by Adam Lowe
First, the camera was working again. Indisputably working. Its little red light danced jerkily from side to side, in time with his rhythmic shaking. Second, the beast. The beast was far larger than Taylor could have possibly imagined. Rearing up on its back legs as it now was, it must have been eight-feet tall. Eight-feet tall and comprised almost entirely of burgeoning muscle, bear-trap jaws and fierce, poisonous yellow eyes. Yellow eyes which were full of a wild kind of intelligence. Yellow eyes which immediately locked-on Taylor’s and told the story of exactly what would happen next.
Taylor held up the camera in a bloodied hand and watched as the beast lowered itself onto its haunches and readied itself to pounce. Like a domestic dog, its rump twitched back and forth, generating the required energy for the leap. Unlike any domestic dog Taylor had ever encountered, it seemed to laugh just before it did so. And the laugh sounded so bitter, it could only have come from the human side of the creature.
When it came down to it, it was Taylor who howled like a wolf. Howled and screeched and pleaded until the beast ripped out his throat and the only noise left available to him was the weird kinda clicking noise which half of his tongue made as it slapped against his teeth and his non-existent lips. His tongue kept flapping, like a great red surrender flag, right until the end, when the beast started feasting on his heart from a newly-opened cavity in his chest.
Remus woke up feeling guilty as sin; like he’d been caught right in the act of doing something terrible by ma. But for the life of him, he couldn’t remember what he’d done. Must’ve got stuck into a few too many of those beers, he reckoned. Must have started on daddy’s old magazines again.
Straight away, like a nervous tic, his eyes darted down to his hands, checking for hairs on the palms. And for a moment, through his blurred early-morning eyes, he really thought ma’s old tale was true. For, at first glance, his hands were thick with a rusty-brown substance. He screwed up his eyes, shook his head clear of the beer-cobwebs, and then took a second look. The brown substance was still there, but immediately he knew it was not hair. No: it was something else entirely, and Remus thought he knew what it was.
Foreman Tipper at the factory once got one of his paws caught in one of the machines. Before anyone could get in there and push the emergency stop, it had chewed off three of his fingers. When they pulled him out, his hand was ejaculating blood all over the place; it was a goddamn fountain. Anyways, Boss-man Reed wanted to keep the injury in-house—the factory couldn’t afford any more health and safety disasters—and so they’d kept him up in the smoking room, shaking and whimpering away until the bleeding stopped. When he came down to see Boss-man Reed again (and be granted full foreman’s pay for the rest of his life), he was pale as fish-flesh and his ruined south paw was coppery-brown with dried blood.
Coppery-brown.
Remus took a frantic inventory of his body-parts, secretly praying he hadn’t done anything stupid. (Once he’d nearly followed through on a guilt-mad desire to make a John Wayne Bobbitt out of himself.) But everything appeared to be in full working order.
So if it isn’t my blood, it must be someone else’s, he thought, feeling a surge of almost sexual excitement. He pulled himself out of bed and lurched across the dilapidated floor of the gingerbread shack, kicking half-empty beer cans out of the way as he went. By the shack’s drunk-looking door he found the first of the magazines, his favourite: Hairy Harems. Only, it was now so badly ripped it looked as though it had been passed through a paper-shredder. And it was so covered in blood it looked as though it was being viewed through only the red side of a pair of old-style 3D glasses. Scattered over the lip of the doorway were more magazines, fluttering in the breeze: Unshaven Havens, The Overgrown Lady Garden, and Au Naturel.
‘Shit,’ breathed Remus, bending down to pick them up and feeling an ache in his legs. As he did so, he clipped the door and it swung open with a creak, letting in cold reality.
Outside was a scene so shocking it took his breath away. It was as though the whole forest floor had been daubed in red paint. And there were things hanging from every branch of every tree. Horrible, snaking red things, like guts. Remus screwed up his eyes, sure that when he reopened them, he’d see something different; that it had only been a trick of the fierce early-morning light.
It wasn’t. If anything, the scene was even worse upon second viewing. Now his bloodshot eyes started to make sense of the confusion. It wasn’t simply a mass of blood and guts and hair and filth, like something accidentally run over by a combine harvester. No, it was more like a scene of sacrifice. Like the clearing was a space for bloody, ritual killing.
He picked out what looked very much like a face; ripped from the mouth right down to the throat, but a face nonetheless. It was kinda grafted onto the trunk of a tree. He picked out what looked like an immensely hairy leg hanging from the roof of the shack. He picked out what was definitely a human hand in amongst all the mangy fur and tatty hair gathered right at the centre of the clearing.
And then Remus felt his insides leaping out of him as though they were on their own suicide mission. His heart threatened to hammer its way right out of his chest. His bowels groaned in warning. He dropped onto his haunches and tried to take deep breaths, but new worries assaulted him almost immediately. What if one of the farmers happened past the shack and saw the bodies on his steps? What if a policeman chanced his way out here?
Quickly, he dived back into the shack, and reached under the mouldy-looking bed for a spade. He’d bury the bodies; that’s what he’d do. Before any interfering busybodies visited. Before any blame could be apportioned to him.
He stepped past the bodies, not even looking down at them, and made for the edge of the clearing, where the leaves had drifted deeper, where it would be easier to hide something like a body. And at some instinctive level, like he was remembering a dream, Remus felt as though he’d performed such a task before. He felt as though he’d done such a thing so many times he could get by on auto-pilot. But what kind of a person becomes adept at burying bodies?
Remus dared not think about such a sticky question. Instead, he allowed his spade to break ground and started to dig. Surprisingly, he found the digging easier than he’d expected. Like he’d suddenly grown stronger than he’d ever given himself credit for. He ploughed into the dirt and leaves with an intensity which bordered on the maniacal, barely even pausing to wipe the sweat off his brow.
Only when a good, grave-sized hole loomed in front of him did he even take a moment to look back at the shack to check whether any small animals were interfering with the bodies. And only then did he see something glinting back at him from right next to the human hand he’d seen.
‘What the fox hat?’ he asked himself in a voice which sounded almost exactly like his daddy’s. Although he did hear some voices quite a lot of the time, Remus couldn’t remember hearing that particular voice in a long time. But he didn’t have time to start wondering about the whys and the wherefores. Not when the glinting thing had caught his eye so.
He approached the bodies gingerly and pulled up his shirt so it covered his nose, before reaching down for whatever it was had caught his attention. And when his fingers touched upon the video camera, at first he couldn’t work out just what it was he was touching. But he pulled it up nonetheless, and with it came the half-eaten hand of Taylor Gray.
Remus tried to shake the strap loose of the hand, which only made the scene more terrifying as the hand responded almost as though it were waving to him. In his desperation, he kicked out at the dead hand and finally its rigor mortis grip was broken.
With trembling fingers, he lifted the camera up to his face and clicked on the ‘play’ button, knowing the camera wouldn’t work, knowing nothing would have been recorded. So he was startled when a crackly image started to emerge on the small viewfinder screen. A crackly image which appeared to be of these very woods; it had the same russet-brown leaves, the same dense foliage.
Almost immediately, the camera
found its subject; it started to focus on a large dog, or a wolf. And then Remus started to laugh. Because it was definitely a man dressed up as a wolf, and a drunken man at that. Hell, the wolf kept stubbing its damn toes and cussing all the time.
Remus watched some more and laughed less. The man in the wolf suit’s acting skills appeared to be improving the longer the film went on. After a while, when the camera followed the wolf into deeper woodland, Remus thought it hardly looked like a man in a suit at all. It looked real.
Abruptly, the film stopped and then jerked back into life again, showing a different scene. This scene looked remarkably like the clearing he was standing in right now, only it was filmed from a funny angle, as though the cameraman was lying down. These modern film-makers, thought Remus; too clever for their own good. He was almost going to stop watching when he caught sight of the wolf again, and this time he was even more impressed. Whoever had done the special effects for this low-budget flick deserved a goddamn Oscar. For this wolfman looked stacked in the kind of way that only a real honest-to-goodness animal which hunts and feeds can be. It looked as though it was bursting with power and with rage.
Remus watched with terrified eyes as the wolf destroyed the cameraman in so comprehensive a manner as to leave no doubt as to whether it was a man in a suit. And then he watched in awe as it sunk low in the middle of the clearing and howled at the waning moon. He could have sworn werewolves, lycanthropes, whatever you wanted to call them, only came out when there was a full moon, but then he realised that being pedantic about such things was patently ridiculous. This was no fairy-tale. This was real; the video proved it.
And then came the real shocker. As Remus Coley watched, the film showed the wolf kinda bucking and bending into its own body. Clicking and crashing and transforming itself into something else, into the man that he saw in the mirror every day he dared look. And when he saw that, he almost dropped the camera.
As if on auto-pilot again, he staggered back into the shack and flopped down into his mouldy old chair by the beer fridge. Absently, he picked up his marigolds and the last condom, wondering what to do. The plastic felt nasty against his fingers. Nasty and forbidding. He flung them away into a far corner of the room and then, without allowing himself to think, he unzipped his fly with confident hands.
Suddenly, he was feeling more turned-on than he ever had in his miserable little life. His cock sprung obediently to attention and he dropped his trousers. And remarkably, he heard his daddy’s voice once again. That’s why they call it the blood lust, son, it said. And Remus smiled and started to stroke. He continued to stroke even when the soft hair started to poke its way through the calloused skin on his palms. He continued to stroke even when it didn’t feel like his hand any more but rather like the paw of something else. For the first time in his life, Remus Coley really felt alive. The picture of his daddy seemed to smile down upon him from the wall, at last happy his son had discovered the real family jewels.
When he finished up, Remus didn’t feel the least bit guilty. Instead he was hungry. Hungrier than he’d been in a long while. As he thought about what he fancied eating, he let loose a howl of victory.
A.J. Kirby is the award-winning author of three novels and over forty short stories. He is a sports writer for the Professional Footballer’s Association and a reviewer for both The New York Journal of Books and The Short Review. He was runner-up in the Dog Horn Prize for Literature (Fiction) 2010 and winner of The Big Issue in the North’s Genre Fiction Award 2011, in Association with Polluto magazine. His work appears in Cabala (2011) and Bite Me, Robot Boy (2012), both published by Dog Horn Publishing.
Gallery Green
by Jan Edwards
The Gallery had grabbed the usual bouquet of design awards and sufficient brickbats to start a reasonable sized wall. Karrin though it was ‘pretty bloody amazing’. From the pavement, staring up that blue-black facade, she was certain that, love or hate it, no one standing in its shadow could avoid feeling some kind of awe. That overwhelming sense of mortality, normally reserved for cathedrals and palaces, inspired by a column of steel and apparently seamless glass rising six stories above the street. This was the brand new, and highly controversial, Tate Modern, Bristol, and she knew the world would beat at its doors whatever words passed on either side of that debate.
Above the entrance a rank of feather flags snapped and flapped the exhibition’s multi-hued logo to the wind in a brashly sophisticated welcome. Beneath them a chattering crowd of lesser beings were segregated from the Celebs by ubiquitous metal barriers. Less-privileged photographers lacking press passes snapped and whirred their glass eyes as she passed. Spectators, there to gawk at the glitteratti in their black-tie designer-splendour, eyed her suspiciously. The more knowing Arties, who were camped out for the following day’s public opening, dismissed her as a nothing, a nobody.
She still felt uncomfortable being here. This rarefied end of the Art-world always unsettled her. She felt vaguely fraudulent. Yes she had a couple of minor local exhibitions to her name, but hardly Turner Prize. Cameras clicked and flashed, and she could almost hear a few hundred pairs of eyes slashing at her back with two questions. Who is she? And why does she get in so easy? Knowing her invitation was the real deal did not stop her feeling that way; and the security guys, handing back her invitation with such scepticism, backed that up. She had that certain feeling they waved her through only because the Holographic-Ticket could not lie.
Walking into the building clutching her holographed invitation was such a buzz, and she smiled. Russ had always referred to these events and the people in them as the Art-ificials. ‘It’s not the real world,’ he had said so very often. ‘It’s not art. It’s money. It’s a sell out. It’s a bloody con.’ But that was B.B., she thought. Before Becki. Now it was all changed, and even he, the great artiste, had plunged both feet into the murky waters of commerciality.
She was so late, so very late, and Becki would be furious. Best opening in years and she’ll say I’ve blown it, she thought. Her own tiny gallery had been quiet all day, until a couple of browsers sauntered in right before closing. ‘Just looking,’ they’d said. It had got so late she had almost decided not to bother. Once she passed through the Tate’s main foyer into the Grand Hall, however, she knew that staying away would have been her biggest mistake. This was everything the promos had promised and more. Muted lighting reflected off the pale marble floor and walls. Pale metal stanchions supporting the six floors, and, ultimately, the infamous cone shaped glass roof that gave the project the subtitle ‘Cornetto Tower’.
The ground floor was one vast atrium with glistening spiral of stairs running up to the top floor. From there the glass ceiling cone poked upward into the night, and from that darkened structure shards of pure colour were apparently hurtling toward her in jagged swathes. She knew this piece—knew the artist, in fact. Russ Willis was an arsehole. A total git of epic degrees. Yet he had conceived such as this. She stared at the installation, feeling her pride and loss in familiar stabbing twists of the gut. ‘Destruction of the Rainbow’ was an old friend. She had seen its tiny prototype, and helped in the cutting of its glass sections. It was the only thing she had ever seen him working on. His obsession and his reason. Yet still she was unprepared for the real beast. It was breathtaking. The shattered spectrum, carefully edged in finely hammered silver, held in a timeless free-fall, as each piece lazily twirled on gleaming steel chains. Swaying in the updraft, despite their weight, they nudged at each other, whispering and tittering amongst themselves at each new visitor who dared to stare. It diffused the wall lights into a mosaic of shifting patterns on the pale floor. She had stepped into the maelstrom, unwary and unprepared, and she paused, vaguely disconcerted that the floor itself seemed insubstantial, like the rippling surface of a clouded lake.
Her dress of white silk and silver trim was caught in the same dance, as tiny mirrored decals on wrap and dress sparked flashes of colour like tiny lights, so that she felt like som
e very small, and very pale, Christmas tree caught in a psychedelic vortex. It made her vaguely nauseous.
A movement lower in the spiral caught her attention, a glass lift gliding toward the top level, mirrored by its twin descending on the far side, synchronised like pendulum weights, marking the hours, the minutes, the moments.
She tracked its path avidly, glad for any distraction against the rainbow’s glamour. From its destination on the top floor came faint chinking from glasses of a very different kind, along with soft twin hums of music and voices. Unmistakable sounds of ‘launch party’ seeped from what the programme had condescendingly informed her were the ‘Discourse Arena’ on the sixth floor.
Karrin crossed the few last metres, stepped into the waiting lift car, and came out at eye level with the shattered Rainbow. She made a deliberate effort not to see it, but to look through it to the other side—all anticipation of the art and the artists she could rub shoulders with. He would not get in her way tonight, not even by proxy.
She searched the crowd for Becki, Chief Curator and her oldest friend. There had been a time, of late, when they had not been friends. There had been a time, not very long ago, when they had been close to killing each other. Over a man, of course. When best-girl-friends stopped talking it’s always over a man. But best-girl-friends are friends forever, and once that fanny-rat had cleared the scene they were back to guzzling wine, and giggling, and comparing tales of his chipolata-prick, and his terminal-halitosis.
Karrin glanced at the Rainbow and sighed. She should be over it all by now. Art was art, to be appreciated whoever gave it life. What else was there? ‘Forget him. Bastard little toad,’ she muttered.