by David Mark
I didn’t hear him move but he was suddenly there in the dark space above me. I had never seen him before. He was thin. Gaunt. There were hollows in his cheeks and his eyes were sunk deep. It was like looking at a skull over which insufficient skin had been stretched. I smelled him, too. Sweat and lotion, mothballs and detergent. I was already shaking but the tremble became a shiver as I saw his hand come down upon my eyes like a huge spider lowering itself on a web.
‘Please, Beatrix. Hush now, be calm. Find yourself. Find your way …’
I have a memory of something I cannot truly explain. For a moment it felt as if I was two people. For an instant my whole body felt flushed with a kind of tingling ecstasy, as though all the blood in my veins had been somehow carbonated and thickened. Everything felt sensual and elegant. I lost sense of what I could see and what I could only feel. Memories rippled in and out of my peripheral vision; imaginings becoming real and reality flickering into a haze. I felt as though vines were tugging at my skin. I saw tendrils and tongues and wreaths of smoke, wrapping me, mummifying me, as something else, something other, probed and prodded at my flesh as if seeking a doorway. I heard my name, and yet it was not my name, and as I grabbed for something familiar amid the flotsam of disappearing memory, I had the sensation of being invaded. I thought of wasps, laying their eggs in the skull of another creature; parasites forcing their will on to a living thing that had become their carrier and sustenance. I told myself to fight it. To push back against the sensation that flooded me, bathed me, rushed into my arteries and veins like pure crystal water through bare riverbeds.
‘Please. Come back to me. All will be well. All will be so perfect …’
I think I may have seen her. Somewhere, between the jumble of sputtering pictures, I saw a girl who looked like me. Saw flushed cheeks and brown eyes and a big ungainly frame. She was not much more than shadow; a dirtied oil painting hidden behind layer upon layer of grime. She was searching for something. She was a child seeking a favourite toy; her gestures manic and desperate, urgent in her jerky movements, and then she was lost to me as the man leaned back into my vision and smiled. He opened my eyes between a finger and thumb that I could not feel. And then he grinned; a knife-wound in rotten fruit.
‘There,’ he said, and his voice was a prayer. ‘I see you, cica. I see you …’
And I knew that if I screamed, the voice that erupted from my mouth would not be my own.
MOLLY
A plump man in a grey cardigan is leaning out of an upstairs window. The glass is frosted and refracts the light from the flickering fairy lights that are strung across the pergola in the garden below. From where she crouches in the rear of the neighbouring garden, Molly cannot see the lights. From her vantage point, it seems as though the fat man is a robot; his torso a circuit board of blinking reds and yellows. He cannot see her. He is smoking a pipe. Blowing out a steady lungful of grey. Molly has a sudden urge to tell Hilda a story. She will tell her of this man, with his round head and his glasses and his pleasant fleshy face. Who leans out of the window of his house on Fournier Street and exhales all the clouds in the world. She will call him The Rainmaker. Hilda will grin, and tell her how the story could be improved. She will hold her hand, like she did when she was young and scared, and Molly will breathe her in; inhaling as if she were a breeze that carried the first sunlight of spring.
The thought causes Molly to shake her head with such ferocity that she almost loses her footing. She is angry with herself for this hesitation. She is so used to drifting off; to following her fantasies on their meandering courses, that she has let go of herself for a moment. Drifted away from her child. From this place. This now. She bites her cheek. Munches down hard with her molars on the soft peach-flesh of her inner cheek. She needs all of herself.
It is perfectly dark in the garden of Mr Farkas’s house. The long, thin space is a mess of broken-down walls and tangled grass. As she had clambered over the high wall at the rear she had hurt her leg on a rusted piece of metal that had once formed the frame of a miniature trampoline. She had lost her footing treading on the head of a broken ornament; the concrete cranium of a regal-looking woman with sleek hair and upturned nose. The wound across the neck of the bust was clean, as if it had been cleaved with an executioner’s blade.
Molly’s breath comes in staggered bursts, as if she has cried herself into a state of neutered hysteria. She hears herself and forces herself to be quiet, then reaches her hand to her mouth and bites upon the skin of her index finger, screaming at herself for her indecision. She does not know whether she wants to be seen. As she sprinted here she kept asking herself whether or not she should make all the noise and disruption it is possible to make. She wants noise. Chaos. Mania. For that could stop the man who has her daughter from hurting her. But to alert the neighbours would be to cause Farkas to panic. He could finish what he has begun. The thought makes her gorge rise and hot acid burns her throat. She wants to shout out. To beg for help.
‘Sort yourself out,’ she hisses, cat-like, as she moves quietly towards the glass. ‘He’s got your fucking daughter …’
Molly tastes iron as she licks the rain and the tears from her lips. Blood has dripped into her mouth. Sucking in a breath she darts forward. The glass is dark, curtains shut. She puts out her hands and touches the wet glass. Moves sideways. Her eyes have grown accustomed to the darkness now and she can see that she is in front of a bay window. She moves left, reaching out, searching her way around the rear of the big old house. Her hands close upon a door handle but the wood stays stuck in the frame as she pushes. She steps back, tears of frustration in her eyes. Her feet squelch in mud and she glances down. She is standing in a long trench of turned earth. Every part of her wants to fall to the ground and begin scrabbling at the earth like a dog. She forces herself to fight it.
Could be nothing.
Doesn’t matter.
Get in the house, just get in, get in …
She edges back along the window. Stops at the drapes. Looks up and sees the softest chink of grey light lancing through the blackness. She puts her hand on the rotten wooden sill. Feels pain. Looks at her palm and sees blood. Ignores it and reaches up to wrap her fingers around the frame of the smaller windows. She hauls herself upright, stretches up on her toes, and looks through the tiny gap, two inches long, above the Venn diagram of the conjoining curtains.
A light spills into the kitchen from the hall. It illuminates a big, square kitchen. It looks as if it has been ransacked or used by somebody living rough. The table is awash with dirty dishes and discarded boxes. Discarded paper covers the floor. Exposed wires protrude from walls on to which the maelstrom of words have been scrawled over and over: a lacework of spiralling, intersecting text scribbled so deeply that in places they have gouged into the plaster beneath.
Blood of my blood
Blood of my blood
Blood of my blood …
There is a hatch in the floor, the trapdoor raised like a sail. Along the wall stand three large refrigerator units, each as tall as a man and wide enough for two.
Molly gasps, her thoughts a hard slap. Realizes at what she has been looking.
Lottie. Laid in the doorway. Not moving. Arm bent the wrong way.
Molly leaps down from the sill. There is no longer a question of making up her mind. She senses that she is leaving herself. That for whatever comes next, she will be mere passenger.
Then she runs into the garden. Turns and looks up at the startled smoker in the neighbouring house.
‘Call nine-nine-nine right now. Police officer needs assistance. Mother and child, immediate risk to life. Suspect still on premises, I repeat, suspect still on premises!’
Before she can register the response, Molly bends down and picks up the head of the broken statue. It has a pleasing heft. She puts it under her arm like a rugby ball and runs back to the house. She grips the rocky skull in her hands and slams it into the wood above the lock. The door bursts open and Molly stumb
les inside. She hauls herself up, dropping the rock on to a cracked mosaic floor. She stands up and the smell of it hits her. The smell of bad memories. Damp walls. Rotten carpets. Spilled blood.
Molly pushes forward, tripping over a cardboard box that has been casually discarded. In the half light of the corridor, she can make out the words upon the packaging. Can see the medical symbols and the official-looking symbols that have declared the medical paraphernalia within to be transported.
Molly wrenches open the inner door and pitches forward into the hallway. The light is coming from a solitary bulb hanging high overhead. A sensation of vertigo flows through her as she stares up and up through the centre of the tall staircase which winds up three floors to a distant skylight. She screws up her eyes, seeking control, and then she feels herself bumbling down the corridor, arm upon the wall, biting her tongue to stop from shouting her daughter’s name.
On the floor before her, Lottie is a pitiful thing. She is unmoving and her arm looks as though it has been snapped completely at the elbow. Both hands lie face-up on the floor, even as her face is pressed against the broken tiles of the floor. Molly crouches down and gently moves her friend’s head. Her lips pull for a second; her lip gloss and spit momentarily gluing her to the floor. Breathing slow, forcing herself to stay calm, Molly puts her fingers under her friend’s nose. She gasps with relief as she feels a faint, warm breath upon her skin.
Molly is about to speak when she hears it. Hears the low, hushed, lullaby voice. She lowers Lottie’s head back to the floor and slowly turns. The void below the open door is a perfect square but to Molly’s perception, it is a mouth, open and screaming for her. She stands. She does not want to know what is there, in the dark, beneath the house. And yet she cannot stop herself from moving towards it. Cannot help but suck in a breath of air laced with the copper and chemical tang of the mortuary room. Cannot help but step inside, down, deeper, deeper … She half imagines that she is lowering herself into shimmering black oil. And then she sees the flickering light. Hears the soft voice. The gentle pleas. The carillon sound of something between laughter and weeping and the soft hum of a generator whirring in the space beyond.
Molly hears the words. Feels them thud into her very centre and pitch shards of flint through her every nerve.
‘You are a beautiful girl, cica. I see you. See you looking out at me. Oh my child, my child …’
She steps down.
Ducks into the light.
Sees …
MR FARKAS
It sounds to Mr Farkas as though somebody has shouted his name or lightly slapped his face. He experiences a sudden burst of waking; of having emerged from beneath packed earth.
He blinks, rapidly, until the thing before him comes into view.
It is his daughter. His daughter, as if viewed through cracked glass. A lifeless mask, amateurishly daubed in lipstick and paint. He feels himself twitch where he stands and he is overcome by a feeling of weakness. He looks down at his arm; bare below his rolled-up shirtsleeve. His skin is white and clammy and there is an open wound in the crook of his arm. Blood leaks from the ugly fissure as he slowly turns the limb and he watches with fascination as it trickles down his wrist. He continues his gaze downwards. Looks at the starched white sheet pulled tight over the still body. A red stain is spreading on the sheet, blooming like damp, and Mr Farkas looks at the clear tube that leaks blood from a thick, blunted syringe.
Mr Farkas fights to control his breathing. Looks back up at the caricature of his child. At this ghoulish imitation, made more grotesque by the realistic quality of the eyes that twitch, frantic, and fill with tears as they rove back and forth beneath the mask.
Mr Farkas rears back as if a hand has reached out for him from a grave. There is a child! A child, in this bed, in this place, wearing the face of his daughter … here, in this terrible place …
Images flash before him; explosions of memory and understanding; a vile stream of lurid snapshots that burst as cannon-fire in his vision. He feels himself lose the power of his legs. He pitches forward and lands upon the child, the girl …
Body-blows of recollection slam into him. He sees himself and all that he has done. Recalls tastes. Touches. The tensions in their bodies as he drained them to make room for his girl.
He staggers back, knife in hand, raising his hands to his temple.
Stops, suddenly completely still.
A woman is standing in front of him. She is pretty, with red hair. There is blood on her face and her palm and she is looking at him with murder in her eyes.
‘Is that my daughter?’
Her voice is raw. Hysterical. Unhinged. Mr Farkas feels fear. Who is this person, to have come into his home and look at him so? To address him so. He is here with his child, sharing stories, laughing, making up silly voices, and she strolls in and dares look at him …
‘I said, is that my fucking daughter! What have you done? Get off her. Get off her!’
And Mr Farkas looks down at the child and sees the perfect lips and rosy cheeks and tousled hair of the child that he adores, and he is suddenly very cross indeed. He remembers. He had been giving her some medicine. Giving her the blood she needs to stay well. Doctors didn’t care, he remembers, suddenly furious. Gave up on her too soon. My blood cannot end with me. It will not. She is blood of my blood. I will make her well …
And he had. Had he not extended her life? Given her more and more precious time. He had emptied himself for her. Drained her own bad blood and gladly poured his own into her veins. He had followed the teachings of the men he admired. Visionary thinkers past. Surgeons. Scientists. Philosophers. It had always been transfusion that fascinated him. The true pioneers. Men who sought to align spirit with science. Men like Denys. He had succeeded, had he not? Altered the natures of both beast and man before cruel fortune forced him to cease his work. Beatrix’s illness had allowed him to become pupil to an ancient master. He followed Denys’s experiments to the letter. Recreated all that the great transfusionist decreed. The results were extraordinary. Bad dogs became good. Hysterical animals were pacified by the blood of the meek. He had discovered what he had long suspected. That nature, the very soul, was not in the skin and bone. It was in the blood. And that was what he would keep. His blood would flourish. Would thrive. And he would forever have his beloved daughter at his side, listening to a heart beat with the same blood that ran in his own veins. His wife had protested, had she not? Finally spoken up after decades as a timid, mousy little crinkle of a thing. Stopped spending money long enough to scold him for his obsession. The obsession that bought them everything. That had made him rich enough to buy her whatever she wanted. To finally afford the treatment which allowed their child to be born. Her egg fertilized, mortifyingly, in a laboratory far from home, three days after he had emptied himself into a plastic pot and wept for the shame of it. The girl had been more help. His student. The loyal one. Eve. Loved Denys like he did. Got his little jokes. Looked up to him with a look that he had never seen outside of films and said she would be honoured to help him in his pioneering work. She had been crucial. Helped source the specimens. Brought in the dogs and cats. Even sourced two lambs. Had a friend in a slaughterhouse who brought true calf blood. She believed in the work. Better, she believed in him. It was his wife who spoiled things. Lost her temper. Said she could stand losing him to their dying daughter but not to a failed research assistant. It had become heated. Mr Farkas had been embarrassed and angry. He had been forced to strike his wife. He struck her harder than he intended to. Struck her again and again and again. And when he was finished striking her, there was not much left to hit. The girl said nothing. Just put her hand on his arm, her gesture sympathetic. Understanding. Later that night, when they made love, she told him that she wanted to volunteer. To use herself as a test subject in the same vein as the greats of science and philosophy. Though he had wanted a more markedly different test case, the opportunity was too great to turn down. He had agreed. He wanted to see wha
t would happen. Would the girl’s nature be softened or sweetened by his daughter’s blood? He had been stockpiling it for weeks. Tapping her vein every few days to build up a refrigerated wine-rack of blood, thinned with the anti-clotting agent his assistant had sourced from overseas. He had not given up hopes of his daughter’s recovery, but it was the blood that must take priority. She died while he was transfusing three pints of her blood into his assistant’s thigh. There was no doubting the presence of Beatrix within her. Once the sweating and nausea and the headaches had passed, there was a playfulness, an other-worldliness, that caused his eyes to fill with tears. His assistant was delighted that she had pleased him. Happily volunteered to start draining herself as swiftly as her body could reproduce it. Each fresh beat of her heart brought more Beatrix into her veins. It was a pity when she fell sick. The heat of her. The sweat upon her skin. The fits of agony that sent her into rictus spasms. It had touched his heart to see her die. But the blood was safe. And it was not difficult to find new carriers. He knew from his own time as an immigrant that the world was full of disposable people. He targeted those he felt confident would not be sought. Hunted those with the right height, the right shape, the right bearing, to carry the blood of his daughter. It had all gone surprisingly well. His daughter took up residence within her. He read to her. Mopped her brow. Bathed and changed her. Told her that soon, she would be well. The girl lasted four weeks. It was a pity when she died. But by then, the blood was safe …