by Mr. Deadman
“Where do you put them?” She lit a cigarette. When he did not answer her, she pointed to the river. “Is that where?”
Barry dropped to his knees as if in prayer. “I didn’t mean to do it. Look, I know I deserve this, but please make it quick. I promise I won’t put up a fight. In fact,” he paused to take out a knife from the pocket of his jacket, “use this. I’ve just sharpened it.”
The young woman made no move to take the knife. Instead, she stared down at him for a long time, tilting her head while slowly coming to her conclusion.
“I’m here to help you, silly.” Her voice sounded sweet. She offered her hand to pull him to his feet. “You won’t die this evening.”
“You’re going to help me?” he replied with disgust. “But I want it to stop. It ends tonight. I don’t want a partner, if that’s what you’re thinking.” He fought the urge to throw up. His hands trembled, and he leaned against his taxi for support.
“I’m going to help you end it tonight.” She smiled. “But you’ll have to do as I say.” She snapped her fingers and three huge crows came swooping down on Barry, pecking at him with unrelenting beaks. He covered his eyes with his hands as they tried to pick away his fingers. He tried to shoo them away, but they kept coming at him, relishing the biting of his soft fleshy cheeks. He cried out, feeling slow rivulets of warm blood fall and collect in the ridges of his ears.
The young woman held up her hand, the crows ceasing their attack and settling down with unease on the roof of his car. “My apologies, but these birds of mine aren’t at all happy with you. Take a good look at them. What do you see?”
Gradually raising his hands away from his pecked face, Barry turned and peered at the three crows who cawed at him incessantly. At first they seemed like normal crows, although exceptionally large. Then his eyes came to their eyes. Locked inside their black depths, he saw the trapped faces of the three women he had killed. Three pairs of black marble eyes were scorched with hatred. They had come back from death, just for him. Now he was the prey.
“Oh, my God,” he wailed, covering his eyes and wishing he had never been born. He looked back at the young woman who studied him closely with a raised eyebrow. “Who are you?” he asked.
“Hmmm, I have many names, but they are old and you probably have never heard of them.” She clapped her hands together, making him jump. “So, who am I? My name is Morrigan. Is that familiar to you? No? Okay, how best to describe me?” She paused, briefly acting like she was on a date, before pointing to a large rat scurrying in the background which suddenly stopped moving.
At once the crows took off and landed by the dead creature, ripping it to shreds, shrieking with delight. Barry heaved as the contents of his rushed evening meal splattered against his car, the smell of it antagonizing him further. The violent retches did not stop until his stomach completely emptied.
“Best not to let them get too hungry.” She smiled. “Now back to me. I’m Morrigan, and I’ve been many things to many people. But simply, as I appreciate we don’t have much time, I’m the goddess of death.” She pointed to the crows. “That’s how I met these lovely ladies. They’re not very happy with you.” She tutted.
“What do you want with me?” Barry asked in a very quiet and controlled voice.
“Tell me about your wife, Jackie.”
“Jackie? What’s she got to do with this? She’s not involved with this. Please leave her alone,” he pleaded.
“She’s the very source of this mess. May-be you don’t quite see it yet.”
“See what? She’s just got a lot on her plate.”
“You do know she’s been having an affair with your brother. It’s been going on for years.” Morrigan took a step closer to Barry. “I do hate to be the one tell to tell you this, but your youngest child isn’t even yours.”
“What? Lucy? She’s 14 next month. All that time?” Barry shook his head. “No! I don’t believe you. Not my little girl. She’s all mine. You’re just trying to mess with my head.”
“It’s not your fault, Barry. She’s a cruel person. She froze you out of her life but kept you close. She’s a succubus. She’s been leaching all the goodness out of you, but that will never correct the darkness in her heart.”
“I don’t understand.” Barry scratched his head. “No, she wouldn’t do this.”
“She’s pushed you to unimaginable depths.” Morrigan turned round and summoned back her crows. “But we’re going to put things right now,” she added breezily.
“How, if you’re not going to kill me?”
“Back in the car, Barry,” she replied abruptly as she got in the back.
Feeling he had no other option, he got in and started the engine.
It was very late when they pulled up outside his terraced home in a quiet south London suburb. Only the foxes were still out, and they knew to keep a safe distance from Barry’s passenger.
“I’ve smoothed things over with these ladies,” Morrigan said. She slowly stroked her birds who were now settled on her shoulders. “And we have come to an agreement. You both have a debt to pay us.”
“Um, okay, what do we do now?”
“We? From now on it’s just you. Here’s where I leave. You’re going to go upstairs and take that shiny little knife from out of your pocket and run it along your wife’s neck.”
“But she’ll die,” Barry protested.
“Yes, Barry, that does tend to happen when you slit a person’s throat. Tonight is her last night on earth. Her debt is heavy because her darkness gave birth to your darkness. Your wife has taken all the goodness out of your soul and replenished it with cold evil born out of her. She’s going to leave you for your brother, and then she’ll work on him. Don’t you see? She’s a monster and she needs to be stopped.”
“You’re a monster. I thought you said you were going to help me.” He whimpered. “Where shall I dump her, in the river like I did with the others?”
“No, Barry, once you’ve killed her, you’re going to ring the police and confess.”
Barry shuddered and began to back away, but she stopped him with her finger that was pointed at him. “I wouldn’t do that, Barry, or I’ll just take you now.”
“But if you’re the goddess of death, why can’t you kill her and then I won’t get into trouble? Like you said, it wasn’t my fault. She made me do it.”
“It doesn’t work like that, Barry.”
“No?”
“No.” She grinned and wiped away a tear from his cheek. Her hands were cold and that made him rattle and shake inside. “I want you to kill her, and I always get my way. You still owe a debt, and we’ve agreed that you’ll repay it with your incarceration. There’s a goodness inside of you, Barry. With help, you’ll be as right as rain. You only need to confess to killing your wife, not the others. You can call it a crime of passion that you found out she was leaving you for your brother and was going to take the kids, and that one of them wasn’t even yours. I think people will be very understanding.”
“But despite that, I still love her. I’d give her a second chance.”
“Yes, Barry.” Morrigan was growing impatient. “Like I said, there’s a goodness inside of you, but you have a debt to pay. You struck down these young women before their time. You took away their chance to fall in love and have a family of their own. Now it is time to give up what you love. I think I’m being lenient here, Barry. After all, you have kids that you love, too. Shall I pay them a little visit?”
“Alright, okay, I’ll kill her. Just leave my kids alone.”
“Good. Well done, Barry.” She patted him on his shoulder. “I knew we’d work out an arrangement. Now, off you go.”
About the author:
Originally born in Cornwall, southwest England, myths and legends surrounded her childhood, and S.J. Budd has always been fascinated by anything out of the ordinary. It was in this strange and ancient land where she developed a passion for writing.
She loves writing short stor
ies exploring dark fictional worlds and its mysterious inhabitants, and is currently working on her first novel. Her day job is a journalist for www.findahood.com, and she also blogs on her site http://www.sjbudd.co.uk.
Her work has appeared in Sanitarium Magazine, Siren’s Call, Deadman’s Tome, Innersins, Aphelion, Bewildering Stories, Blood Moon Rising Magazine, Shadows at the Door, Danse Macabre Magazine, The Wild Hunt, Morpheus Tales, and Freedom Fiction.
Twitter: @sjbuddj
Her debut collection of short stories, Spells and Persuasions, is out now on Amazon.
Wicked Congregation
Gary Buller
Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy Glen,
We daren’t go a’ hunting,
For fear of little men.
--The Fairies, William Allingham
Do I regret my actions? Of course—every waking moment the memories fester inside my mind, and at night let loose. Darkness is their natural habitat, so I suppose it makes sense. Yet, as I rock atop the sheets in solitary silence, I am confident I would not change a thing. My actions, no matter how obscene, were for the greater good, as you are about to discover.
You are all in grave danger.
You laugh?
Let me tell my story, and then you might understand where I am coming from.
Perhaps older than the English woodland engulfing it, the church was a small, black building that sagged under its own weight. The mossy grey tiles bowed under decades of leaf litter, and walls appeared to sink into the ground as if the surrounding graveyard wished to reclaim them. This ancient place was my destination, as I travelled with a great burden on my shoulders. A shining sun would have kissed lush grass, colonies of plump mushrooms and snowdrops, but my work required the cover of darkness.
Two earthy grooves, once carthorse tracks, were overgrown, and foliage brushed the underside of my car as I descended the valley. The deeper I travelled, the greater the sense of dread, and I was thankful for the occasional island of moonlight breaking through the canopy above. I navigated by memory while two bony nubs on my left hand, where my ring and pinkie finger had been, tingled. Skeletal branches thickened and encroached on my path, scraping windows, and almost entombing the car before the headlights found an opening and the walls of that cursed place.
Within a little clearing, I reluctantly killed the engine, and an eerie quiet descended, weighty and foreboding. Branches did not rustle, and animals did not call. My father was a ranger here and taught me how to identify all the different sounds. Had I heard anything—a hoot, or a fox cry—it would have brought at least a little comfort. Instead, I scratched the stump of my fingers in absolute silence.
Bump.
It came from the trunk, and a breath froze in my lungs. In the rearview mirror, I saw lightly waving underbrush and one nervous eye. For the longest moment, I held still, ears straining until my chest burned. Satisfied that all was well, I exhaled a measured breath, and grabbing a flashlight from the passenger seat, exited the car.
The white beam of my flashlight sliced the cloying darkness, falling on the little wooden gate of the cemetery. Rusted horseshoes, thick with tufts of moss, hung from the waterlogged boards. Random nails and streaks of maroon suggested there were others at one time, but they were somehow displaced. On my last visit, as father had dragged me along painfully by my upper arm, I had seen and heard wind chimes in the trees, but these were likely buried under dead leaves, or tangled within the tall grass where they fell.
I angled the circular beam up a noticeboard beside the arched doorway. Once containing parish notices, it was now vacant, and more horseshoes hung, black with rust from the swollen frame. Further up, there was an overhanging roof with a diminutive bell tower overlooked the clearing.
A low moan escaped my lips.
Decayed and bloody, a carcass stretched across the opening where a long absent bell had once chimed. Pointed ribs were parted like the jaws of a carnivorous animal, and bloated sacks of rotted organs swayed in the breeze. Sausage strands of intestines spilt from its severed gut and snaked down the tiles.
"A sheep," I whispered, not liking the tension in my voice. "It's a bloody sheep."
Broken yellow teeth grinned amongst matted curls of wool, and milky white eyes appeared to gaze into hell. I don’t know how long the fetid creature had been up there, but there was no doubt in my mind that it was some kind of warning. Someone wanted to keep people away from this place—and for a good reason.
A branch snapped.
I wheeled around.
The flashlight found vacant woodland, and overgrown bushes shrouded in shadow.
I reasoned that it might be a fox or badger, but the throbbing stumps of my left hand told me otherwise.
I was being watched.
Lifting the gate from a drift of soil, I pushed it open. A blistered nail snapped, and a horseshoe fell into the grass. Quietly, I made my way up the lichen-spotted flags to the porch, observing strange, white pebbles dotted in and around the headstones. On closer inspection, I saw animal skulls of varying shapes and sizes jutting from the grass, hollow eyes observing my progress. There was something blasphemous about their placement, something unclean and alien.
Like many others of its time, this rural church remained unlocked, and two iron rings served as handles. A strange symbol was crudely painted on the wood in something dark and viscous that smelled coppery and rotten like old blood. These were the same doors my parents had dragged me through when I was ten years old. Mum had been sobbing, and dad had been muttering distractedly under his breath. Neither of them would look me in the eye, or had answered my panicked questions. That was the last time I had ever seen her.
I pulled the doors, and they parted down the middle. The loud creak of rusty hinges made me wince. As if escaping the terrible space within, the odour of damp and decaying plant matter rushed past me. It was dim inside, but the roof at the front of the church had caved in, and moonlight cascaded onto a granite altar scattered with dead leaves. At either side of a narrow aisle, there were three short pews, which I guessed would have seated no more than twenty or thirty parishioners back in its day. One of the benches had collapsed into the rotten floor, creating a deep hole.
I moved gingerly towards the front, testing each spongy board with a toe before proceeding. The atmosphere was claustrophobic, and moonlight charged the air with unseen electricity. There was very little by way of religious paraphernalia. Animal skulls hung where crucifixes should have been, and half-moons of iron were fixed beneath broken and faded stained glass. The ancient creatures here preceded Christianity, and the locals tried more arcane methods to keep them at bay.
The church roof curved like the upturned bow of a ship, and within the jagged edges of broken tile, the moon was a silver penny against a sea of black. An ancient oak partially obscured my view, gnarled branches hanging over the rear of the structure as if to embrace it. Within the creaking boughs were sunken hollows, and inside movement.
My left hand prickled like it'd brushed against stinging nettles, and I retreated to collect my offering from the car. Moving abroad had crossed my mind many times, a means of escape from this nightmare—but dad’s words repeated in my skull.
“You have to sate their hunger, or they will infest. You’re the son of a High Peak Ranger, like my grandfather, and his grandfather before. If they don't get what's coming to them, they will destroy the High Peak and then come for you. Mark my words. Remember Ashopton?”
I prayed what I was doing would satisfy them for another twenty years, knowing what I would do after that since I didn’t want to visit this place again.
That is when I saw it, sitting at one of the pews.
I thought it might be a doll left behind by a long-dead parishioner—until its head tilted to one side. Pinprick eyes glowed a strange shade of blue within recessed sockets, following me as I moved against the altar. Its face was narrow and skeletal—as pale as porcelain. Papery wings, threaded with veins
folded at its back. A serpentine tongue elongated between razor teeth and licked purple lips. My missing fingers throbbed. How I'd laughed when mum said, They're real, son, but not like in the stories or picture books...
I wasn't laughing now.
I'd screamed as they converged on mum. My dad had cried out, too, but more out of surprise than anything else. A ranger for over thirty years, he was an expert on these things but hadn't been aware of their keen sense of smell. Neither of us had known that mum was with child until they finally bore through the white skin of her belly. She was the starter, and my unborn brother the main course. Blind panic mixed with guilty relief since I had been reprieved, for I was meant to be the sacrificial lamb. They coveted the young.
Dad had run. Isn't that what he'd always done when confronted with a problem? Foolish and meek, I fought back, an act of futility that almost cost me my life. Instead, I paid with two fingers.
The doll in front of me now stood with the assistance of twiggy arms, a perfectly formed miniature person. Its clawed feet tapped against the wood as it shifted in anticipation. Hunching its shoulders, it threw an ugly face to the sky, shrieking like a bird of prey. A rustling, like autumn leaves, sounded from the holes in the towering oak, the darkness inside the warrens undulating and blinking with the movement of hundreds of tiny faces.
Springing on my heels, I headed toward the open doors. Bare boards wobbled and bent underfoot. Expanding, the creature's wings were the size of dinner plates, mottled with greens and browns that shamed the stained glass. It emitted another cry as I rushed by.
Suddenly my front foot crashed through a section of rotten board, and into the mulchy ground beneath. I toppled forward, my ankle twisting painfully.
Scrambling to my feet, a fire erupted at my shoulder blade, and everything tinted a deep shade of red. Serrated teeth excavated deep into the flesh and blood blossomed, warm and wet, over my shirt. I reached a hand around, pulling the creature away. My skin stretched and tightened before it finally let loose, surprisingly light like a bundle of twigs. Everything flared white, my brain screaming in protest. I launched it back at the altar, where the others crawled and floated, infesting the church like cockroaches.
