Incantations

by SIMS, MAYNARD

  The figure slowly stood upright, unfurling like some hideous flower. The auburn hair was matted and tangled, and in the light that streamed in through the window, the once alabaster skin took on a sickly, greenish hue. But it was unmistakably Marissa.

  She took a step out of the shadows and Chris Parker saw the full extent of her dissolution. Her clothes were ragged, filthy with streaks of dried mud and other stains about which he could only speculate. Her once finely manicured fingers were now blackened and scabbed, the fingernails left to grow into claws.

  She spoke but the sound that issued from her throat was a coarsened mockery of her once mellifluous voice. ‘What’s the matter, Chris?’ she said. ‘You used to find me desirable. Don’t you still?’ As she spoke she took small shuffling steps forward, shortening the space between them. Chris Parker made the sign of the cross in the air in front of him, his lips moving in silent prayer. The nearer she approached the stronger the smell in the room became; an earthy, feral smell, tinged with the sickly sweetness of decay.

  ‘I knew you’d come back,’ he said. ‘Knew you would bring your evil back to this village. I should have killed you when I had the chance.’

  She threw her head back and laughed; a hacking parody of the laugh he remembered so well. Anger boiled inside him and he gripped the iron spike more tightly, the muscles in his forearm taut, ready to strike out. It was only the weight of the sack in his other hand that stopped him.

  ‘What’s the matter, Chris? I thought you’d be pleased to see us.’

  The voice was behind him, but he didn’t need to turn around to know who it was. In the doorway, bathed in pale bleached evening light from a grime-spattered window, was Charles, his brother. For a long moment Chris stared at him, etching the image of him onto his mind. Of course he had known he hadn’t died, that was just the story. He hadn’t wanted to believe his brother would come back, but now, standing before him was proof that all the nightmares he had suffered over the last twenty years had their roots in a stark and shocking reality. His lips twisted in contempt. ‘Do you expect me to welcome you? You’re the same as her.’

  ‘I can’t deny it,’ Charles said pleasantly, conversationally. His clothes were as dirty and ragged as Marissa’s, his hair long and unkempt, and the smell just as vile. He stood in the doorway casually, arms at his sides, a smile playing on his ravaged face. Unthreatening. Chris noticed his brother’s hands; begrimed and clawed, and stained with blood, matter hanging in tendrils from the fingernails. He lifted his head and ran a finger across a scar that stretched across his throat, white and livid in the pale flesh. ‘A razor did that. Someone who thought he had the measure of me. I killed him. Of course, I bled for a week, but Marissa nursed me, brought me food when I was too weak to find it for myself. I should have died, but then, how could I as I was already dead?’

  Chris Parker wheeled on Marissa who stood but a yard away, a smile flickering on her lips. ‘You did this to him. This isn’t my brother. Charles died twenty years ago. This is your creation.’

  Marissa said nothing but the smile spread to a grin. Her teeth were decaying, rotting like the rest of her.

  ‘It was my choice, Chris,’ Charles said. ‘We had this argument years ago. You didn’t understand then and you don’t understand now.’

  Charles let a strange expression settle on his face. Neither a smile nor a frown. It was the kind of expression that speaks of acceptance, of the end of resistance. He made a movement that looked as if he was scratching the back of his neck. Gradually the skin around his lips seemed to loosen. The folds of skin on his neck draped forward like a woman letting a silk nightdress slide to the floor. The shifting of his skin was accompanied by the most odd noise; the sound of wet tissue paper being folded. Very quiet, very soft. The skin on his head flopped forwards onto his chest. With imperceptible movements behind his back Charles continued to ripple his skin away from his body so that after a few moments it fell in rivulets from his waist. Still it continued to cascade away from him, the sound of faint tearing joined now by sighs of almost sensual pleasure. Chris realised the sounds were coming from both Charles and Marissa. As the skin finally peeled from the torso and dropped obscenely without a sound to the floor Chris was astounded when what had been his brother bent casually, picked it up like a discarded towel, and hung it from a hook on the wall.

  ‘Come here.’ It was a command from Marissa.

  The thing that had been his brother walked to the bed, and sat beside her. She cradled the head in her arms and kissed what once were lips. Soft moans escaped their bonded mouths, and Chris knew he would never hear such sounds again. Disgust welled up but in concert with an awful fascination. Where he had enjoyed shared pleasures, now he harboured hope, almost dared, for some part in this display.

  One of the creatures on the bed, their voices becoming as joined as their bodies, asked him. ‘So why come here?’

  The anger swelling in Chris Parker’s chest reached its zenith. With tears clouding his eyes and an inarticulate cry on his lips, he lunged with the iron spike. Marissa moved forwards at the same time, anticipating the attack, hitting Chris, sending him sprawling forwards. The spike hit the floor first, and she took it like a spear and slashed it at his body. His momentum carried him down onto it, the end of the spike scraping through the soft tissue of his skin. Momentarily beaten, Chris Parker writhed on the floor in a gradually spreading pool of blood.

  What was left of Charles looked down at his brother, and at Marissa who was on her hands and knees, lapping at the blood like a cat with a saucer of cream. He crouched down and with a hand of raw crimson, stroked the hair away from Chris’s eyes. ‘I loved her, Chris. I had to be with her. I loved her before we became like…I loved you as well. It’s why we shared her…all those years ago.’

  Chris Parker coughed, spitting more blood onto the floor. He was drifting in and out of consciousness. ‘The sack,’ he mumbled. ‘Your past is in the sack.’

  Charles stood from his brother and approached the whimpering sack.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Marissa was on her feet, tugging at her lover’s ragged body, trying to pull him away. ‘He’ll hate you for this.’

  ‘He hates me already,’ Charles said, shrugging her off. ‘I have to do it. He’s my brother.’

  ‘You know what’s in there,’ she accused him. ‘Leave it like we did before.’

  ‘Is it Charles’s or mine?’ Chris had asked her when the pregnancy was announced. She gave him that smile, the laugh that had lost all it’s magic by then. ‘How can we ever know Chris? How will we ever know?’ She used her powers to entrap them both, but only one brother truly succumbed. Chris had lived with the guilt and the regret ever since.

  The sack writhed in anticipation on the dusty floor. The drawstring was pulled back and blinking into the gloom emerged something that could crawl but would never walk, that would communicate but never speak.

  As Chris died he watched what had been Charles embrace the creature, and knew that all the secrets they had shared, all the lies he had carried, were nothing compared to the legacy he was leaving behind.

  THE NICE HOUSE

  He had been watching her for days as she tended the garden at the front of the elegant Georgian house. As he worked at the house opposite, painting window frames, repairing gutters, she busied herself, cutting the lawn to billiard-table fineness, tending the over spilling herbaceous borders, trimming the box hedging with brisk clip-clip snips of her shears. Today it was the roses turn to receive her attentions, and with her hands sheathed in leather gardening gloves, she wielded her secateurs with loving precision.

  He looked around from his perch on the ladder leaning up against the west wall of the house, hoping she might, just might turn and meet his gaze, perhaps a smile, a nod of acknowledgment, perhaps more.

  She was attractive, pretty even, in a demure way, with her bobbed chestnut hair and large oval eyes. About his age, which made her early twenties, slim, almost petite, she moved with an
economy that spoke of grace and breeding. Since he first saw her he wanted to talk to her, to get to know her, but there was something about her manner that suggested that any direct contact would be met with a cool rebuff. She seemed self-contained, unaware if not oblivious to the life that passed by on the other side of the four-foot high hedge that bordered the street.

  He went back to painting the down pipe. The house was not his but belonged to his aunt and it was she who was employing him to redecorate the frontage, to fill and paint and make good any defects, and it was she who had tutted and shook her head when he had dropped out of college to pursue a more artistic lifestyle. Had his parents been alive he would have met with much stiffer opposition to his plans. His aunt, whilst ostensibly frowning on his choice of art over academe, he thought, secretly approved. She had been a formative influence on his life. His mother’s sister, she was the opposite of his staid and conservative mother. Given to flights of fancy, and possessed of a wanderlust that had taken her across the globe and back, his aunt had shown him there was more to life than a law practice and a life in suburbia. In him she recognised some of the spark that drove her own whims and had always been more tolerant of his artistic leanings. The redecoration of the house was a means to repay her for allowing him to board with her until other suitable accommodation could be found.

  He had the house to himself for three months while she cruised on a luxury liner. Not that he planned to abuse the responsibility. He had few friends in this part of the world, so there would be no wild parties, no all night drinking binges. Most evenings he drew. He had set up a makeshift studio in the dining room – a drawing board and chair, and a small table to hold his pencils, pens and ink. It was a solitary existence, and although used to it, it tended to explain, to his own satisfaction anyway, his fixation on the girl in the house opposite.

  NICE HOUSE. It was some kind of residential home, he had decided. Mainly elderly folk judging from the faces he had seen pressed against the house’s many windows. He rarely saw anyone but the girl outside though. Two days ago another young woman had struggled to manoeuvre a baby in a pram up the three stone steps to the house. He had put down his paintbrush and rushed across the street to help her. The girl barely smiled a thank you, but looked at him with curiously dead eyes, wiped a hand across her brow and rung the doorbell. He noticed a small tattoo of a bluebird on the hand that wiped the sweat away, and when he looked back at her face she was glaring at him. ‘What are you waiting for? A tip?’ He hurried back across the street; not turning round when he heard the front door open and greetings exchanged.

  Since then he had seen no one enter or leave the house except the girl with the chestnut bob.

  NICE HOUSE. Actually the name above the doorway had lost two of its letters. Just two pairs of rusting studs denoted the place of the missing letters before the word NICE. Perhaps he would ask the girl what the two missing letters were.

  ‘Excuse me.’

  The voice distracted him from the length of pipe he was painting a rich burgundy. He looked down. The girl from the house opposite stood at the bottom of the ladder looking up at him. Each hand held one half of the broken secateurs.

  ‘Can I help?’ he said, starting to descend the ladder.

  ‘I hope so,’ the girl said diffidently. ‘I tried to cut through rather a thick stem. It was all too much for these old things.’ She held up the two halves of the secateurs. He reached the bottom of the ladder. Seen from a road’s width the girl had looked attractive. Close to she was breathtaking. Her skin was flawless ivory, the mouth sensuous and her eyes shone with a deep fire, at once alluring and playful. Even her teeth were perfect, white and even. He watched the way the sun played on her hair, picking out fiery red and copper highlights.

  He took the broken secateurs from her, their hands touching briefly. Skin against skin, sending electric shivers through his body.

  He cleared his throat before he spoke. ‘You don’t remember seeing a bolt, do you?’

  The girl looked puzzled. ‘Bolt?’

  He showed her the hole in the middle of the two pieces. ‘It holds the two halves together. It must have fallen out when you were pruning.’

  She shook her head and shrugged.

  ‘Then we’d better look for it. Come on.’ He led the girl back across the road to the garden of NICE HOUSE. ‘My name’s Michael, by the way. Michael Thomas.’

  ‘Jenny Boswell,’ the girl said. ‘This is awfully kind of you. I didn’t mean to drag you away from your work.’

  ‘No problem,’ he said. ‘I was due for a break anyway. I’ve been up that ladder since eight this morning.’

  ‘I know,’ she said as they entered the garden. ‘I’ve been watching you.’

  He felt his cheeks flush as a thrill of pleasure swept over him. This was more, much more than he could have hoped for. ‘Have you? Oh.’

  It took ten minutes of rummaging through the flower bed, turning over stones, brushing dead leaves aside, before he found the centre bolt, and another five minutes to fix the two halves together. ‘There. Good as new,’ he said, handing them back to her. ‘Well, nearly.’

  Jenny Boswell smiled. ‘Thank you so much. I thought I would have to buy another pair. Can I make you a cup of tea…a small thank you?’

  He returned her smile. ‘Tea…yes…great.’

  He followed her into the house. There was a notice board in the porch with age-curled flyers for jumble sales and choral concerts attached by rusting drawing pins. The floor was covered in brown linoleum that squeaked under his trainers, and a heavy smell of cooking hung in the air. Vegetables, he guessed, strong on leeks or onions. There was a long corridor running through the centre of the house, and he found himself struggling to keep up with Jenny as she rushed down it. Doors lined the corridor; all heavy oak, all shut except one. He looked in as he passed. An old man was sitting in a high backed chair. He looked up as Michael glanced in. There was panic in the old man’s eyes and he made quick sweeping gestures with his arm. He mouthed silently at him. ‘Get out, get out!’

  Jenny came back along the corridor. ‘Michael?’ She drew up next to him and looked into the room. The old man seemed to shrink into his seat and snapped his mouth shut. Jenny entered the room, went across to him and crouched down next to his chair. ‘Now, Billy, what’s all this fuss?’ Gently she smoothed the old man’s floppy fringe of grey hair back from his face, brushing it back across the top of his head, her hand settling at the back of his neck. She massaged the top of his spine. Michael watched the gentle way she was soothing the old man; talking quietly into his ear, soft words, he supposed, of kindness.

  The old man stared down at the floor. Michael watched his hands that were twitching in his lap like frightened sparrows. After a few moments Jenny got to her feet and joined Michael by the door. ‘He’ll be fine now,’ she said and made to close the door. Michael gave the old boy one more glance, but he was still staring at the floor, tears running freely down his cheeks. Jenny shut the door on his grief. ‘Very sad,’ she said. ‘Lost his wife two years ago. It left him a broken man.’

  Michael nodded sympathetically.

  They reached the kitchen and Jenny switched on the electric kettle. Despite the smells permeating the house there was nothing cooking on the range-style stove, and, when he sidled up to it and stroked the cast-iron, the metal was cold.

  The kitchen was a large airy room; quarry tiled and painted deep terracotta. Opposite the range there was a double sink and drainer, and rows of pine fronted cupboards. Between the range and the sink stood a long rectangular oak table surrounded by wheel-backed chairs.

  Jenny made the tea and set the two stout china mugs down on the table, pulled out a chair and motioned for him to sit.

  ‘What is this place?’ he asked artlessly.

  ‘Senice House. It’s a rest home. A retreat if you like.’

  ‘Senice House. So the missing letters are S and E. I wondered.’

  ‘Most people call it the Nice House
anyway. I rather like that,’ Jenny said.

  ‘Are all the inmates like Billy?’

  ‘No…and I don’t think they’d thank you for calling them inmates. We use the word guests.’ She sipped her tea. He followed her lead. It was hot and sweet. Too sweet for his taste, but he said nothing, not wanting the slightest thing to come between them at the start of what he hoped would be a burgeoning relationship. She continued. ‘The people who come here are tired. Tired of grieving, tired of their hectic schedules, tired of the hustle and bustle. Tired of life.’

  ‘Of life, or of living?’

  ‘Oh no, not that,’ she answered sharply. ‘Never that. I can’t imagine anyone ever being tired of living.’

  Try telling that to his father, thought Michael. His father who had been so bereft at losing his wife to cancer that he followed her to the grave three months later, helped on his way with a handful of barbiturates and a bottle of whisky.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘The people who come here need to get away for a while; some place of sanctuary where they can regroup and get their lives back together.’

  ‘Like the girl the other day, the one with the pram. An unmarried mother, I expect?’

  Jenny looked blank. ‘I don’t recall,’ she said.

  ‘I helped her up the steps with the pram. She was very prickly.’

  Jenny shook her head. ‘No, not one of ours,’ she said. ‘We don’t encourage children here; too much bedlam. Children don’t make for a peaceful environment.’

  ‘Perhaps she was just visiting then.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Jenny sipped her tea. ‘Do you do this sort of work for a living?’ she said, changing the subject abruptly.