The Waking That Kills

by Stephen Gregory

  A dry cough. At first it was almost the sneezing of a cat.

  But a terrible, rather horrible thing happened. He was gripped by a kind of convulsion, as though his body had been seized by a cruel, powerful hand which was squeezing the breath out of him. He coughed. Louder and louder, a dry retching. He dropped the racquet, doubled over with his hands on his kneecaps, and a relentless force bent him lower and lower until he fell to the floor. The binoculars swung from his neck, banged on his chest. He coughed. No, he couldn’t, he tried to cough, but there was no more breath in him and I could see the bones of his ribs standing starkly out and every knob of his backbone.

  The woman knelt – ‘Oh my god do something!’ – and wrapped her arms around him. I knelt too. I massaged hopelessly at his neck, where the sinews stood out like wires. ‘Do something! Oh do something!’ she was shouting, to the boy as much as to me.

  There was a madness in the room, a piece of nightmare. It was in the boy. It was on us.

  And suddenly, an explosion of energy from the boy’s body repelled us from him and we stood away, powerless, as somehow, from somewhere, he’d found a pocket of air in his lungs which allowed him to cough once more.

  A huge, howking cough, big enough to bring up all the contents of his stomach in one mighty eruption.

  He didn’t. He retched something onto the carpet and peered closely at it. And then he slowly stood up.

  Nothing really. A blob of grey mucus, a congealed pellet which had lodged mercilessly in the back of his throat. But the sight of it, now that his fit was over, seemed to give him a curious satisfaction.

  He swivelled his head to his mother and then to me. His eyes were wet. His smile was spooled with saliva. He tried to lick it from his downy lips, but it resisted his tongue. A sick, sticky smile.

  He bent to the badminton racquet. He flipped up the pellet with it. And, before Juliet could try again to comfort him, he popped the pellet back into his mouth. He loped across the room and was gone, into the darkness of the woodland.

  THE DARKNESS. THE night. A long night. A long tunnel of darkness. Such a blurring of nightmare and reality that it was impossible to tell which was which.

  I tried to stop Juliet from pursuing her son into the garden, but I couldn’t. And anyway, in an odd, selfish way, it was a relief to flee the glaring light of the living-room with its stink of booze and sweat and smeary furniture, from the broken glass and mysterious stickiness on the carpet, and melt into the sweetness of the night outside. Everything we did was hampered and thwarted, as though, in a limbo between wakefulness and the chaos of dream, our movements were slow and laboured. Or it was the drink? Or the adrenaline in our limbs? Or we were asleep?

  Straight out of the French windows, with shards of glass in my feet, we blundered into the chairs we’d taken outside and fell headlong into the long grass. Together we rolled onto the lawn, and the chair I’d hit was a crunching pain on my ribs. We got up, bruised, panting, and stumbled away from the house, and immediately the blackness was impenetrable. Blindness – it was the same blindness which had surrounded us as we’d sat and watched the gathering twilight. And now, as we moved deeper into the woods, it was a reckless, haphazard descent into an invisible world.

  I felt for her arm. She gripped my hand. There was a gleam of light, a sliver of starlight reflected from the hearse, and then a faint glow from the derelict greenhouse.

  She dragged me towards it, knowing the way better than I did, careless of the nettles which were chest-high and even wafted their stinging leaves at my face.

  ‘He’s in here,’ she hissed unnecessarily, and I tried again to stop her, to make her pause at least, or to pull her away.

  ‘Juliet, no. I’ll go in and see what he’s...’ I was panting. ‘Juliet, you wait out here and I’ll take a look and make sure he’s...’ In my stomach I was sick with a fear of what we would see, of what he might be doing. Because I knew. I knew. And I didn’t want her to see.

  But I couldn’t stop her. She possessed the unstoppable strength of a mother fearful for the sanity of her child. I had such a stabbing in my ribs that every step made me gasp, and the broken bricks underfoot, they ground the splinters of glass deeper into my soles. I couldn’t stop her.

  We fell together into the greenhouse.

  The boy, we couldn’t see the boy. We couldn’t hear him. He must have propped up his torch, it was beaming from somewhere at ground-level, from somewhere in a clump of brambles or the tangled roots of the vine; it was beaming up into the rafters and shattered panes of the ceiling. The swifts were in full panic. Hundreds of them – screeching with their tiny, tinny voices – were pell-mell in the confined space. The air above us and around our heads was alive with their dashing, hurtling, furry-feathery madness. A Bedlam of birds.

  Lawrence... Lawrence?

  He was up there, clinging with his toes and fingertips, where I’d discovered him once before: his outline blurred by the movement of the birds, a figure from an old black and white movie, flickering in the kaleidoscopic light.

  Oh god. What was he?

  A piece of myth? Some kind of bird-boy, a figment of legend or superstition? A boy who came out of the night, who emerged nude from the mud of the pond or dropped from the cloud-covered moon, who hung in the rafters festooned with the nests of the devil-birds and was a part of their mystic roosting. He was nude, dusky, his skin matted with their dust and down, his hair a sooty pelt, and oozing from his mouth a...

  Yes. We stood and gaped up at him. His whiskery wide mouth. Oozing. His body heaved with the effort of retching, and – unless I was hallucinating and tunnelling deeper into nightmare – he sicked up a mess of saliva, which gleamed in the quivering torchlight before he smeared it onto the rafters with his tongue.

  The birds... they were a frenzy of screaming, a sooty haboob, so dizzying and so loud I didn’t notice that Juliet was no longer standing beside me.

  Until I glanced down. She’d fainted onto the ground.

  AT LAST THERE was a lull in the lunacy of that night.

  No, not then, in the greenhouse... somehow, I got the woman out of there. Not sure how, like one of those cuts in a 1950s film, a swirling of the screen and a tag-line swimming into focus: Later the same night. There was a blurry commotion and a lot of pain. The trees were huge and black around me, and an enormous, elephantine roaring, either in their lofty branches or inside my head. Did I carry the woman on my shoulders or drag her bumping and bumping by the heels?

  Not sure. But there was a lull – Later the same night – and for an hour or two it was almost sane.

  I was in bed with her. In her bed, for the first time, the bed she’d shared with her husband. Somehow, to use that convenient word again, I’d got her up the stairs and toppled her like a sack of potatoes onto the rumpled sheets. I was exhausted – the pain in my ribs, the effort of manhandling the woman from inside the greenhouse and through the woods and into the house and upstairs, the discomfort of my wounded feet... And yet the pain itself was disconcertingly reassuring. Fuck, it was real. Every stab and twinge of it was a lurch back into a real world I’d felt slipping further and further away.

  I think we slept. Not sure. Juliet awoke from her dead-faint long enough to realise she was on the bed with me, long enough to mew pathetically like a kitten while I undressed her and myself and we pulled the sheets over us. She smelled of the woodland, sappy and green, she smelled of the leaves and the grass and the earth. And gin. And fear.

  I slipped off the bed and saw the orange glow of the light in the greenhouse, and when I slipped beside her again and held her close I whispered in her ear that everything would be alright, that the boy would be alright, that he would come to no harm while I was here and I would take care of them both... murmuring platitudes, sweet useless nothings, which lulled us both into a woozy, warm, welcoming sleep.

  I think we slept. Impossible to tell.

  Sleeping or waking, nightmare or reality? What was the difference? What did it matter?
Whatever absurdities I dreamed – Welsh-speaking head-hunters, schoolgirls possessed by spirits of the forest, my indomitable father drooling in an old people’s home – they slid seamlessly into the horrid oddness of that night.

  Absurd... and horrid.

  I dreamed of a madman. While I nestled in the limbs of a naked pixie-woman, naked with her in the wide expanse of her own bed for the first time, I dreamed of a medieval madman. No, not medieval, except in the long-ago, long-lost lunacy which gleamed from the grin on his face... because in one hand he was swishing a modern-day badminton racquet, and in the other he was swinging a hefty pair of black binoculars on a leather strap.

  I dreamed of him. He was huge and nude. He loomed in my dream.

  He wafted the racquet over my head, and it was furry with flies, they dripped off it and pattered on my head and face. In my dreaming, although I was wrapped in the arms of the pixie-girl and safe in her bed, I was afraid. Can you smell things in a dream? The madman smelled bad. He smelled of stagnant mud, a brackish slime. He leaned so close that even his shadow smelled bad. His mouth smelled bad, of sickliness and sick regurgitation. I was afraid, in my dreaming...

  Not a dream. I blinked awake and Lawrence Lundy was standing over me.

  I stared up at him. He smiled at me. A spool of saliva... a silvery thread of it, with a silvery blob on the end, drizzled from his lips and hung in mid-air, until the blob gathered enough weight in its mucous liquidity to drop into my mouth.

  He moved across the room. He opened the wardrobe doors and nuzzled through the hanging clothes. This time he took them out. He took out his father’s RAF jacket and trousers, the squadron-blue suit he might wear for special or ceremonial occasions, and he laid them carefully on the bed. For me? No, not for me, but on the end of his father’s bed, for his father, who must be lying in this bed with his mother.

  I held my breath and watched. It was beautiful, this ritual, the laying-out of his father’s clothes, in its deference, its pathetic humility. He took his father’s cologne and sprayed the clothes with it. Like a blessing.

  Almost lovely, a part of the lull in the nightmare.

  But then, as he moved around the foot of the bed and out of the room, I could sense a sudden anger in him. It was rank in his sweat, on his breath, on his naked teenage skin, and in his stale mouth. A terrible anger.

  I followed him, fascinated and sick with fear of what he might do. He seemed to hum with anger, as though his bones would crack with the tension. I could hear him grinding his teeth. He moved quickly, with a fell purpose.

  With three strides he was across the landing and into my room. He swung the binoculars from his neck, gripping the leather strap in his right hand. He hurtled them round and round like a sling... and with every ounce of strength in his body he smashed them onto my pillow.

  Again. And again. With a greater, more terrible force each time. Until he was heaving with the exertion.

  At last he stopped.

  He let go of the binoculars and stared at them, embedded in the pillow. He exhaled a long, long, wheezing breath, until his shoulders relaxed and the tension was gone and his whole tormented being was deflated.

  He turned and walked past me, oblivious of the reality of my presence, and he went silently up to his tower.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  WE WERE HAVING breakfast in the kitchen. It was as though I’d just arrived and the world was a warm, sunlit heaven. It was all real.

  Juliet had made eggs and bacon for the three of us, with coffee. She was putting on some toast and turning out the cupboards in search of honey. Me and Juliet and Lawrence, and the cat.

  And outside, two wonderful things, two things so truly marvellous that the reality was almost unbearable.

  First of all, through the open window of the kitchen there came a whiff of autumn.

  Impossible to describe, it would be presumptuous to try: something lissom and sly in the way the leaves were turning, the dark green leaves of late summer. The tiniest shiver in them, and a restless shifting this way and that as though they knew, they could sense the coming of a time when the air would cool and the winds would rattle them off and down and tumbling to the ground below. A whiff, a scent and a shiver I hadn’t had for all my years abroad. The changing of the seasons – it was late-August, and simply the idea of September, the loveliness of that word, the idea of September in England was more delicious than all the honey in Lincolnshire.

  Juliet found the honey, an unopened jar of it, tucked in a corner of one of the cupboards. She’d entirely emptied the cupboard, she’d hoicked out everything, so the kitchen was a muddle of batteries, boxes of candles, rolls of sticky-tape and wrapping paper, soap and shoe-polish, and for some mysterious reason the elusive jar of honey had got pushed into the cupboard and hidden at the back. With a housewifely smile of triumph, she set it on the table. Lawrence tried to open it. He couldn’t. He wrestled at it with all his manly stubbornness, refused to let me try, and eventually relinquished it to his mother, who stabbed at the lid with the point of a knife and effortlessly twisted it open.

  ‘Brains,’ she said, ‘not brawn. It takes a woman to know these things.’

  Small talk. A small triumph. Nice, yes. Nice and banal. We were three normal human beings, like a family, eating eggs and bacon, rummaging for a jar of honey and struggling to open it. The sun, a cooler, paler sun fell into the room, and it was alright for me to say, ‘What a lovely morning!’ It was alright to state the blindingly obvious, it felt so good to be back in a normal world.

  The other thing? ‘Listen,’ I said, to engage the boy and his mother, ‘do you hear it? You won’t have, not since the springtime, and it’s a sure sign that it’s nearly the end of the summer. Listen... the robin.’

  The most delicate, silvery song. A trickle of quicksilver. ‘You’ll hear him singing in the spring, when he’s disputing territory and looking for a mate and nest-building, but then he’ll stop. Not a peep, through June, July and into August. Listen, that’s the robin singing, that’s the sound of soon-September.’

  We all listened. The cat listened. It had been lying asleep on the floor, away from the table and the movement of the humans’ feet. But now, as if required to stir itself and pay attention, it opened its eyes and blinked around the kitchen. Like Juliet and Lawrence, it was still and quiet, and listening.

  At the same moment, both Juliet and Lawrence cocked their heads slightly in the direction, not of the garden, but of the kitchen door and the hallway and the foot of the stairs. As if they’d heard something out there and they were waiting.

  Not the robin. Something else. Somebody else.

  The cat started purring. It got up and stretched, arching its back and shimmying all its fur into a huge orange halo. It moved to the door and stood there, purring loudly, and staring up the stairs. There was a creak of the floorboards, a flexing of the old house in the warmth of a summer’s morning. Another creak. And the boy and his mother, perfectly synchronised, their eyes fixed on the doorway, turned their heads and followed something, or somebody who came in. No, actually a nothing, an utter invisibility, which didn’t come into the kitchen and sit on the empty chair at the breakfast table.

  The cat too. Purring like a sewing-machine, in a state of bliss, it folded its body as voluptuously as only a feline can, in and out of the legs of that chair, the empty chair, on which no one was sitting, an empty chair at which two people were staring with beatific smiles on their faces.

  Nothing. I stared at the chair as well. Was it Banquo’s fucking ghost or what? The cat sprang onto the chair and sprawled on its back with its legs wide apart, as though someone was stroking its tummy, nubbing its nipples...

  Juliet and Lawrence turned their heads and smiled at each other. She, her eyes gleaming with incipient tears, reached for her son’s hand and squeezed it. I was completely effaced. For them, I wasn’t in the room. They were engrossed in one another and the phenomenon they, and the cat, had conjured.

  ‘Excuse
me...’ I tried sarcasm, to hide my exasperation, to quell a qualm of fear I felt in my stomach. ‘Excuse me, did we hear the robin singing? In the garden? The first one I’ve heard in six years?’

  They blinked at the sound of my voice. I heard myself clawing at the reality I thought we’d had in the room, clutching for it, desperate for it, feeling it slipping away from me. They both looked at me, a flicker of puzzlement on their faces, as though they’d discovered a stranger sitting at their table and helping himself to their toast and honey, and I said, a bit louder, groping for the moments of sanity I thought we’d been sharing, ‘The robin? The end of the summer? The days will get shorter and cooler and...’ I sighted on the boy and aimed an idea at him, to try and wake him, to try and bring him back to the real world. ‘And Lawrence, soon the swifts will be thinking of leaving, we’ll go out one morning and find they’ve all gone.’

  He stared at me. My voice, my words, seemed to jar on him. I saw, in his eyes and in the tensing of the muscles in his forearms, a warning glimmer of the anger he’d manifested before.

  He controlled it. He looked at me through the fall of his hair. He simply said, ‘No.’

  I tried to smile at him. I wanted small talk. I wanted little, everyday conversation. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean no. The swifts won’t go. They don’t have to.’

  I felt the smile falter on my face. I fixed it there, but I knew it was only a mask and he could see through it.

  ‘Lawrence, I know, and you know, they’ll fly away soon. They always do. And they’ll come back next year, the very same birds will return to the very same nests. Their migration, it’s one of the marvels of nature. Those tiny creatures, weighing no more than a couple of ounces, will set off and...’

  ‘No, they don’t have to,’ he said. ‘You don’t know. You’re a teacher, but there are things you don’t know.’

  Oh god. No, not oh god. Oh fuck. I felt myself encloaked in a dream. Was that a word: encloaked? The weight of it, the very darkness of it, was like a smothering cloak. All of the delicious, chilly end-of-summer, and the miraculous robin... smothered in his truculent teenage words.