Forever Autumn

by Mark Morris

Now, though, he was a wreck of a man, and a lot of the local kids saw him as a figure of fun. He’d retired four years ago, and two months later his wife had died unexpectedly, which, according to Rick’s dad, had knocked the stuffing out of the old guy. He’d hit the bottle hard, and he now spent most of his time propping up the local bar, or sometimes even sitting on the bench in the town square, sipping whisky from a bottle he kept in a brown paper bag in his jacket pocket. Many people had tried to help him, including Rick’s mom and dad, but no one had been able to make him mend his ways.

  ‘You can’t stop the man drinking,’ Rick’s dad had said, ‘short of sewing his lips together.’

  ‘He’s on a one-way path to destruction,’ Rick’s mom had said, ‘and there ain’t no one can do a thing about it.’

  ‘Hey there, Dr Clayton,’ Rick called now, kind of hoping that the old guy was too drunk to notice how Scott and Thad were laughing at him.

  Earl Clayton came to a swaying halt. He peered at Rick through the late-afternoon gloom, screwing up his rheumy eyes. ‘Why, it’s y-y-young Rick P-P-Pirelli, isn’t it?’ he slurred.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Rick loudly, trying to ignore a fresh outbreak of snickering from his friends.

  ‘My, but you’re g-g-g-getting tall,’ he said. ‘You boys g-going to the C-C-Carnival tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes, sir, we’ll be there,’ Rick said.

  ‘Well, you b-be sure to have f-f-fun. And don’t forget to g-give my regards to your p-p-parents.’

  ‘No, sir, I won’t. And thank you, sir.’

  The old man gave a clumsy salute, which Scott found so hilarious he had to clap a hand over his mouth to prevent himself hooting with laughter.

  ‘Quit it, you two,’ Rick muttered when the old guy was out of earshot. They crossed to Harry Ho’s, ordered their ice creams and sodas and sat down. Rick felt bad for Dr Clayton, and so steered the conversation away from him and back to the topic of the week: Halloween.

  ‘Hey, what movies do you guys wanna watch tomorrow?’

  ‘Saw,’ said Scott without hesitation.

  ‘Final Destination,’ said Thad.

  ‘There’s no way my mom would let us watch either of those, and you know it. Come on, guys, get serious. We don’t want everything we choose from the video store to get canned.’

  They began to discuss the merits and demerits of certain movies, and were still arguing even after their ice cream bowls and drinks cups were empty. They became so involved in a heated exchange about Psycho (Rick pushing for the original, Scott saying he’d rather see the colour remake) that none of them noticed the two strangers until a shadow fell over their table.

  They looked up to see a skinny guy in a tight suit grinning down at them. The guy was holding a banana split in one hand and a long-handled spoon in the other. He was shovelling ice cream into his smiling mouth as if he hadn’t eaten in days.

  ‘Aren’t bananas brilliant!’ he said.

  The boys just stared at him. Finally Rick said, ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m the Doctor,’ said the man, ‘and I bet you’re Rick.’

  ‘How did you know that?’ Rick asked.

  ‘Well… you look like a Rick. You’re all kind of Rick-like. I knew a Rick once. Well, a Ricky. Well, a Mickey really. Except there were two of them. And one of them was called Ricky, but I didn’t really get to know him all that well. Mickey, though… aw, brilliant, he turned out to be. Prince among men. Top banana. Which, funnily enough, brings us back to bananas again. Mind if I sit down?’

  The guy had spouted all this at breakneck speed. Rick felt as though he’d been bombarded with words. ‘Er… what do you want?’ he said.

  The Doctor waggled his empty ice cream bowl. ‘Another one of these would go down a treat.’ He turned and yelled across the room. ‘Same again when you’ve got a minute, Harry! Ta.’ Turning to the girl beside him – who, Rick now noticed, was both beautiful and eating something chocolaty with caramel sauce – the Doctor said, ‘What about you, Martha? Fancy another?’

  ‘I’ve barely started this one,’ she said.

  ‘Please yourself. Now, where were we? Oh yeah, we were about to sit down.’

  He grabbed a chair from the next table, swung it round and plonked himself into it. Then he jumped up again almost immediately.

  ‘Whoops, manners,’ he said, and offered the chair to the girl he’d called Martha. He grabbed another for himself, sat down and leaned forward on his bony elbows, as if he and the boys were about to tell each other their deepest secrets.

  ‘So,’ he murmured, ‘dug up anything good lately?’

  The boys looked at each other in alarm. ‘Who did you say you were again?’ asked Thad nervously.

  ‘He’s the Doctor and I’m Martha,’ said the girl, and nodded at Thad and Scott. ‘So what do they call you two then?’

  They told her. Rick said, ‘You say you’re the doctor? So do you mean you’re, like, the new doctor?’

  ‘Interesting question,’ said the Doctor reflectively, and tilted himself so far back in his chair he looked in danger of toppling over. ‘I suppose that all depends, doesn’t it?’

  ‘On what?’ asked Scott.

  ‘On when you meet me. I mean, if you meet me in your past and my future, I’d be the new Doctor to you, but the old Doctor to me, whereas if you meet the old me in your future, I’d be the new Doctor now and the old Doctor later. You see?’

  ‘Huh?’ said Scott.

  The Doctor lunged forward again, his chair crashing back down onto all four legs, making Scott jump. Staring at the boy intently, he said, ‘You haven’t met the future me by any chance, have you?’

  ‘Er… no,’ whimpered Scott.

  ‘Aw, pity. I wanted to know whether I was ginger.’

  Martha cleared her throat. ‘I think we’re getting off the point,’ she said.

  ‘Quite right,’ said the Doctor. ‘That’s Rick, that is, trying to avoid answering the question.’

  ‘What question?’ said Rick.

  ‘You were about to tell us what you dug up.’

  ‘Why should we tell you?’ Scott blurted.

  ‘Because,’ said the Doctor quietly, ‘if you don’t there’s a very, very strong likelihood that you won’t live to see your… how old are you?’

  ‘Twelve,’ said Scott.

  ‘OK,’ said the Doctor, rotating his fingers in an anti-clockwise direction, ‘… your thirteenth birthday.’

  ‘Hey!’ exclaimed Rick. ‘Are you threatening us, mister? ’Cos if you are—’

  ‘Calm down,’ Martha said, putting a hand on his arm. Despite his indignation, her touch gave Rick a warm tingly feeling.

  ‘Of course he’s not threatening you,’ she continued. ‘He’s trying to warn you. He’s trying to save your life.’

  ‘Save my life?’ said Rick. ‘But… but why does my life need saving?’

  ‘Because that thing you dug up – whatever it is – is dangerous,’ said the Doctor.

  ‘Very dangerous,’ added Martha.

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ the Doctor agreed, ‘very, very. And add another great big dollop of very, with lashings of very on top.’

  ‘But… how do you know?’ asked Thad.

  ‘I just do,’ said the Doctor. ‘I’m clever like that.’

  ‘Believe me, guys,’ said Martha, ‘you’re doing yourselves no favours by keeping schtum about this. We’re probably the only two people who can help you.’

  The boys looked at each other, and her, uncertainly. The Doctor sighed and pointed out of the window. ‘That green mist?’ he said. ‘That’s you, that is.’

  They looked out of the window, and all three of them gasped. An eerie green mist was creeping into the town square.

  ‘What is it?’ whispered Thad.

  ‘It came out of the hole you dug,’ said the Doctor. ‘Whatever was in there was dormant and now it isn’t. It’s very old and very deadly.’

  Scott looked as though he was about to throw up. ‘It was only a book,’ he
wailed.

  ‘At last,’ said the Doctor, ‘a chink of daylight. Give that man a pineapple.’

  ‘What sort of book?’ Martha asked.

  ‘Dunno,’ said Rick. ‘It had weird words in it, like a foreign language or something.’

  The Doctor’s second banana split arrived. He devoured it in three gulps. ‘Where’s this book now?’ he asked, spitting ice cream.

  ‘Under my bed,’ said Rick.

  The Doctor jumped up so quickly that his chair fell over.

  ‘Show me,’ he said.

  Something strange was happening to the book underneath Rick’s bed. It was beginning to quiver and twitch, like something coming back to life after a long, enforced sleep. The reddish-brown material which covered it rippled like slug-flesh jabbed with a stick. Tiny sparks of green light began first to dance across it, and then to coalesce, to form a jagged, spidery network of strands, rather like a flickering green web.

  The web of light spread across the book, around it, and within moments had enshrouded it completely. It glowed brighter – so brightly, in fact, that soon the book no longer seemed like a book at all, but simply a block of dazzling green luminescence. It filled Rick’s room, radiating out from under his bed, reflecting off the plastic models arranged on his shelves, bouncing back from the computer screen. Then it began to dwindle, to fade and, in less than a minute, had vanished completely. And where the book had been, among the dust balls and dead spiders and discarded comic books, was suddenly nothing but an empty space.

  MIDNIGHT WAS THE time that Earl Clayton hated the most. The bars were closed and everyone was tucked up at home, safe and snug, with their families around them.

  Not him, though. He had no family. June had died four years ago, and now the only thing waiting for him in the big draughty house that had been their home was silence and a cold bed. People kept offering him advice to get his life back on track – buy a dog, get a part-time job, take a holiday, see a doctor. But none of them understood how he really felt. None of them understood that June had been his life. He and June hadn’t needed anybody else, which he guessed was why they had never had kids. And after he had retired they had had such plans to see the world – Venice, Paris, Tokyo, New Delhi.

  But then she had upped and died on him. Just like that. And, even with all his years of training and practice, he hadn’t been able to do a damn thing about it. And so he had started to drink. To forget. He had known it was wrong, but he hadn’t cared. And now drinking had become a habit, something he couldn’t break away from. Something he relied on.

  He was walking, or rather staggering, home. The streets of Blackwood Falls were deserted and there was a peculiar green mist enveloping the town. Street lamps were little more than hazy glows through the murk. Halloween pumpkins on porches and stoops were distant smudges of orange light.

  Earl hadn’t felt scared since June had died; had thought he was beyond feeling scared, in fact, since the worst thing that could have happened to him had already happened, four years earlier. But right now he was scared, and the funny thing was he didn’t know why. For some reason there was a sense of deep apprehension churning in his gut. All right, so he kept thinking he could see shapes looming in the mist – ghostly faces, squat figures – but surely it wasn’t that which was scaring him? Even in his drunken state he knew that was only his imagination, only his unfocused eyes trying to make sense of the swirling formlessness around him. No, there was something else. Something in the air. He wondered if the town was under attack from some unknown enemy, if the mist contained some substance that worked on the fear centres of the brain. Chemical warfare? It was possible.

  He was passing the cemetery when he heard a noise.

  He stopped and listened. The mist was like a blanket, not only blurring everything, but muffling sound too. He had to stand for several seconds, utterly motionless, before he heard it again.

  A scrabbling sound. A pattering sound. As if something was burrowing down into the earth – or rising out of it.

  Earl took hold of the cold thin bars of the cemetery gate and peered through them. He could see nothing. Nothing but swirling green mist and the pale, diffuse glow of an overhead lamp further along the path, between the graves.

  Should he investigate? It might be someone. Someone he could talk to. Someone who might help him overcome his growing sense of dread.

  The cemetery gate was actually two gates, which opened in the centre. Earl pushed the left-hand one, wincing as it creaked. He could still hear the sound of scrabbling ahead of him, but it was intermittent. It would stop for a while, then start up again, as if whatever was causing it kept needing to rest. He wondered if it was a dog, digging for a bone.

  Plenty of bones round here, he thought, and put a hand over his mouth to stifle a giggle.

  He started to walk, his shoes making tiny crackling sounds on the path between the graves. The mist was so thick he couldn’t see the church, except as a vague block of fuzzy darkness somewhere in the distance. Tombstones rose on either side of him, looming from the mist like the dwarfish figures he had kept imagining he was seeing earlier. The scrabbling was somewhere to his left. He would have to step off the path and walk on the soft ground between the graves to locate it.

  He hesitated for three seconds, then stepped off the path. Part of him wanted to go home, crawl into bed and pull the covers over his head, but a greater part felt the need to reach the heart of the mystery. The closer he got to the source of the sound, however, the greater became his sense of dread. It was like a steel fist around his lungs, cutting off his air, making him dizzy and sick.

  He hunched down behind a tombstone and forced himself to take several deep breaths. When he felt able to carry on, he did so in a semi-crouch, slipping from tombstone to tombstone, suddenly eager not to be seen. The sound of scrabbling was louder now. It surely couldn’t be more than a few steps away. Pressing himself up against a tombstone, he swallowed, counted to three, then raised his head slowly and peered over the top.

  He could see nothing out of the ordinary. Just some old graves covered in weeds. One of the graves had a crooked sapling sticking up out of the centre of it. The sapling was creaking back and forth in the wind…

  … and then Earl realised that there was no wind.

  Without warning, the five spindly branches jutting from the thin trunk of the sapling bent in the centre, then opened out again. Earl felt all the blood draining from his face as he suddenly realised what he was really looking at.

  It was an arm, black and twig-thin. And the ‘branches’ were fingers – each one as long as his forearm; each one bony and segmented, like the legs of a lobster; each one tipped by a hooked, razor-sharp talon.

  As he watched, too terrified to move, the ground heaved and a figure rose slowly out of the ground. It was fully nine feet tall and impossibly thin, and seemed to be clothed in a rotting patchwork of black, tattered rags. Its hands – its long, long taloned hands – were awful enough, but more terrifying still was its head. It was huge and pale and fleshy, with deep-set eyes and a wide, wide mouth filled with jagged teeth.

  Soil fell from the creature, pattering to the ground, as it pushed itself up from the earth. Once it had fully emerged, it looked slowly around, its great head creaking from left to right. It seemed almost to hover above the ground as though it weighed nothing at all. When it moved its hands, Earl could hear its fingers clicking together like bones.

  As the massive head swung slowly towards his hiding place, Earl ducked down. He was panting and sweating and shaking. All at once he felt stone-cold sober. He forced himself to count to three again and then tentatively raised his head once more.

  To his horror the creature was drifting like a wraith towards the tombstone behind which he was crouching. And what was more, it was looking straight at him!

  Whimpering in terror, Earl rose to his feet and stumbled away. His body felt heavy and awkward, as though he was wading through sludge. He could hear his heartbeat poundi
ng in his ears, could feel his breath tearing at his throat. He slithered and blundered between the graves, disorientated by the mist. He had an idea that if only he could make it to the cemetery gates he would be safe.

  More by luck than judgement, he spotted the thin dark thread of the path between a pair of tombstones. He staggered towards it like a marathon runner towards the finishing line. Now he could see the black arch of the cemetery gates ahead, wreathed in mist. With every thumping step, he expected to feel long, bony fingers folding around his shoulder, yanking him back. He glanced behind him and saw the creature still gliding after him, the ends of its tattered rags trailing behind it. He turned back to face the gates – and another of the creatures loomed out of the mist, blocking his path.

  Earl clumped to a stop, too terrified even to scream. He was close enough to the second creature to smell it. It smelled foul and pungent, like decomposing fruit. Slowly the creature lifted a finger to its lipless mouth, as though urging him to be quiet. Then it used the same finger to slash a curious X symbol in the hazy air between Earl and itself.

  Instantly Earl became aware that something odd and terrible was happening to his face. He felt a tugging, a tightening, almost as if his skin was reshaping itself. His eyes bulging in terror, he clapped a hand to his mouth. He dropped to his knees as the mist closed in around him.

  Chris was lying in a small, enclosed space. It was so dark he couldn’t even see his hand in front of his eyes. There were hard surfaces on either side of him, and one just a few inches above his face.

  It was a box of some kind, and it was hot and stuffy. If he didn’t get out soon he’d suffocate. He pushed at the underside of the lid, but it wouldn’t budge. He felt himself starting to panic. Stay calm, he thought, stay calm.

  Then he heard a sound, right above his face, on the other side of the lid. A dull, heavy thump that broke into a scratchy patter of smaller items coming to rest. There followed a moment of silence, then it came again. And suddenly he realised where he was, what was happening.

  He was in a coffin and he was being buried alive!

  He began to scream and flail in the desperate hope that someone would hear him. And all at once the lid gave way under his fists. It didn’t crack or splinter, but became soft, pliable, like dough. He sat up, smothered in the stifling thickness of it, and eventually it slid away from his face and he was able to breathe, to see. It was still dark, but there was a faint, greenish glow coming from somewhere in front of him. In the wan light he could just make out the familiar contours of his room, and realised the light was coming from the window.