by Bark, Jasper
The table was empty. Jimmy looked around the story space and saw that all the tables were now empty, as were the slabs and the sacrificial altars. All the victims were gone. The mood and the atmosphere of the whole place had changed, too. The despondent pall of agony and suffering that hung over everything had dissipated.
It was replaced by a sense of impending menace, as the many Anunnaki looked around them and saw no one to maim and torture but Jimmy and Mr Isimud. They left their posts and began to advance on the pair of them.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Jimmy darted behind one table and then another, trying to get as far away from the Anunnaki as possible, but nothing stopped their advance. Eventually he pushed himself up against a wall and sunk down into a squat with his arms over his head, naked and vulnerable, wearing only his boxers.
The Anunnaki pushed right past him as though he wasn’t there. They were interested only in Mr Isimud. They fell on him in a blurred and shadowy mass. Jimmy pulled himself up and sat on the edge of a table.
It was impossible to look directly at the massive scrum of Anunnaki surrounding Isimud. To try and take it in hurt not only Jimmy’s eyes, but also his soul.
Jimmy turned away and tried to block out first Isimud’s screams and then the sounds of rending and tearing. The Anunnaki began to separate into smaller mobs each carrying a different Isimud, kicking and thrashing in their grip.
Jimmy’s eyes couldn’t process the mass huddle of Anunnaki that had fallen on Isimud. The sight of so many blurred and shadowy figures caused them to throb. He could only focus on the occasional glimpse of Isimud himself, lying on the floor screaming and lashing out at his captors. The Anunnaki appeared to be peeling and tearing identical versions of Isimud from the captive original lying on the floor. Almost as if they were peeling sheets from a daily calendar.
Jimmy didn’t understand what he was seeing at first. Then it dawned on him; Isimud was being separated into all the lifetimes he would have lived over the course of the six millennia he’d been alive.
The Anunnaki carried each Isimud to a table or a slab and went to work on him as only they were capable. Visiting upon him the same frenzied damage and depravation they’d visited upon all his story’s victims.
A darkness was encroaching on the space and whole sections were simply winking out of existence. As soon as one group of Anunnaki finished dispatching their version of Mr Isimud, the space they were inhabiting shut down and vanished completely.
As six thousand years’ worth of Isimud’s dying screams slowly faded, the whole realm receded into a tiny area of floor and one single operating table where Jimmy was perched, his knees drawn up under his chin.
CHAPTER FORTY
Jimmy couldn’t stop shivering, not just from the chill air, but from everything he’d been through. He wanted to cry, but was afraid he’d lose himself to hysteria. His chest wheezed as his asthma threatened to return.
He knew at some point he’d have to climb down from the table and explore the tiny space. He wouldn’t find a way out otherwise, if there was a way out. At the moment though, all he wanted to do was hug his knees and rock gently back and forth.
The darkness that surrounded the tiny area was thick, black and seemingly absolute. Beyond it were beings more dangerous than Jimmy could comprehend.
He had no idea what to do if he couldn’t find a way out. He hadn’t thought this far ahead. He never did. He wasn’t a great finisher or completer, he needed Sam for that. He was an initiator. He launched into the things on impulse without a thought for where they might go or how they might end.
It all came down to endings yet again. It always did. It wasn’t supposed to end like this though. Why hadn’t he been saved as the Tailor promised?
As if in answer to his question, two Anunnaki stepped out of the darkness. Jimmy bit his lip so hard he tasted blood. He pulled his knees up over his face and hugged his legs, rocking frantically. He expected the Anunnaki to strike any moment, but nothing happened.
After an agonising while he looked up and peered over his knees at them. The Anunnaki weren’t paying Jimmy the slightest bit of attention. Their heads were bowed and they were examining the stone floor, searching for something. Without looking directly at them, Jimmy watched as they identified a spot and reached down into the floor.
The stone slabs seemed to change their composition as the Anunnaki reached into them, becoming more like loosely draped cloth. The Anunnaki lifted this cloth and, as they pulled it up, it began to resemble human skin.
The skin filled out, forming legs, arms, breasts and a head. The figure came to life in front of Jimmy. He nearly sobbed with relief when he saw who it was, her image blurred by the tears pouring from his eyes.
“Melissa, oh thank God . . . thank God. I thought I was never going to get out of here.”
“You aren’t,” she said. “Not for a long, long time anyway.”
Jimmy blinked the tears away and stared at Melissa with incomprehension. Why was she acting so cold?
“What do you mean?” he said. “I thought you’d come to help me, to get me out of here.”
“Now why would I want to do that?”
“Because I came back for you, like you asked. I set you free.”
“You rammed a bloody great sword into my guts.”
“Only so I could end the story and get you out. So you could be free, like you wanted.”
“Ah yes, what I wanted. I heard your little conversation with Isimud. Men, you’re all so alike, always telling a woman what she wants, without actually listening to her. That’s what made it so easy to play you off against each other.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh dear, the penny still hasn’t dropped, has it? How easily I played you and Isimud. Both thinking you knew what was good for me and what I wanted. I did want to be free of the endless suffering, just as you said, but I didn’t want to be rescued by some knight in armour. And I do want immortality, but not the type Isimud was offering. Who wants to endure so much suffering they get purified? What I really wanted was what Isimud had. I wanted the story and I wanted you to help me get it, which you did.”
“I did?”
“Yes, you covered me with the robe remember, and you said the story was ‘my story’ and ‘all about me,’ just as I wanted you to. Mr Isimud was quite right when he said, all stories are autobiographical at heart, and now he’s gone, the story really is ‘all about me,’ and that makes me the teller of the tale. I own the story, just as I always wanted. Now I really will be immortal, but on my own terms. Just as soon as I rebuild it.”
The Anunnaki moved a little closer to Jimmy. He didn’t like where this conversation was going. “What do you mean by ‘rebuild it?’”
Melissa’s brow wrinkled with annoyance. “You do ask a lot of questions, do you know that? It’s not one of your most attractive traits.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Oh God, don’t apologise, that just makes you sound pathetic, and that would be out of character. You see, you are a character now, just as I was. You put on the robe and stepped into the story, you chose to become the character I asked you to be, Dumuzi the shepherd king.”
“And I was Dumuzi. I came to Hell for you. I rescued you, just like Dumzi rescued Inanna.”
“Oh my dear, sweet Jimmy,” Melissa moved closer to him and stroked his cheek with the back of her hand. Her touch was soft and warm, and surprisingly comforting. It was the first sign of affection anyone had shown Jimmy in an age. He would have relished it, had the Anunnaki not closed in around him as well.
“Your aversion to endings was one of the reasons I chose you,” Melissa said. “I knew you wouldn’t read ahead and find out how the myth ended, but you really should have. Inanna isn’t rescued by Dumuzi. The god Enki comes to her aid but, in order to leave the underworld, she has to find someone to take her place. Dumuzi didn’t come and help Inanna when she asked him, just as you didn’t come to Jennie’s aid. So she had him se
ized by demons and dragged to Hell in her place.”
The Anunnaki grabbed Jimmy’s wrists and dragged him back till he was lying prone against the table with his hands above his head. Then they began to strap him in. There was a fierce tingle to their touch, like an electrical charge. There was no animosity in their actions, they acted with what seemed like calm benevolence.
“Wait,” Jimmy said. “What are you doing?”
“Again with the questions, isn’t it obvious? I’m rebuilding the story.”
“What?”
“Oh please stop, you’re embarrassing yourself. The other reason I chose you was because, like me, you can’t let go of your pain. In fact, you’re worse than I am, no amount of closure can stop you hanging on to it. You store up pain and never let it go. This story feeds on pain and grows because of it. Do you realise how perfect that makes you?”
“That’s not how it works though. I made the final cut, I ended the story. You got what you wanted and I’m supposed to be saved. There are rules to every story, the Tailor told me.”
“And I believe he also told you the best stories never follow these rules quite how you’d expect.”
“But I’m supposed to be saved.”
“And you will be saved, by living through the deaths of every victim this story has ever taken. It’s the only salvation this story can offer you. It’s also the only way to rebuild the story, one agonising death at a time, until it’s back to its old monstrous size.”
One of the Anunnaki produced a sacrificial knife. The other ran an appraising hand over Jimmy’s chest, the crackling touch reminded Jimmy of how frail his body was. He’d seen them slice and peel skin like his. He’d watched as they tore and shredded flesh as tender as his own. He knew how fragile his bones would be in the sombre hands of the Anunnaki.
Jimmy had seen what six thousand years of torment is like and now it lay ahead of him, without any hope of a reprieve.
“Wait, this isn’t fair,” he said. “This isn’t how the story’s supposed to end.”
Melissa placed a kiss on his forehead and put her lips to his ear. “Now don’t be that way. I thought it would rather appeal to you. You see, this story is never supposed to end, even when it finishes. You carry it away with you, in your heart and mind, haunted relentlessly from the moment you reach the last line . . . ”
EXCERPTED FROM RUN TO GROUND
BY JASPER BARK
1:
There was something wrong with the shed. Jim knew the moment he saw it.
It was an innocuous little building that sat against the far cemetery wall. Jim kept his tools there, along with his work clothes, the ride-on mower and anything else he needed for groundskeeping.
Yesterday, Cundle had requisitioned it for all his fancy equipment. Jim had moved most of the tools into the bungalow where he lived, on the outskirts of the cemetery. There were a few things he still needed to pick up, and he was curious to see what sort of mess Cundle had made of the place, with all his seismological apparatus.
The first thing Jim noticed, as he drew nearer, was the amount of flies buzzing around the shed. They hovered in a cloud and the noise they made was like a distant engine.
The door was open, creaking on its rusty hinges. There was a thick smell in the air that grew stronger the closer Jim got. It reminded Jim of his father’s overalls when he worked at the abattoir.
Jim had no idea what Cundle was doing in the shed but it was time to put a stop to it. He didn’t care how high up he was at the university, or how much of an expert he was supposed to be, he was up to no good. Jim wasn’t going to let him get away with it, not in his shed.
The cloying smell, and the drone of the flies, increased as Jim reached the door. He put his hand over his nose and mouth as he pulled the door open. A wave of flies swarmed out and Jim waved them away with his free hand.
The dim bulb that hung from the ceiling had been shattered and it took Jim a while to see through the gloom inside the shed. When his eyes had adjusted to the dim light, his brain took a while to process what he was seeing.
Every piece of equipment in the whole shed had been destroyed. The camp table Cundle brought had been knocked aside and bent out of shape. His laptops and seismological apparatus lay in pieces in the corners of the shed.
A stray electric cable, with its torn wires exposed, lay crackling in a pool of water. Except the liquid was too thick to be water, and it was the wrong colour. It was dark crimson and covered the entire floor of the shed. Its surface was beginning to congeal as Jim waded into the shed looking for Cundle. It began to seep into Jim’s new trainers.
That’s when Jim saw Cundle, and wished he hadn’t.
Cundle lay face down with his knees pulled up underneath him. His back was arched. What remained of his head was thrown back and his posterior was in the air. His trousers were torn to shreds and Jim clearly saw the foot-thick column of compacted earth that appeared to have burst up through the boards of the floor and buried itself in Cundle’s impossibly distended rectum.
Cundle’s buttocks were pushed so far apart to accommodate the shaft of soil, that the flesh around his anus was torn and ruptured. The earth had forced itself so hard and so deep into Cundle’s behind it seemed to have pushed every one of his internal organs out the opposite end.
Cundle’s mouth had been thrown wide open by the expulsion. His jaw was not only dislocated but the bones had cracked and come apart entirely. The glistening pink tubes of Cundle’s lower colon protruded from his torn and ragged lips, spilling out into the lake of blood and bile in front of him. Jim saw what he thought was a liver and a pair of lungs among the coils of dripping innards and the crawling flies.
This couldn’t be happening. Jim’s mind just couldn’t make sense of the scene before him. Who could have done this? How was such a thing possible?
Only this morning Cundle had been fussing around the graves and bossing Jim about as though he was Cundle’s lackey. Looking down his nose at Jim the whole time. Now he was reduced to this.
Jim felt a wave of revulsion, then a deep, terrible pity. He hadn’t liked Cundle while he was alive. He’d found the man to be pompous and condescending. Jim’s menial job left him beneath Cundle’s consideration. All the same, he’d been a human being, capable of thought and compassion. He didn’t deserve a fate like this.
Jim wondered what Cundle had been thinking in the final moments, as the fear gripped him and the agony of the violation became unbearable? Did he call out for his mother, or his children, if he had any? Did he long for the touch of an old flame, or just pray it would end quickly so the pain would finally stop?
It didn’t make any sense. How had the ground just risen up and punched a hole through the floor like that? How had it impaled Cundle and filled him so full of earth that every one of his internal organs had been expelled? Things had been getting weird around the cemetery lately, but this was off the scale.
Jim felt his stomach turn over. Not from the sight of Cundle but from a new smell that invaded the shed. It was growing stronger by the second. He’d thought it was coming from Cundle, but it was too cloying and putrid. It reeked of decay and rotting matter, so rancid it was almost fertile. A shameful sort of fertility, like the mould that grows on dead things. The smell not only grew, it began to envelop him, as though it were alive—another presence in the shed with him.
The floor shook and something beneath the wooden boards rumbled, as though it were moving through the earth directly below the shed. It might even be the thing that had killed Cundle.
Jim’s breathing got heavier and his skin went cold all over, even as the sweat broke out on the back of his neck. He realised he was in great danger, not just of death, but the same slow, hideous torture that Cundle would have suffered.
He had to leave the shed right now and put as much distance possible between himself and whatever was under it. Jim turned on his heel and fled into the cemetery.
2:
He had to get to Sloman’
s office. Sloman could call the police, or the fire brigade, or whomever it took to fix this. The cemetery was large, covering many acres, but Jim had worked there nearly six months now, so he knew the quickest route.
As he ran down the asphalt path Jim felt the ground beside it rumble. Whatever had been underneath the shed was now chasing him. It was in the earth right beneath him. Something was terribly wrong, things like this shouldn’t happen. What had Cundle been doing in the shed to cause this to happen?
Jim’s heart pumped and the blood sang in his ears, colours seemed brighter and his vision was sharper. Jim could pick out individual blades of grass and petals on a daisy.
His cousin, a head-case who’d done two tours in Iraq, once told him this happened under fire. In fight or flight situations, all your senses went into overdrive and you knew things without realising how.
Jim was experiencing that now. He couldn’t tell how, but he knew whatever was pursuing him wasn’t burrowing beneath the earth, it was becoming it. The ground was too smooth and undisturbed for it to be digging. Somehow it was possessing the soil, like a vengeful spirit, converting the earth to whatever it was, then releasing it as it moved alongside the path in pursuit of him.
Jim’s pursuer overtook him and circled round in front, becoming the asphalt path in front of him. The asphalt up ahead rippled like it was suddenly gelatinous and the rumbling took on a harsher tone—the growl of a beast about to attack.
Jim turned and ran back up the path, tearing away from whatever was blocking his way. He spotted another path, branching off on his right, it would take him a little off course but he could still circle back and get to Sloman’s office. His pursuer followed, keeping time with Jim, sometimes beside the path, sometimes behind him, rumbling loudly like a hound nipping at his heels.