he retained no horror of his own. Now he knew why that was; the knowledge came to him in a flash, like a migraine.
This was the horror he’d always been looking for, the terror that he’d spent his life tracking down without even knowing it. The dreams of the Angel; the prophecies of apocalypse. The Angel, he now realised, was meant to be him.
He was the Angel of the North...
And what was it that angels did? What was their great purpose?
Angels, like the hummingbirds hovering above him, were messengers. They had sacrificed their humanity to serve at the shoulder of their god.
Sacrifice.
This was his purpose; it was the reason he was here, the mission he’d come back to accomplish.
Sacrifice.
He smiled. “Take me instead. Leave the boy and take me.”
Pushing... pushing hard... pushing for something he did not quite understand...
Hummingbirds began to fall from the sky.
At first they plummeted one by one, and then in clumps, like debris from a volcanic eruption. They fell around him, missing him by inches, but not one of them came into contact with him.
Captain Clickety was crippled beneath the deluge, his arms raised uselessly to protect his head. The clicking sound was by now cataclysmic; it was the sound of tectonic plates shifting in this strange, symbolic dream-world, of great stones grating together on the ocean bed.
Here was Simon’s horror. This was his terrible prize.
Captain Clickety’s lenses and mask were knocked off his face, and beneath these was another, smaller mask exactly like the first.
He strai
ghtened, stretching to his full height, reached up and removed this mask, too. There was yet another one underneath. He was a being made entirely of masks; a walking lie, a deception. One mask after another was torn from his face, and the hummingbirds continued to fall.
This, Simon realised, was the birds’ own sacrifice, their way of confirming his thoughts, telling him that he had been right.
“Take me,” he whispered, opening his hands and letting go of his friends – perhaps relinquishing his grip on those childhood friendships forever. The two men fell to the ground at his sides, kneeling like tired suitors before a prospective bride.
Gradually, the rain of birds ceased. The sky cleared. The surviving hummingbirds flew off in groups, letting back in the daylight.
Captain Clickety shuffled forward. He was broken, spent; a thing past its use-by date. His arms and legs hung from their sockets like a marionette’s. The Underthing was no longer raging in the ground behind him. It had returned to whatever sewers or underground conduits served as its home, fleeing in the face of defeat, not wanting to watch as its plans were torn down.
Captain Clickety sniffed, like a dog, inhaling Simon’s scent. His hat had come off and his head was bald and white, an extension of the beaked mask. He kept sniffing and sniffing, and then, finally, he stopped and slowly nodded.
Yes.
The sacrifice had been accepted. Perhaps this had been required from the start; there was a chance that Brendan had never been the one, that it had always been Simon, and only now was the truth being told.
Simon reached out and took the final mask from the face of his nemesis, his childhood fear. He crumpled it easily in his fist. This stagnant puppet of deception, this last bedraggled lie, wore nothing but a paper face. Beneath the final mask was nothing but a broken mirror. Simon stared into his shattered reflection, wondering what all of this could possibly mean. He studied his empty eyes, his sunken cheeks, his dry lips.
