by Robin Ince
The square was empty now, though he saw it before him, he didn’t know for sure if he was in it. In the distance, a man ran into the square, saw something, and ran, startled. Everyone else was scared, why wasn’t he?
What had the man seen that he hadn’t or couldn’t?
He saw a hand.
It was his hand.
And it was bloody.
Sodden with gore.
He felt real emotion now. He had felt passive, but now he was panicked too, like those silly, screeching droves that had flailed and yelped through the square just moments ago.
This fear was very different to their haphazard emoting.
He wondered if he was the cause of it all. If that red hand was his, was he dying, or even dead? Had he been brutally slaughtered and now his torn corpse was the source of terror?
Was this what dying felt like, an ebbing away of awareness? Where was he going?
He looked again, his hand was still moving, so he was still alive. It wasn’t merely moving, it was moving wildly. When he first observed it he had thought it was still, a trick of the mind, it was reaching into something.
Not just reaching, tearing.
And his other hand too.
His hands were in offal, steaming offal.
His hands were in the pit of a stomach, wildly pulling.
This was disgusting.
He was pulling at the tubes, red meat, and putty of something.
He should stop that right away, this was quite out of character.
He instructed his hands to stop, he urged them to desist, but they wouldn’t obey him.
Had he confused his hands for someone else’s?
Was he the victim? Maybe he had confused his hands for those of the madman who was slaughtering him?
But only if the slaughterer had the same signet ring as him.
No, these were his hands.
And they weren’t just tearing into something, they were bringing the raw lumps to his mouth. He would have felt sick, but he didn’t seem able to.
He was revolting.
He tried to close his mouth, to seal his lips, to stop the steaming lumps making it inside him.
Urgh, this looked like a bit of pancreas.
This was uncouth.
Uncouth?
It was more than bloody uncouth, he was leaning over someone, he knew it was a person now, immersed in their guts. This had definitely never happened before. He once killed a bird with a stone, but he was very young and he was only trying to help. It was a wren that had damaged itself in some wire. He wrapped it in tissue paper then repeatedly struck it. There was no hidden joy, no vicarious thrill. It was the only way he could think of killing it, twisting its neck would have been too visceral, too real.
This was real.
God, when was he going to stop, ripping and tearing and shovelling, what a nasty brute.
Most out of character.
The body was nearly empty now.
He saw the face above it, mauled and vacuous.
It was Lucas.
He didn’t like Lucas. He was in PR.
But he had never imagined beating him to death and eating his entrails.
He really was an arsehole, but if you cannibalised all the arseholes in the world, you’d be exhausted and plagued by peptic ulcers.
Even though Lucas was now hollow, he didn’t feel full. For a man with not much of an appetite, he thought he looked bloated. He had two sets of lungs, a second spleen and pretty much everything else inside him now, but he still didn’t feel anything.
He saw himself getting up, but so clumsily. He was never clumsy. Posture had always been important, he’d even gone on a course and had his own yoga mat. To publicly stagger like a drunk was not to his liking. It was almost a relief that everyone had run away upon seeing the sight of him gorging on a dead man, it saved the shame of this display.
He had once seen someone at an outdoor festival who had lost the ability to co-ordinate his limbs. He was stuck on the ground, desperately trying to work out the sequencing of his legs, but to no avail. Someone had told him that the man was in a K-hole; apparently excessive ketamine use can obliterate your motor skills.
Perhaps that is what had happened. Someone had managed to spike him with ketamine and that is what had caused this whole damn mess. He saw Lucas below him.
No, that mess really was too big a side effect for some drugs, even those ones he had read about being used on soldiers in Vietnam.
He couldn’t quite place where he was in his brain now, the himness of him seemed to be shifting. The ghost in the machine seemed to be thinning out.
He was fully standing now, upright and dripping. He was walking freely, a stiffness around the knees, but no longer lumbering. He thought he felt tired, but despite his desire to sit down, he walked past the bench with the small plaque for a Molly who ‘always enjoyed this view, Died 2006. Much loved by Polly and Neil’. He didn’t seem able to tell himself what to do.
A dog ran through the square.
A terrier.
He liked terriers, not so much he would run after one, but he was now.
He was chasing a small dog, he was running with an urgency he had never experienced before, and he didn’t like it.
It didn’t take long to eat the dog. There was some vomiting: the hair had jammed in his throat and the automatic responses of his body had contracted and puked the tangled mess while he watched. What was he watching? Was he watching him, or was he him and this was it. He was beginning to accept he had become a puppet dictator of his own body, maybe he always had been. He didn’t like it. He concentrated hard. He hoped to move his arm the way he wanted, like some charlatan psychic who has begun to believe he really can move teaspoons with his mind, but all the staring is to no avail.
He was leaning in the dark now, an alley filled with bin liners. Perhaps he was going to sleep.
The dream was comforting. He was civilised. He was frying tofu and ginger, he had never fried tofu and ginger in a dream before. In the dream he could smell the ginger. In the dream he ate with cutlery. In the dream he was vivacious. As the dawn light interfered with the dream, the fine meal ended with a brutal attack by wok, few survived.
He was awake and so was the thing he was within. Now in daylight, he realised why the dreamt smell of ginger was such a joy, awake, he could smell nothing. This was probably a relief, vomited raw dog and congealed blood was never marketed as an air freshener plug-in. He wasn’t sure he could hear anymore, when he did think he heard things, he didn’t trust them.
And what could he do about them anyway?
Was that screaming?
The daylight illuminated a different world now.
There were many more; overnight, the number of carcasses had sharply risen.
Hollow corpses were strewn about. It was as if the minds had given up.
This day was not like any he had ever written about in his diary.
He had found himself openly having sex in the high street. He had been approached, a display was made and within seconds the two of them were rutting by the chain store shoe shop; someone else tried to join in, but they both savaged him. He thought it was Tony, who used to bother people by ringing them to see if they’d thought about having a new kitchen. When the intercourse was finished, he felt unpleasant to have been there. After all, he was now a voyeur. He saw himself as an internet voyeur or someone who rings up a woman on the TV to ask her to shake her bottom more. He had not had a sexual experience, but it had.
He had no trousers now. He concentrated so hard to try and make the muscles and bone reach down and pull back on his clothes, but it ignored him. He presumed that soon, like the others he had seen, he would be naked.
Much of the afternoon was spent punching the window of discount clothes stores. As much a
s he tried to tell it that this was his own reflection, not some marauding primitive in underpants, it wouldn’t listen.
And so he watched what had been his face repeatedly punch and headbutt a plate glass window until it cracked and then shattered. As he looked at that face, the one he had for so many years, the one he had bought cleanser and moisturiser and post-shave balm for, even he wondered if that had really ever been his. He was also embarrassed that it did a victory dance after the reflection was shattered. It had obviously been a good dancer, as he watched itself/himself/whatever having sex again. Annoyingly, it was with Martha, a woman he had always been attracted to but who had married Lucas in error. He should have felt some victory as they howled in unison, but he knew he was not having sex with Martha, she was probably inside her skull wishing that this thing that housed her would stop at once, or at least allow her to put her bra back on. Did she know that it was not him? Would they ever be able to communicate again?
By Thursday, he acknowledged that he wasn’t around so much. He presumed it had been staggering around for some hours as he was some way into the countryside when he first felt a smidgen of existence. He noticed the sky moving away from him, this alerted him that he was falling from a branch. Had it been trying to eat acorns or catch a squirrel? It had failed at both.
His awareness seemed to be evaporating, he was that puddle on a hot day, becoming less and less, until it was defined only as a raindrop, and then just the dampness of soil.
He didn’t know how many days had passed, but was woken by it beating the water that reflected his face. He had quite a beard. He had never thought a beard would suit him, and he was quite right. He wondered where one of his front teeth had gone.
He hadn’t had a dream in a long time. He wondered if empathy and altruism must evolve again or whether these creatures were a last death rattle of sex and violence and solipsism. The babies were left behind and devoured. What banshee cries the mothers within must have tried to unleash as they saw their shell wander away. It was the day he had seen his own signet ring rise to his mouth, a baby’s foot in his hand, and then his mouth, that he had resorted to trying to work out if he could kill the self that lay within.
He couldn’t watch it anymore. It was too ghastly. All that potential spent.
That stupid frog, was it really a stupid frog, or each time his tongue shot out ninety degrees from the fly he craved, did some inner amphibian cry inside, ‘No, you dumb frog tongue, the other way, the other way! Goddamn stupid frog I am.’
Possum
matthew holness
I picked it up by the head, which had grown clammy inside the bag, drawing to it a fair amount of fluff and dirt, and pushed the obscene tongue back into its mouth. Then I blew away the black fibres from its eyes and lifted out the stiff, furry body, attached to its neck with rusted nails. The paws had been retracted by means of a small rotating mechanism contained within the bag handle itself, and I detached the connecting wires from the small circuit pad drilled into its back. Forcing my hand through the hole in its rear, around which in recent months I had positioned a number of small razor blades, I felt within for the concealed wooden handle. Locating it, and ignoring the pain along my forearm, I swerved the head slowly left and right, supporting the main body with my free hand while holding it up against my grubby mirror.
I’d come home to bury it, which was as good a place as any, despite my growing dislike of the mild southern winters. Yet, having stepped from the train carriage earlier that afternoon and sensed, by association I suppose, the stretch of abandoned line passing close behind my old primary school, up towards the beach and the marshes beyond, I’d elected to burn it instead; on one of Christie’s stupid bonfires, if he was still up to building them.
Despite my intentions, I’d felt inclined to unveil Possum mid-journey and hold what was left up against the compartment window as we passed through stations; my own head concealed, naturally. But I’d thought better of that; I dare say rightly. In any case, the bag concealing him drew inevitable attention when, entering the underpass on my way back to the house, one of his legs shot out, startling two small boys who were attempting to hurry past. Several adjustments to the internal mechanism in recent years had enabled the puppet’s limbs to extend outward at alarming speeds, so that when operated in the presence of suggestible onlookers, it looked as if the legs of some demonic creature, coarse and furred, had darted suddenly from an unseen crevice. Then, as happened rather beautifully on this occasion, the perturbed children, or child, more often than not would catch sight of a second, larger hole, carefully positioned at the rear of the bag to capture their peripheral vision, and glimpse, within, an eye following them home. The effect, I must say, was rather stunning, yet had, like any great performance, taken years to perfect.
Christie had not been at home when I’d arrived, although as usual the front door had been left ajar and the kitchen table crammed with large piles of rubbish awaiting destruction. Stacked among the old comics and clothes I’d found the familiar contents of my bedroom drawer, along with an old tube of my skin cream and a skull fragment I’d once dug up at the beach. Having retrieved these, I’d drunk a large measure of his cheap whisky, tried the lounge door, which, as expected, was locked, then taken my bag up to the bedroom. The walls had been re-papered again with spare rolls from the loft, familiar cartoon faces from either my sixth or seventh year. The boards were still damp, the floor slimy, and a strong odour of paste hung heavily in the cramped room. I’d opened a window – the weather was indeed horribly mild – and switched the overhead bulb off, favouring darkness for what I was about to do.
Although the body was that of a dog, Possum’s head was made of wax and shaped like a human’s, and I could not have wished for a more convincing likeness. It even captured my old acne scars, yet with hair less neat and a gaunt quality reminiscent of the physical state I had embodied when the mould was made. The eyes were its greatest feature, belonging to what once had been a bull terrier. Both were former lab specimens, heavily diseased, preserved together for years in an old jar of formaldehyde. Several minor adjustments and refinements made by a former colleague, a long-dead teacher of science to whom my work had strangely appealed, had turned them into hard, bright, unique-looking decorations for Possum’s face. Deceptively cloudy until caught in the appropriate light, these two vaguely transparent orbs were the key to Possum’s success, and, despite patent similarities in our appearance, evidence of his own unique personality.
My most recent addition to his appearance, nevertheless, had also proved extremely effective. At the beginning of summer I had attached coloured flypaper to the tongue, which, like the body, was canine in origin, and over several months the mouth had accrued a large cluster of dead insects that dropped abruptly into view whenever the puppet licked or swallowed, invariably scattering one or two dried bluebottles into my spellbound and horrified audience. This proved to be a striking accessory, particularly as a tiny battery-powered mechanism in the concealed handle allowed me to control rudimentary facial movements, although I had never bothered learning how to throw my voice. Possum’s wide-eyed, open-mouthed stare penetrated well enough during his sudden intrusions, without the need of vocal embellishment. Only ever unleashing him at points in my dramas when his presence was a complete surprise, his unnerving silence merely served to exacerbate his chaotic misbehaviour. Whether devouring other characters without warning, usually the hero or heroine, or bursting through walls and destroying with unrestrained violence my neat but tedious endings, Possum’s soundless, unpredictable presence captivated my young audiences like no other puppet I’d ever built. He was a law unto himself, and was now even challenging my own authority.
I leaned closer toward the mirror, reflecting on my most recent performance, and watched the sinking sun darken Possum’s face with shadow. I observed how his head continued to stir subtly of its own accord as my body’s natural rhythms gradually made their wa
y through into his, and I tried in vain to freeze his movements. Before it was fully dark I took Possum outside.
There was no hint of a winter frost, and the earth was suitably wet. I dropped him in the stagnant water tank behind the old shed, where he couldn’t get out, and hurled mud and stones down at him from my vantage point at the rim. I pulled faces at him until I could no longer discern anything below, then went back into the house. I considered waiting up for Christie’s return, but instead went straight to bed.
I awoke to find Possum beside me, his long tongue hanging out like a vulgar child’s. The head had been turned to face me in my sleep, and the eyes in the dawn light were a pale, milky yellow. As I sat up to scratch the tiny bites covering my legs and ankles, several dry houseflies dropped from the pillow onto my bed sheet. Later I found a dead wasp tucked inside my pyjama pocket. I pushed Possum to the floor, noting that his head had been wiped clean and his body scrubbed. Sensing that the parlour games had begun, I dressed quickly. I could hear Christie clattering about in the kitchen below, and I took the puppet with me when I went downstairs.
‘Good morning and thank you,’ I said, dumping Possum on the table. ‘Now please burn all your hard work.’
Christie, moving slowly with the aid of a stick, handed me a mug of strong tea and the ancient cake tin.
‘Good morning,’ he said, smiling under his thick, nicotine-stained beard. ‘The head is expertly made.’
‘As are the legs,’ I said, sipping my drink. ‘A perfect job.’
‘You wired them in?’ he asked.
I looked out at the garden. A huge bonfire had been piled ready.
‘I want it burned,’ I said. ‘That’s why I threw it out. You wasted your whole night. Now that’s funny.’
Christie laughed, which made me laugh.
‘I’m going for a walk,’ I added. ‘What will you do?’
