The creature, a macabre Greek statue, released Alex. Blond hair flying, limbs flapping, his friend splashed into the tank. Richard expected a rush of frenzied bubbles, a churning of fluid, something distinctive and dramatic.
Nothing happened. Made balletic by the concentrate, Alex sank. The momentum of his fall was ebbing, carrying him so far before giving up altogether. Suspended almost centrally in the tank, arms and legs loosely outstretched, he looked like one of Raphael’s angels. Some cold part of Richard’s mind informed him that the fluid must be denser than water in order to support a man so. He ignored the observation, too fascinated by the spectacle. Alex’s hair was beautiful, floating loose and majestic about his head.
Like a patient litmus paper, Alex’s skin started to redden. When it was the shade of dying embers, the tank began to drain through the pipes, into the small steel drum, then into Jennifer’s left wrist. Arms held aloft, a worshipper rejoicing, she allowed the tank to empty into her. With nauseous horror he noticed that it surged back out of her right arm, back to the drum, back to the tank. Ready for round two.
Cheeks dampened by the tears he had not noticed crying, he watched the repetitive process of a human body dissolving, as the tank drained and refilled, drained and refilled. With each stage there was less of Alex to see.
Worst of all was the moment just before his eyes were consumed. For a few lonely seconds those orbs were visible, and they seemed to watch Richard with a deep and sacred love. Then the eyes were gone, leaving a stain of black and red floating in front of empty sockets. Alex had been awake and aware, until that moment at the least.
As she fed, Jennifer grew stronger, more vital, fuller. She looked almost as he remembered her now, as Greg remembered her, young and beautiful. Flesh had grown before his eyes, filling out her atrophied muscles, inflating her perfect breasts. Yes, inflating was the right word. It was like watching a balloon being filled. Though he wept love at the passing of his friend, he was simultaneously aroused by the sexual ecstasy she displayed as she fed. Hating himself for the sensations that crept through him as Alex died, his tears grew more ferocious.
When the process was complete, and even the bones were gone, he had little time to grieve. With Alex dead her attention was on Richard alone, the grip of her mind tightening around his body and soul. All at once, he felt the prickle of his defences sharpen, and knew his body was priming to reject her, loosing flashbacks of a false life in him. Attempting calm, he relaxed himself as he had done in the restaurant, when he dined with his dead brother. It was a success, the rushing sensations he associated with the mental leap fluttered to nothing. Unable to even clench a muscle, he could do nothing about the physical onslaught, and his body spurted blood. Nails, eyes, anus, ears, mouth, nose; a tiny needle was thrust viciously into each, causing them to weep red tears in crimson mourning for Alex. Compared to the other agonies, the burns and bruises, the pain hardly mattered. Richard felt the blood flow from him and knew a small glow of triumph when he realised that Jennifer’s next meal would be incomplete. As he gushed red, she studied him.
“You reject me? Oh sweetling, but you are a curiosity. I wish we had more time to play, but my physical appetites have been neglected too long. The main course awaits.”
With the return of her full attention, Jameson winked out like a light bulb. One moment he comprised a significant portion of the personality in his mind, the next he was gone. He could still remember what he had so recently thought and felt, but there was now a wall in place which stemmed the tide of returning information. His reactions were once more those of Gregory Summers.
Thinking of Alex, of the feelings he had for the dead man, he felt nothing but self-loathing. The same instincts that had thrust his friend away during their only tentative kiss now made him glad the man was dead. Crying with the destructive power of those thoughts, feeling they were right at the same time as he knew they were wrong, he wished his shamed, tired existence would end.
“Then how fortunate for you that I’m here.” God, he wished she would get out of his head. Like a coroner examining fresh meat, she reached forward with her cupped hand and pulled the lids of his eyes closed. They would never again open of their own accord.
Blindness provided at least a small physical relief. His staring eyes had begun to throb and run with the room’s constant glare, losing and gaining focus with alarming fickleness. Now he could wrap himself up in a little world of self.
Even if he was the wrong self.
“Strip him.” Her voice was as honeyed as the day he hadn’t married her. Feeling the hands of the creature tear his charred shirt from him, he felt a curious outrage. Could it not be a little gentler, a little more decent with his last moments?
“Gently,” she added. She would be with him until the moment of his death. Then he would be with her, travelling through her in little tubes, feeding her. Was that to be his afterlife? He felt he deserved more.
“There is nothing more.” She was close to his ear. “There is only me and mine.” Was that true? How could she, an endless, wandering thing that had evaded death for so long, possibly know? Her voice betrayed a hint of panic and fear, two things he had thought never to hear there. “I’ve seen it on the faces of the dead! I’ve seen it scrawled on the back of eternity!”
Poetic nothings. He knew what had wormed into her, breaking her calm and releasing the black beast of fear. She would never be sure. It was Jennifer who was damned, not he. Stuck in her meagre, repetitive existence, she envied him his ability to either discover or fade, for either were preferable to her infinite inertia.
Victory. When he died he would take a victory with him.
All thought left his head, leaving only stars and confusion in their wake. Unable to see, he had been unaware of the impending blow he had received. At last he could be grateful for his paralysed vocal cords. Though she knew she had hurt him (he could keep nothing back from her), she would never hear his pain again. He denied her a satisfaction, and relished the act.
“Cherish your illusions while you can.” The surety of her voice was chilling.
Naked now, a cool draft flowing over his body, he began to steel himself for the tank. Could he prepare himself for the unknowable? Pushing such thoughts from his head, aware that he was wasting the little time left to him, he tried to imagine what the pain might be like. Perhaps it would be a larger version of the coffee scald he had never received, nothing more than a protracted burn. Thinking on the pain he had felt in his blazing flat, he thought he could live with that. Better, he could die with it.
Roaring like the grumble of some ancient beast, the tank filled somewhere ahead of him. Meaty arms found purchase beneath his arms and legs, lifting him from the floor. Wanting to cry for the creature, a child with no true experience of love and hate, he felt a burning need to speak. Concentrating, feeling his chance fade as it began to carry him to the steps, he thought of his vocal cords trapped into immobility. Pushing hard, he found his breath willing to obey him.
“Waaagth.” Wait. Inarticulate, but the creature heard. She heard, in her mind and in the air about her. Though he could simply think the thought, allow her to suck it up like she did everything else, he wanted to be a human being one last time. He wanted to speak to his wife.
“Aaaaayyyy….” No good. He tried again, desperate that she hear the words before her patience wore thin and he lost his chance. “Aay luuuthed wut uuu weer. Aay haayt wuut uuu aaaar.” It would do, she had the words in her mind to confirm his last fragile sounds.
“Take him.” He had expected another blow, a final repercussion of some sort. She did nothing. As he felt the lurching steps of the creature ascending, he knew it was because there was nothing she could say. Two victories. How many could she claim? Not knowing, but satisfied that he would do nothing more significant with what remained of his life, he waited.
A halt, followed by movement from the arms holding him. At the top of the steps the creature held him out like the sacrificial o
ffering they had made him. From below, he heard the thunder of the tank continuing to refill. The beast is hungry, he thought.
The roar stopped.
The creature let go.
He fell.
The graceless plunge lasted long enough to wonder what was coming, and wish that Jameson was still with him, then he broke the surface and was submerged.
Agony beyond words. Pain that seared as it ate him. Sinking and burning, but no awareness of anything beyond those sensations. More than he had prepared for, tearing through his mental barricades as it ripped at his flesh, the pain chased him towards merciful blackness.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
PERDITION
Growth. Expansion. Completion. Again he is complete, and this surprises him, though he knows what has occurred. A small part of the fluid has been recycled, pumped back to the tank. A small part of his mind. Enough to integrate with the rest of the vicious liquid, pulling him until he is the cube of the tank again.
It has happened because she wants to feel him as he feasts on the last remnants of skeleton in the tank. Knowing he has no control, he pictures himself cracking bones, sucking sweet marrow from them, absorbing them into him. It will finish soon. He will move on, leaving her here.
Whole truth strikes him only as he performs his nerveless task. She need never let him free. She will never let him free.
Screaming silent, fluid howls, he sees his fate. Barricaded into this vampiric existence, he will be recycled. All she need do is keep one tiny portion of each batch of fluid she consumes. A small piece of him, diminutive but aware. She will have done so with every victim who passed into this tank.
How many? Is Alex there, or the victim before that? Yes and yes. An infinite yes. All of them, from the moment she realised she could still link to their suffering, could still feed her soul with their pain.
Are they aware of him? Will he ever know their company? No. They are disparate torments. Countless meals.
So he will be an endless man in an endless suffering. How many more frightened Gregs will he consume with his new fluid form? Eyeballs will burst, their fluids merging with him. He will drink deep, destroying and consuming, binding them to form a grotesque, fleshless insanity. That is all he is now. One fragment of a greater, twisted whole.
As he diminishes once more, finally able to accept that he has no future but this continual shrinking and growth, he knows he will be pushed to madness. On the outside, she will be watching his acceptance and pleasuring herself with the knowledge, a perverse cerebral masturbation. It is her victory after all.
Two victories. All he ever claimed.
Alex is more intimately joined to him than he could have ever imagined.
Screaming, his silent shriek joining many hundreds of similar wails, he shrinks to nothing once more.
Stalking Tips
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Richard maintains a website at http://www.richardwright.org and Tweets occasionally at http://www.twitter.com/richard_wright.
If you enjoyed Cuckoo then please consider leaving a review at Amazon to help spread the word. There’s nothing new readers trust more than the opinions of those who preceded them. Thanks!
AFTERWORD
Thank you for buying this book. I wrote it many years ago in Scotland, on an electric typewriter with a display that showed four lines of text at a time, and on which I saved each chapter as a separate file on the type of floppy disk you can’t buy any more. To proofread it I had to print it off over and over again, making changes in pen and meticulously finding the lines on that tiny display to make the needful corrections.
By contrast, I prepared this revised edition in India, on a Macbook, using an incredibly sophisticated writing program called Scrivener. I proofread it on my Kindle, making notes in the electronic text as I went.
Times have changed. When Greg Summers first fought to survive, mobile phones weren’t the ubiquitous commodities they are today, and the Internet was still catching on. Little things like that have evolved this final edition of the novel, but I’m pleased to say it’s much the same book as it always was, albeit one with a more experienced editor.
When I started telling this story, I wasn’t a writer. By the time I finished it, I was. That’s what I owe this book, and I’m delighted to be able to put it back out into the world.
- Richard Wright, New Delhi, 2011
About the Author
Richard Wright is an author of strange, dark fictions, living in Glasgow with his wife and daughter. For two decades his short stories have appeared widely in the US and UK press, most recently in anthologies such as Iris Wildthyme of Mars and More Tales From The City. He is the author of the novels Cuckoo, Thy Fearful Symmetry, Craven Place, and The Flesh Market, and the novellas Hiram Grange and the Nymphs of Krakow, The Flesh Remembers, The Weighing of the Heart, and The Blackened Soul.
You can find out more about his books and sign up for his email newsletter at http://www.richardwright.org
Dedication & Acknowledgements
This is a book with history. With each new life it’s developed, there have been more people to thank. So, in no particular order, sincere thanks to Natasha Di Michele, Mark Williamson, Emma Buckle, Annie MacPherson, Mary Z. Wolf, Dirk M. Wolf, Darren Floyd, all at Borders Glasgow (RIP) circa 2000, Emma Barnes, Kirsty, and Eva. There are others. If you know who you are, then take it as read.
Also by Richard Wright…
The Flesh Market
"Doon the wynds an' up the streets,
Where revenants sought souls tae eat,
The Butcher called for twitching meat
An' Burke an' Hare did answer." -anon.
1827. A year after the Cadaver Riots, anatomists slice twitching flesh as they dream of cures and glory. Behind closed doors they deal with devils to keep the flesh market supplied. Set between the slums of 19th Century Edinburgh and the ivory towers of its academia, The Flesh Market is an almost true story of murder, mad science, obsession, and the restless dead.
"For a tale so concerned with death, it's bursting with human vitality." - J.J. Marsh, Bookmuse (bookmuse.co.uk)
Now available on Kobo.
Also by Richard Wright…
Craven Place
The author. The psychic. The vagrant. The hack.
An invitation to a crumbling cottage in the lonely wilds. The legend of the witch who haunts it still. A disappearance from a locked room and the rising, ancient power that may be culprit.
Welcome... to Craven Place.
"Part horror, part thriller and part mystery, it's almost in a genre all it's own. Part of the joy of Craven Place is letting it unfold and lead you where it may." - Jessica Nottingham, Hopelessly Devoted Bibliophile
Now available on Kobo.
Also by Richard Wright…
Thy Fearful Symmetry
Blood will flow. Fire will fall. Days will end.
The end of the world started in Glasgow, with a kiss. Two people - two creatures - broke rules hardwired into the DNA of the universe.
The universe noticed. The universe broke.
As the masses pray and crawl on bloody knees, the few must restore the fearful symmetry between good and evil - for the sake of all.
"Imagine a world where fire rains from the sky at the same time as pure white snow. A world where the dead walk the Earth. Faced with that, logic goes out the window. The people in this story are raw and real. Broken and sullied. Terrified." - Jessica Nottingham, Hopelessly Devoted Bibliophile
Now available on Kobo.
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