by Greg James
He was not alone in the office.
He could hear uneven breathing at his back.
“Hello? Is it you? Are you there?”
First, breaths, mutterings and whispers, followed by a touch on the shoulder, a shuffling before the great unveiling of its hideous form, stepping out into the light, tittering to itself as he shrank away. That would be how it would go, perhaps with some minor variation.
He wasn’t sure if he could take much more of this treatment.
It would be the death of him.
The ghost of the convalescent had almost been the finish. Poor man, it had been in the newspapers the next day, no mention of Stokes or an arrest being made. The breathing in the room sharpened, becoming intense. It was hovering over his right shoulder.
Cargill turned to face his guest, but it was not his guest standing there.
It was Sergeant Cutter, his empty eyes looking dead ahead, seeming to see Cargill though there was nothing for him to see with. There was no way the man could be looking at him. No way.
“Why are you here, Sergeant? If you have any needs, you can ask one of the Sisters on the ward to assist you. I’m afraid I’m about to retire for the night.”
He tried to keep his voice even, his tone authoritative.
How had the man gotten into his office?
The door was opposite his desk and it had not been disturbed.
Cutter grabbed Cargill by the collars, hauling the doctor up, he threw him, sending him sprawling across his desk, papers and pens fell onto the carpet. An inkpot overturned, spilling an indigo rain.
“Don’t you know me, doctor? I know you.”
“Well, of course you do. You were brought in this evening, your terrible injuries.”
The Sergeant was advancing on him, moving as if he were not wounded and newly-blind. He was not stumbling, not tripping, not missing a step, bearing down on the doctor. He placed a palm over the old man’s heart, pressing down on it hard.
“I gave my eyes that I might see, doctor.”
Cargill winced, a rib cracked.
“Do you remember my brother?”
“Your brother? I don’t know what you mean.”
“Yes, you do. You know. You just don’t remember. Let me remind you.”
Cutter paused.
“Ever been to an orphanage?”
“No, not at all. Why would I visit such an establishment?”
“Oh, your sort go for lots of reasons. To study the poor like we’re dumb zoo animals. To be ‘charitable’ to us. To look concerned about our plight. And, for en-ter-tain-ment.”
Cargill flinched.
“What are you implying, sir?”
“Implying nothing. I’m telling you.”
Cutter pushed his disfigured face close to the old doctor’s.
“You don’t remember, do you? You don’t remember me or my brother? Barry?”
Cargill’s eyes went wide.
Cutter grabbed him, squeezing the old man’s throat tight, his voice was rising, high on hate’s fire. “You raped him and me, you and your braying friends. Time and again. Getting us to do every nasty fucking thing you could dream up. I wasn’t pretty enough for you, so you let me alone after a while, you let me be. But Barry, you always came back for him. I found him after the last time you came around, didn’t the Mother tell you? He was dead as a dog because of you, hanging by his neck. Fuckin’ dead!”
A blow from Cutter sent him crashing through his office door.
“Hung up there, cold, like a slab of fuckin’ meat! My baby brother!”
Cargill shook violently.
The voice Cutter had just spoken in, he had heard it before. It was the voice of his guest. It was the voice of his father. It was his voice too, the one he used when he hurt the ladyboys in The Club.
It was the voice of Jack.
Cargill fled , wanting to get out, get away before that thing could catch him. It wasn’t his guest but it wasn’t Cutter either. Something horribly in-between, something transitional, a cocoon that would soon breach. Then, it hit him, straight up and square on, a blow to the body. In the stomach, no, just below, sudden abdominal pain. Gastro-intestinal, gnawing at him with hungry teeth. His smaller intestines protested. He could feel them uncoiling and recoiling, aching, trying to strangle the hurt. Everything was glowing, edged with rotten gold.
He could barely see, let alone walk.
Then, the pain burst again, a dirty bomb. Buggering him, through and through. Hot nails, rough splinters of scalding wire, bringing tears to his eyes. He reached out with fingers that didn’t look familiar, pulling at sheets, then mattresses, then the rails around the sides of beds as he ran through the wards. On his feet, he was swaying, keening in the back of his throat, he was a kicked dog begging mercy from a vicious bastard master.
Why was the guest doing this to him?
The double doors at the end of the ward flipped and flapped. Not locked. Wide open. He made for them. Seeing into the corridor ahead, how it faded, how it waned, how it retreated off to an indistinct grey, ending in remorseless dark.
Another gut-quake tore him open, levelling mountains, wiping out villages and towns, leaving matchsticks of bone and burnt-out cries to attest to little people, pieces of him, having once been there.
The ward narrowed, becoming a crawlspace. He was shaking from tip to toe, piss running down his legs, dignity, a long-lost memory. Whitish drool hung in depending strings from his chin. Cargill’s veins itched and his arteries yawned. On hand and knee, he went on.
Outside of the ward, he sat and rocked on his haunches. Babying the pain inside, cradling it, hoping to soothe it with nonsensical mumsy words, waiting for it to sleep and go away. Give him some peace. Otherwise, he feared he would beat and batter it, tear it out from inside his skin. Bite on it as it bit on him. He shook his head from side to side, struggling and spitting, bad dog gone mad, long, trembling segments of greyed-out Time went worming past, hissing.
The pain acquiesced, receding, giving him his life back, such as it was.
He felt his way to the stairs that led down.
What floor was he on?
Don’t know. No markings gave the game away, passing by dusted windows that looked out onto ancient alleys spattered with spilt drink and congealing mould, he groped for a banister that was unclear to his eyes. It became solid in his hands, his palms passed over scabby divots and breakages in the unvarnished wood grain.
Lower he went, further down the helter skelter, where angles curved and what was once sharp ran smooth, where up was down and circles were not round. This was a place where chaos reigned and order desisted, where a hangman waited with a noose fashioned from blood-rusted barbed wire.
Darkness, he could hear it snapping and fluttering on the outer limits, a dead man’s flag mounted in the open stomach of a ripening corpse, stranded on some forgotten battlefield. He felt that darkness take him by the hand, lead him down the night-bright stairs. Slipping fingers into fingers, as cold and tender as a lover’s touch in winter.
“Charles?”
Then, with a laugh, the cold hands pushed him down the stairs.
Battered and bloodied, Cargill came to. A poor, derelict mess remembering the stairs, the helter skelter, his cold hands in mine. The long fall, it hurt, so much hurt, it was like being born. Feeling surfaces kick and bite, their black teeth-marks deep in his flesh. His spine was an aching line drawn by brutal, gouging fingers. Tasting blood, he felt broken enamel pieces on his tongue, saliva trailing from the torn-off turnbuckle of his nose.
This place was not the London hospital.
This lower floor he was on, it was as dim and but not as quiet as the floor he escaped from. He could hear patients moving about, rattling the old screws and nails in their body braces. Hard enough to make bruises show, he was sure. Maps of institutional abuse. Cigarette burn signatures and punch-drunk life-histories. There was so much Grey spooling out here, adhering to his senses, making everything unclear.
He heard teeth chattering violently.
Then, a distant lupine baying sound.
The Grey thinned, then went away and he was walking down a tiled walkway of limestone mahogany and pasteurised marble. The walls were writhing with failing patterns of black light and white darkness. The way was hard, unforgiving. The walls and ceiling seemed to press in close. Pain shot through his limbs, felling him, his knees cracked on the shimmering floor. Bent double, his stomach jumping inside him, it felt like it was trying to force its way up, out of his throat, that horrible sensation he knew from drinking too much. He felt hiccups catching in the back of his throat. His oesophagus was dilating in feverish spasms.
“Christ, what’s wrong with me?”
He hurt. He hurt worse than he could remember, even when he’d had the nastiest wine on offer, there’d not been this level of pain, it was coming from the cellar of his soul. He could feel wicked needles cutting through tissue, whittling away at the lining of his heart. Numbing sheets of pain tore at him. He felt barbs slicing away his nerves. His hands clutched at his throat, pulling at the flesh there.
Then, it came.
Rushing out of his mouth in a caustic gush of half-digested meat and blood, falling to the ground with a soft squelch. Cargill looked down at it, his arms wrapped around his shivering torso, hugging himself against the nauseous aftershock waves. The knot of matter before him was as large as his fist. Curled in on itself in an attitude of defence and self-comfort, strange bony protrusions split through the under-developed musculature. A blind, wizened head surmounted its nuggety body, a lipless mouth suckled on itself. Its throat letting out a thin, liquid mewling.
Cargill felt something trailing from his mouth. He wiped at it. It did not wipe away. It was not spittle. It was the umbilical cord.
Squeezing his eyes shut, Cargill prayed to a god who was not there, or listening, and bit down on the sinewy length of tissue. He chewed on it hard, grinding it between his teeth. After a long minute of gnawing, it was severed and he spat the gristle out of his mouth.
It was then that the foetus began to cry; grizzling in its birth-pool.
It opened its eyes, pale yet clear, and stared at him.
Stared at him with eyes that he knew.
He saw them in the mirror every morning.
Face twisting dark, Cargill lurched forward and stamped down, grinding with his heel as Stokes had ground down on the fallen convalescent’s face and limbs. The foetal bundle let out a weak wail as it split open under his foot; a translucent bloodbag spilling out frail bones and under-formed internal sacs. Cargill stamped again, again and again, until there was nothing left but a smear and some squealing scraps of skin.
Through tears, Cargill saw him step out of the darkness. His wet hands, shining with blood. It was Jack and he spoke through Cutter’s mouth.
“There is no greater abomination, for you, Cargill, than that of innocence and now you have slain yours as you have slain that of others. You have done enough.”
Cargill wailed as weakly as the foetus had done, clutching at his torso, at the empty space there, inside him, the echoing hole he had excavated over the years, growing, blossoming outwards, consuming him utterly.
He trailed his fingers through the bloodstains on the floor, raised them up before his eyes, then licking the stains away, he tasted them, feeling them on his tongue.
So much pain, so little understanding, until now.
Now, he understood.
“Charles, forgive me.”
Cargill’s limbs were removed with surgical grace. He could feel his stomach digesting pieces of lacerated genitalia. His torso was being quartered, bones breaking, flesh parting. Yet still, his heart kept on beating, somehow. His mind was bleeding delirious words, strange demands, but he understood why this was all happening. He understood what his guest wanted.
He understood Cutter.
He understood Jack.
He was adrift in agony, drowning in pain, but he understood as the skin was peeled away from everything he was. The obscure was made explicit and the hidden, bleeding heavily, was put on show. How ugly was beauty. How hateful love. How no-one is there for you and all friends are enemies waiting to happen.
How Something was Nothing and Nothing became Something.
Vile truths went shrieking through the weeping contours of Cargill’s brain and Cutter was laughing long and hard as he administered the old man’s fate.
No, not Cutter, call him Jack, his name, our name, watch him cut, cut, cut away at all things we hold dear. We scream, we run, we hide, then we cover it up, hope to make it go away but still he comes back, again and again and again, and he cuts us and we scream and scream again and we don’t know why.
But we do, really.
We let him in every time, we do.
We be the echo.
Chapter Seventeen
Dr Spice opened the front door, nodding a greeting to Jerry and Liz. “Ah, good evening. Follow me please.”
Jerry and Liz followed Dr Spice into his library, the shelves were cluttered with leather-bound books and arcane statuettes, the bejewelled eyes of which made Liz’s skin crawl. There was a small table in the room and a single black candle mounted into a polished brass holder at its centre.
“Please do take a seat.” said Spice.
As they took their seats, Dr Spice marked out a circle using a stick of blue chalk, enclosing them. He then drew out a number of vacuum tubes from under the table, slotting them together so that they matched the outline of the chalk circle. He plugged them into a hefty battery and turned it on.
There was mutter, a prickling crack and then a nascent hum. The tubes came on, ethereal blue light emanating from them, casting the four people in a shifting phosphorescent pallor. The library outside the circle became dim and distant, unreal, a vision seen through frosted glass.
“I think,” said Dr Spice, “we are ready.”
“What is all this, doc?” asked Jerry, “What’re the tubes and chalk for?”
“A precaution,” said Dr Spice, “I have been doing some research since I first, ah, became familiar with the Vetala and I felt it important that we protect ourselves fully. Blue, it seems, is a colour that wards off whatever unpleasant spirits hide Outside and there is a particular arrangement called the Circle of Three which the texts recommend be employed if the number of participants is correct. There are three of us and so there will be also three barriers; the chalk, the vacuum tubes and then we shall hold hands to form the third and final circle. This will create a metaphysical vacuum. We will become a blind spot, an empty point, a black hole. By placing ourselves within this arrangement, we have effectively snuffed out the flames of our existence. Whatever has been plaguing you will then take notice and come to us.”
“And, we’re safe in here, when they come looking?”
“There is no such thing as an infallible defence, but this should make things difficult for them, at the least.”
“Difficult. Right. Okay, whatever you say. We’re in your hands, doc.”
“Very apt, Mr Reinhart.”
Dr Spice lit the candle, took his seat and then the three linked hands.
The circle was complete.
“Now what?” asked Liz.
“We wait,” said Dr Spice. “that is all we can do.”
Hour followed hour as they sat at the table inside the circle, waiting. One of the vacuum tubes guttered briefly then came alive again with an electric snap. Uneasy silence hung over them.
Then, there was a sound from outside.
“I think they are here,” said Spice.
The three shuddered as they listened to shadows breathe.
“Where?” asked Liz, about to turn.
“Everywhere around us, and don’t move, Liz. Don’t break the circle. it must remain complete otherwise the source of our protection will be lost.”
As Dr Spice spoke, the atmosphere began to change, becoming heavy, dingy, the last glimpses of the library’s walls wer
e swallowed into the dismal veil that had fallen over all things outside the circle.
“What’s that?”
Jerry heard it first, footsteps.
“I think we have a visitor,” said Dr Spice, “Close your eyes, both of you. It is not safe to look upon the dead. Do it now.”
They closed their eyes.
The footsteps came to a halt.
A bead of sweat ran down Dr Spice’s brow. Everyone held hands tightly, their knuckles popping under the shared pressure.
“Who are you?” asked Dr Spice, “speak to us, spirit, please.”
“Arthur ... ”
“Oh no,” Spice said, “No, it’s not you.”
“Dr Spice?” asked Liz.
“It is a conjuration, nothing more. Ignore it, as I do.”
“Please ... Arthur ... I don’t want to be here ... he brought me here ... with him ... from the dark and cold ... the gravelands ... I’ve seen them ... don’t you want to know ... where I have been ... all this time?”
“No, no, it’s not you. Please go away.”
“Who is it?” Jerry whispered, squeezing Spice’s fingers.
“I cannot say. To use the name would break the circle as surely as stepping across its boundaries. Now please, both of you, be quiet, this is to hurt me, not you.”
“Arthur ... my blood ... the red room ... the hurt ... the cold here ... it’s worse ... ”
“Be quiet.” said Spice, his voice trembling in his throat, “I see you every night, in my dreams. I have no wish to see you here, now. You left me. You are gone. There is nothing for you in my heart.”
“no heaven no hell no hope ... only dark and the cold ... and the teeth ... the black teeth that grind out darkness ... and the echoes, so many, Arthur, we be the echo ... ”
“I said, go away!” Spice shouted.
The footsteps receded.
The smutty air was tinged with a trace of faecal smoke.