by Adam Lowe
“James, you need to get this.”
I looked over at him and I knew. Just by looking at him I knew. Maybe not everything but it was like someone had whispered into my ear: it’s Sheila. Sheila and James Jnr, and I scrabbled out of the pit and ran across the garage floor.
The phone was lying dead on its side on top of the chaos of the office desk. I stared at it for a moment, as if I could see something seeping out of the earpiece, something slick and putrid. I didn’t want to pick it up. I was disgusted with the idea of picking it up and yet I watched my fingers wrap around the receiver and I heard myself saying calmly. “It’s James here.”
“Mr Green?” She had a soft voice.
My throat closed up. When I spoke I didn’t recognise my own voice. “Yes?”
“I’m calling from the General Hospital. I’m very sorry to tell you that your wife has been involved in an automobile accident. Both your wife and your son were brought to the General. Their injuries were too great and although the medical staff tried everything they could to save them. I’m sorry to tell you they died.”
I stared out of the window. I could vaguely hear the official but kind voice of the woman. Her voice was distant and unimportant. Tim was standing outside the door of the office.
“They’re gone,” I said. Tim started to cry, I’d always known he’d had a crush on Sheila.
Gone. I kept repeating to myself over the days and weeks—as if I had to remind myself—the explanation when I woke up in an empty bed each morning and came down to an empty house. Gone. More than once I started off towards James Jnr’s nursery only to remember en-route that I didn’t need to collect him, that he was never going to need picking up from there again. Gone.
And eventually, weeks after that phone-call, I did what I suppose I knew all along I was going to do: I drove out to the crossroads where Sheila had been trying to make a right turn. Where the Artic had simply ploughed through her tiny Fiesta and crushed the life out of it. I stood on the side of the road, buffeted by the side swipe of the wind from passing traffic.
I crossed the road and I was almost to the white line when I realised I hadn’t even bothered checking it was clear. A car crested the hill, racing towards me. It slowed almost to a crawl and I saw the driver’s angry face peering out the window, her mouth working soundlessly. “do you want to get yourself killed? What sort of an idiot are you?” I stared through her with dead eyes.
On one of the trees there was a scar weathered to yellow where Sheila’s car had stripped bark from the trunk. Right here was where Sheila was sitting and over here . . . I moved just a few steps to my right . . . this was where James Jnr had been prised out of the vehicle. Small cubes glittered in the grass like false diamonds. Somehow coming here made the whole thing real in a way that nothing else had; not the empty house, not visiting the morgue, not James Jnr’s shoebox coffin. I stood at the side of the road and I cried and cried and cried until I thought surely I had no water left inside my body.
I don’t know how long I stayed there. Winter was folding over into spring and the sky darkened gradually. The cars flashing past had their lights on—low beams at first but as the sunlight leeched from the sky they came over the brow of the hill with their halogens glaring, pinning me back against the darkness.
That was when I saw them: A line of footprints leading away from the crash site. Two sizes—Sheila and James Jnr size. At first I didn’t believe it, thought my mind was making it up to give me some comfort. You had to really look for them, but once I saw them it was almost impossible to ignore them, or to think of them as anything except what they were: Angel tracks. This is where they had died. This was where their souls had left their bodies.
I’d never been a religious man: births, marriages and deaths were the only times I’d stuck my neck through the door of a church, but as soon as I saw those silver footprints leading away from the crash site I believed. No, I didn’t believe, I knew.
I tried to follow the footprints but as soon as I left the road it was too dark to see them. I came back the next night with a torch but that only took me a little further—through the first line of trees and over a fence into the wood before I lost them. On subsequent nights I sometimes got a little further. There was a comfort there—knowing something of Sheila and James Jnr had walked away from the crumpled wreck of her Fiesta, even if they were no longer here with me.
I came back every night, trying to follow wherever the footsteps would lead. Night after night, the trail fading over time, until the night came when I could no longer find any trace of Sheila and James Jnr.
And that might have been the end of it—leaving me to try and find some meaning in my life. Except that I was called out to the M1. Pete was off in Malaga for his annual week’s debauchery and Tim was laid up at home with Swine Flu so when the call came in it was me, me or me. I knew they’d been protecting me—nothing said but since Sheila’s death it had always been Tim or Pete’s turn to go out and haul in the wrecks, but I couldn’t hide from it forever so I got the flatbed out and chugged down to Junction 23.
One of the traffic cops filled in the details: some old codger driving down from Inverness had fallen asleep at the wheel. I waited in the van whilst they cut the guy free. They transferred him into an ambulance and it rolled away: no sirens.
As I walked over to the wreck I saw them—you couldn’t miss them—amongst the shattered glass and debris on the carriageway; silver footprints leading across the hard shoulder.
I looked back at the cop. He knew. They all did. They stared up at me but then they looked away, one after another returning their attention to the crumpled mess on the carriageway.
The glow of the footprints was already beginning to fade. I stopped, crouched down beside one and reached out. The print crumbled beneath my fingertips and I felt a terrible guilt at destroying something important. Silver rendered to grey ash and blew away in the breeze.
I walked up to the policeman, holding out my ash covered fingertips. “What is it?”
He didn’t even look, he stretched out his foot, dragged his toe over the tracks until they were gone. “We’ve got to get the road opened,” he told me.
The fat man lay huddled in the gutter.
This time.
I knelt down beside him. “This was what you wanted,” I told him. I’d seen it in his eyes—in that fraction of a second as I’d come over the hill and he’d chosen to walk out in front of me. And never mind the slight swerve of my car that had taken him into my path. I recognised that look, I’d seen it on the features of the others—and once you saw it you could never mistake it for anything else.
I stood up and looked around. Nothing. No silver footsteps leading his soul away.
“Come on,” I shouted at him, if I was less in control of myself I might have lost my temper. If I was someone else I might have screamed and kicked at his limp, useless body.
“This time,” I said to myself.
Every second I waited by the side of the road was a gamble. Soon someone was going to come over the hill.
“I promise—just this once.” And I knew they must have already heard this from me so many times before. “I just need to see it again.”
It couldn’t just be... It couldn’t just be that one time on the M1—because if that was the case then what did that say about Sheila and James Jnr?
It couldn’t be that I imagined that?
Off in the distance I hear sirens—probably nothing to do with me but I don’t want to take the chance. One last circle of the dead man and then I hurry back to my car and drive away. Another failure.
Just drive and drive and drive. It starts to rain and water smears the windscreen—everything out there is blurred and unreal and nothing matters except moving forwards.
Rain-tired taillights glow red from the cars up ahead. I can’t tell you where I am—I stopped paying attention to the journey months ago and now there’s only the motion and the sound of the engine and the water under the wheel
s and the steady swish-swish-swish of the wipers pulling me forwards.
I don’t even think about it, not really, because if I think about it I might change my mind. Instead I push down on the pedal and the needle on the Speedo judders past 70, through 80 to 90 and with just the slightest pull on the wheel I drift off the carriageway and I hit the motorway bridge at nearly 100 mph.
Richard Farren Barber was born in Nottingham in 1970. He has had short stories published (or due for publication) in All Hallows, Blood Oranges, Derby Scribes Anthology, Derby Telegraph, Gentle Reader, Murky Depths, Midnight Echo, Morpheus Tales, Scribble, Shriek Freak Quarterly, The House of Horror, This is Derbyshire, and Time in a Bottle, and broadcast on BBC Radio Derby.
Richard was sponsored by Writing East Midlands to undertake a mentoring scheme where he was supported in the development of his novel Bloodie Bones. The Literary Consultancy are currently submitting it to agents on his behalf.
His website can be found at richardfarrenbarber.co.uk
51 Weeks
by Rachel Kendall
We are members of something unique; a small collective, a thumb-sucking comfort. We are emotional refugees who fled the sanctimonious core of society, who seek to reconcile with the truest, most unconventional order.
We met on the internet, conferred electronically, planned telephonically and then gravitated to this one place, Pescara, Italy. A warehouse, hot with a vaguely meaty odour, plastic shards hanging like stalactites from a high ceiling.
The devil wears a sandy coloured suit. His flesh is tanned. The shades worn indoors and the sculpted beard betray his cool and his wealth. But there will be wealthier, more powerful demons above him. He is Tuvia. Tuvia is our guide.
There are twenty seven of us here. Some are people I have met before, some are new members. Some wear the expression of accismus, others’ eyes dart nervously. We are teachers, officials, artists, and nurses, in blue and white collars. We are unemployed, unemployable, homeless, ‘cured’, bullies, bullied, pugilists and pacifists. And we have one thing in common—a need for satiety. Some of us have points on our license, criminal records for indecency, drug habits. Others own firearms, fucked up lungs, multiple piercings. And for us, nothing is ever enough.
Pescara is picture-perfect, a postcard paradise. Clear warm water, a blazing white sun, sandy beaches, coloured houses trailing flowers.
But we’re all blinkered. We see only what we choose. Or, at least, only that which we’re allowed to see. We sleep during the day and come nightfall we prepare to be shown our unHoly Grail.
I’ve been a member for four years. Once a year we all meet. It is our holiday and our reunion. For the other 51 weeks of the year we carry on as normal. We wait for the pubs to open so we can have that first drink of the day. We masturbate at the sight of lovers groping in the backs of cars. We steal the neighbour’s kids’ pet rabbit and saw off its ears before placing it carefully back in its hutch. We shoplift. We write letters to the editor. We have affairs and blackmail magistrates and lie on our tax returns.
What we want can be seen on a hundred different sites on the internet. But what we need is the chance to get involved. We want to submerge ourselves in the action, not sit alone in a room, staring at the monitor. Here is a group of like-mindeds to share the pleasure with. People we might meet in the flesh and start an actual friendship with. We help each other out, make suggestions, offer services, lend money, supply drugs. Hits and misses. I helped out a woman who went by the name of Rose (a woman by any other name . . . ). She wanted to live out her rape fantasy. She lived a few hundred miles from me and I offered my services. We made plans. As she walked jauntily through the park near her four-bed, two-car home, I jumped her. I ripped and kicked and tore my way between her legs. Fucked her, pissed on her bloody face, kicked her a couple more times in the ribs and fled. It didn’t fulfil any of my desires. I hoped it filled hers. I never heard from her again.
My first ‘outing’ with the group was in my home town of London. Tuvia led what was then only five members into the warm basement of an empty house with boarded-up windows and a pervasive smell of piss. Graffiti covered the walls inside and the toilet was clogged with shit. The squatters had to be forcibly removed before the body could be brought in. He’d been shot in the face; unidentified and possibly homeless, he’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Two of his fingers had been partially eaten away, by a stray dog, or maybe rats. His body had been cleaned up but his face was a mess. We were here to watch him decay. The heaters were there to speed up the process. The longer we were out here, the more money we had to part with.
So, we came and went as we liked for hours, days, weeks. One man vomited the first time he saw the body and didn’t return. None of us spoke. We took our chairs or leant against the wall and performed our vigil around the corpse. We were not there to touch. We were eyes only. Eyes that widened further with every movement of flesh, every fluid and gassy ejection from every aperture. Our fingers merely held handkerchiefs over noses. Sometimes we went outside to breathe in the carbon monoxide from the day’s mass of traffic. Going back inside was made harder by the fresh onslaught of decay. I found it easier to stay where I was. People brought me coffee and sandwiches, which I barely touched. I didn’t want to miss a second of the show.
When Tuvia asked, I told. When he asked each of us in person and in private what effects the sight of the corpse had had on us, I told him none. I was disappointed, I said. I wanted more. It was all too passive, sitting and watching as nature did what nature does. It might make some people sick to the stomach, it might revolt others with its obvious mortality show, the reminder that this is how we will all end up. But what was it, really? It was nothing. It was a cycle. It was not enough.
I think Tuvia took note of my grumblings as the following year we ended up in Madrid at two in the morning, sitting behind glass on a second storey, watching a dog fight. Pit bulls. At least in part, these dogs had been bred to be fighting machines. Starved, beaten, kicked, they had been revved up like bulls before a fight. They ran at each other like they had been shot out of a cannon. I was impressed at first. The way their muscles rippled. The way their short legs pounded the floor. The way they tore at each other, ripping off a nose in one bite, taking out an eye, sinking teeth deep into the other’s shoulder, through muscle, ripping off flesh till the bone was visible. Exhausted, they continued dripping blood, legs buckling, the chant of the men around them urging them on until one just gave up and the other tore its corpse to pieces.
“Why were we behind glass?” I demanded to know the next day.
I’d found the missing piece. Sitting on the edge of my chair, face inches from the clear obstacle, I’d been denied a right to be part of the action. I wanted to be down there where it happened. I wanted to be jostled by the crowd, smell the sweat of the men, be deafened by their shouts, wave money about, hiss and spit and clap the winner on the back.
“Too dangerous,” was his answer. “These are very violent men. They know each other well. They’ve been face to face with each other for years. They don’t take kindly to strangers. They’re not here to put on a show for tourists.”
“So give me something I can be part of,” I spat at him. “It’s what I pay you for. Give me something real, something I can touch and smell and feel.”
The next outing was for me alone.
He took what I had said to heart and a few days later a black car pulled up outside my hotel room. I was alone at the time, drinking bourbon, lying on the bed staring at the stains on the ceiling. I wasn’t prepared for three men to come knocking at my door, with guns and rope and heavily disguised voices.
When I woke I was back on my bed. Tuvia was sitting beside me. He cocked a brow when he saw me, shone a light into each of my eyes in turn. Perhaps for show, perhaps he was actually concerned. He nodded, satisfied.
“How do you feel?”
There was a question I couldn’t answer in a flash. I felt . . . hungover. My head
cracked and splintered, my eyes felt like they might roll out of their sockets. It was as though all the fluid in my body had been drained out. I was a pit of sand, and it felt like someone had been digging away inside me. Gradually I became aware of a pain in my genitals. What started off as a low throb and hum worked its way up to an acid burn as my foreskin began to peel off, followed by layer and layer of skin until I expected to find a bloody red stump in place of my cock. When Tuvia saw my pain he lifted the bed sheet (and here I discovered I was naked) revealing two metal spikes going in one side of my penis and out the other.
“Do you remember anything?”
I shook my head, closed my eyes, the pain almost visible to me. “Get them out,” I said.
“Of course. But first, watch.”
He pointed a remote control at the TV at the end of the bed and I watched myself in grainy black and white. The whole thing had been filmed, from my kidnap, to the S&M club, to the loss of my body in a mass of flesh, to the woman (man?) towering over me, my body on a rack, my penis limp, and the insertion of the spikes into my flesh. My face did not even register pain. Had they filled me so full of drugs I was completely numb? Blood, thick and black on film, covered my legs. They left me there, carried on cavorting around me. The screen faded to black.
The offending articles were removed from my cock and though it hurt to piss for a few weeks and sex was completely out of the question, there was no lasting damage. These people were not amateurs. Still, in the end, I had to ask Tuvia what was the point?
“You didn’t like it?”
“There were many things I didn’t like about it. I wanted action and you offered me a passive role again. Not only that but I was drugged beyond awareness. I felt nothing. I saw nothing. I asked you for something, Tuvia. Give me something.”
And now, a year later, in a warehouse in Pescara, we wait for the devil to speak.