by Greg James
It could hear his thoughts, knew what he was planning.
Twisting the joystick with both hands, he threw the idling plane upwards and out of the petrified, polished forest with a scream of its own. The Vetala plunged past him, making him gag on its putrid wake as it vanished below.
Jerry took the Nieuport high, hitting the ceiling, then he let her drop. He saw the Vetala as a dirty blur, arising from out of the murk. Plunging down into a zoom, the darkness of the Stones became one beneath him. A spreading stain, a pit for him to fall into, as Black Wood had been, so long ago.
Behind, he could hear his pursuer, hear the crash and boom of its great wings. It didn’t matter, he was not scared, he breathed deep and slow. He could feel the vulture hook of the Vetala’s beak tearing through the air as it fought to gain on him. He heard the wood of the Nieuport’s rear wearing away. Leaning the stick forward, Jerry increased the steepness of the dive.
Below him was Darkness. Above him, Grey.
He could not see outside of it. There were no horizons. He looked down at his hands, glimmering bones were clasping the joystick of the Nieuport, bones that should have been buried. The plane herself was a burnt-out wreck. Her fabric scorched away by the hungry flames of the past. Wind shrieked through the many holes in her fuselage.
He couldn’t pull out of the dive.
Jerry felt darkened claws nick at the nape of his neck, tracing a cold path down to the base of his spine. Scraping and raking over his charred, splintering body. He should be dead. He should’ve died when he crashed into Black Wood.
But his pride had not let him die, not then.
The wreckage of the plane was crumbling around him, becoming a dead weight, dropping out of the sky. Jerry saw what was below, hungry and waiting, those great black teeth, a glistening maw. Whispering maggots were crawling through the raw meat of his scalp, telling him what they would do to him if he went through with this.
Jerry’s eyes were unswerving in the cinders of his skull.
“No deals this time, pal. You piggy-backed your way into London on my shit. Well, the shit stops here and now. Pride comes before a fall. I figure it’s time I took my fall.”
He pulled the joystick back hard. It came free from its mounting with a shriek. The nose of the Nieuport jerked, lurching over to one side. He was in a death-spin, the whining and wailing filled his fraying ears.
Everything came thundering up to meet him.
Jerry closed his eyes tight.
“Stay safe, little brother.”
The Nieuport slammed into the Stones.
Jerry’s last word, as white fire and cold shadow consumed him, was her name, and it cut, like pieces of black ice, into his heart.
...
There was Nothing. Then, there was Something.
A burning pinprick. Blinking, twice, in the heart of the Darkness.
And then, there was Light.
...
Liz sat up.
She was sore, she ached. She was in the room, in Miller’s Court, back where she had been. Wiping her eyes, rising, groaning, she saw the broken pieces of the vacuum tube circle littering the floor. There was a slight smell of petrol and scorched skin in the air. Streamers of grey daylight slipped in through the crusts of grime plastered to the room’s one window.
She got to her feet, swaying, unsteady, unsure.
“Jerry?”
A pain shot from her right hand up her arm to her shoulder. Wincing, she opened her clenched fingers and saw it there in her palm, silver and shimmering, its outer edge burnt black. She peeled it off with a cry, a ragged patch of skin tearing away with it. She recognised it as Jerry’s penny, the wheel-crushed Canadian keepsake. Tears worried the edges of her eyes as she examined the bleeding hole in her hand and saw what was there, scarred in, where the coin had been.
“Jerry ... ”
Frozen into the raw flesh of her palm, forever at the moment of his death, were the minute and mortified details of Jerry’s face.
Hell's Teeth
Dedication
For my grandfather
“... when one creates phantoms for oneself, one puts vampires into the world ...”
Eliphas Levi
Chapter One
His was a prison of broken mirrors. He could remember nothing more than bits and pieces; fragments, shards, shattered glass slivers and distortion, nothing whole. Nothing was the way it should be.
It came out of the black rain with a chassis that was loose and clattering. Bubbled paint was peeling from its juddering hide, a heavy brown cancer of rust eating its way through the engine’s grille and the spokes of the pneumatic wheels. Its windows were dim with dust, streaked with grime, and they rattled violently in their frames. The vehicle was an LGOC X-Type bus, only sixty of them were ever built to prowl the streets of London yet X61 was daubed onto the side of this one. There was no enclosed cab, the Driver sat in shadow beneath a small canopy, exposed to the elements, behind the engine, steering with deft, liver-spotted hands. His uniform clung to his shoulders and thorax. The material was stiff, hardened with a flaking crust, patches of ancient blood. He had no head with which to see but see he did, in his own way.
In the alcove towards the rear stood the Conductor; a Bell Punch machine hanging from cracked twin moons, the topmost buttons of his uniform. The metal of the antiquated device was dulled by age, leather-yellow fingers stroking it with a lover’s tenderness, whilst a blind egg of glistening mortuary matter wore the conductor’s cap. Pregnant sores formed a livid necklace around his throat, their discharge discolouring the unwashed china-blue collar of his shirt.
The Conductor cocked his head, catching a scent on the night air. He pulled a cord that hung above his head. A series of tinny chimes rang out inside the Bus. The dried skin on the Driver’s arms crackled as he turned left, following the Morse code instructions of his companion, depressing the accelerator. The Bus chugged, lurching forwards as the engine sped up.
... pokita-pokita-pokita ...
From the black hole of the Driver’s neck, fresh blood ran freely, displacing scabs that had grown over the puckered edges of the stump, torn veins and arteries opening wide, disgorging a steady crimson flow, his fingers wound tight on the steering wheel. The Driver’s open throat gurgled wetly, excited, as the Night Bus went on its way, seeking, that it might find.
He heard the engine first and then he saw it, in the moonlight, coming for him.
... pokita-pokita-pokita ...
The sound of its machinery was old and tired, a dying animal preparing for one last lunge, a wounded soldier, bayonet in hand, about to impale an unwatchful foe. He backed away from its approach. The one working headlight of the Night Bus burst into life, catching him in its glare.
It bore down on him.
He turned and ran. His calf muscles clamping tight as he did, too old for this. At his heels, the Bus’s rusty thunder grew louder and louder, an oncoming storm – the end of everything.
*
The world was tearing itself apart; the sky was burning, the earth beneath was shaking, the big guns spoke deafening thunder, pouring down a scorching shrapnel rain. Tom Potter ran through it all, a darting shadow, one amongst many that swarmed and multiplied in the dim, flickering trenches cut through the baked earth and stones of the Gallipoli peninsula. The British Generals must have been insane when they came up with this campaign. The beaches and the cliffs, that’s all they had and it was all they ever had from the moment they splashed ashore. There was no shifting the Turks, they were tucked in cosy and tight, so much for the briefings that had gone on and on about the cowardly, undisciplined bandits they were going to rout with ease. Tom had seen nothing but evidence of sound tactics, good discipline and tenacity from the unseen enemy. The old men in charge of this fiasco seemed to have it in their heads that willpower and a vague sense of racial superiority were all that was needed to drive the other side from their positions.
Fucking ridiculous, he thought, this whole thing.
&
nbsp; Not for the first time he wished himself far away from the blood, the heat, the dead and the flies.
Then the world tore itself open again, the explosion punching him to the ground, driving the wind from his lungs in one go – curled foetal, he wheezed, gulping in great gasps of the burning acrid air. He patted himself down, shaking, steadily checking himself, arms, legs, head, torso and genitals.
Lucky, he thought, as colours faded like momentary bruises from his retina, very fucking lucky. No pain, no wounds, no harm done, this time. Next time could be the last time. You never knew when or how, it was just a matter of waiting; minutes, hours, days and nights, wasting your life, waiting for death.
Tom got to his feet, blinking stinging sand from his eyes. His stomach lurching as hot wet flesh squelched underneath his boot, making a bitter rush of bile spatter against the back of his throat. Up ahead was the crater where the machine gun burrow had been, the shell had gouged a great chunk out of the earthworks, throwing the Vickers gun high into the sky before it fell back down as so much twisted metal.
Shredded sandbags covered the bodies of three gunners, inadequate funeral shrouds for what was left of them. The dead men were weeping bundles of bloody bits held together by tattered and torn uniforms. The life had been smashed out of them before they realised what was happening. Tom wondered if that was easier, better even, dying without knowing, having it over and done with in a moment. A glimmering caught his eye and he knelt down to see what it was. A severed finger, dirt caked in a black stripe under the cracked yellowish nail, the stump was horribly white bone and a plain band of dull metal encircled the digit, just below the knuckle. It was a wedding band.
No, Tom thought, this isn’t better or easier, not at all.
Within the hour, the remains would become sticky nests; maggot factories incubating hundreds upon hundreds of black-headed bastard flies that would come bursting out as droning dismal clouds. There was no chance of burial for these men because there was no time. It was the end of everything, the Gallipoli campaign was done, the evacuation order had been received.
At long last, they were pulling out.
Tom was a runner in the Brigade Staff. He’d been sworn in as a galloper back in New Zealand however, with the conditions of the fight as they were, it made more sense for him to be moved across into communications. His unenviable job was to signal artillery positions with the lamps and to run messages through the treacherous gullies and steep ravines that made up the trench system of the Entente's frontline. With the withdrawal going ahead, Tom was looking after the batteries that were covering the retreat; making sure they sent off salvoes towards the Turks at designated hours of the day and night. The intent being to maintain the illusion of the Anzacs, the Canadians and the Brits still holding the line. There were only a few men left to clear out now, and Tom knew that he would be one of the very last to go.
Brigade headquarters was a rickety structure clinging to the hillside; planks and poles dressed in dirt-streaked tenting. The crude coverings were a vain attempt to create a sense of home and place, and to protect the men within from the endless swarms of flies. They succeeded in neither goal.
“Did you inform Battery A of their timings, Potter?” asked Lieutenant Bell.
Tom was sitting on a crate that stood in for a chair in the Lieutenant’s billowing, buzzing ‘office’. He swatted at a fat fly crawling up his neck.
“Couldn’t, sir. They were blown to buggery the second I arrived. Dead as hell.”
The Lieutenant sighed and scratched the back of his head, clearing half a dozen flies from his sweat-soaked brown hair. “Damn. That’ll put a hole in things. We’ll need to see if we can patch it up with some volleys from, uh, Battery D, perhaps.”
Tom nodded. He was feeling like shit, his face was yellow and seamed, sun-bleached blonde hair pasting itself to his scalp and, just then, a tremor shook through him.
“You still not over it, are you, Potter?”
Tom wanted to lie and keep a stiff upper lip about it but another tremor shook him, creeping up from his feet through to his gut, and then on to his head and hands, burning and freezing, all at once.
“Go to your funk hole, man. I’ll get someone else to go up to D. If you can’t walk, how the devil do you think you’ll be able to run, eh? We don’t want you ending up in a state.”
Tom managed a weak smile of thanks and staggered off to his hole in the ground.
Sitting in his funk hole, behind the rough-cut of cloth he had secured across it, Tom hunkered down into the farthest corner, the picture of Betty in one of his thin, trembling hands. He’d won her in a card game a few weeks ago. The Irishman he deprived had been most put out. She was a faded picture from The Sketch; her silk stockings were topped by tiny cupid bows, her dark hair was styled into an intricate French coiffure, and her body was sheathed in a curt little skirt, not hiding the lace of her petticoats. The skin on show was pearl-white and her smile was false, mannered and submissive. Sand coated the picture, further grains had crept underneath his raw cuticles and a sudden gust of humid air sent more stinging dirt into his little refuge. He listened to the dull thuds of tiny bodies striking his tattered curtain as day fluctuated into night and back again, thanks to the clouds of flies swarming by.
Tom cursed Gallipoli; its dry weather, its vermin, its dust, its ankle-breaking gullies and the dead bodies. The corpses were everywhere, piles upon piles of them, falling to pieces on the strip of butchered, sun-burnt earth that ran between the opposing frontlines. Such was life here, such was Hell.
Searing pain swept over Tom, washing him cold in its wake, and Betty slipped from between his fingers. He’d been low with dysentery for what felt like eternity, time dilating with every cramp. He trod Betty into the ground as he staggered out from his funk hole, near-blind with agony but still dreading his destination - the latrines.
They were one of the greatest horrors of all, ten feet long, a yard in width and, appropriately, six feet deep. Men had died in there. It should have been funny as a way to go but it was not. Crawling, hand over hand, towards the pits with their shorts down around their ankles, arses hanging out in sagging pleats, shirt tails crusted over with rust-red stains when there was nothing left for a man to pass but blood. A moment was all it took for an accident to happen. A man trying to turn his frail limbs so that he could pull himself along the crossed poles and onto the primitive x-form ‘seat’. He might pause, just to steady himself, catch a laboured breath. Then he would fall, roll sideways, over, over and down, headfirst into the sucking pit below, too weak to stir or pull himself out. It took too long for his fellows to get to him, to drag him out. They would turn him over and see his waste-caked jaw feverishly masticating, chewing and swallowing mouthful after mouthful of faecal slime, dying trying to eat his way out of the vile shit he drowned in.
Tom's knees gave way as he was crawling and remembering, robbed of his self-control and dignity, he went in his khakis. He thought he screamed but he could not be sure, wiping tears from his eyes, he shuffled back to his funk hole, feeling hot prickling liquid running out from his rectum in soft streams. He picked Betty out of the dirt, wiping his boot-print from her face, and slumping down on his side, he looked at her.
He began to cry.
Chapter Two
Tom blinked the tears away and he was looking at the sepia photograph of his wife, Dilys, resting in the battered old shoebox where he kept his memories. Gallipoli, the latrines, the flies and the dead of 1916 was years ago, decades, almost a century, yet it all came unbidden into his mind with a photographic clarity that the images in his box of happier times were rapidly losing. A few more years and they would all be blank card-scraps, but until that happened, they were precious to him. They were the history of his life. They were all he had left. One photograph showed Dilys before she met him, she was young, sitting, waiting, expectant, a curious mien on her face, of pleasure and happiness that she hoped was to come her way.
*
Dilys MacDonald sat in the office, waiting for the doctor to come, her brown, leather-bound bible on her lap. She knew that she was not welcome here. She had seen the look on the face of the nurse who’d let her in, disapproving.
“You do realise that this is a place of science, Miss MacDonald, not of faith?”
“I do, nurse. Thank you.”
“I just wonder why you bother coming here. The work that the doctors do is the only hope these poor wretches have.”
“I would hardly call them poor wretches, nurse.”
“Well, I would.”
It may be a place of science, Dilys thought, but its staff seem to be short on a quality that would be essential for those caring for the disturbed – understanding. Treating the men in this place the same way that a butcher treated carcasses. These men were not dead specimens for them to pick over, they were flesh and blood with hearts and souls, even if there was no hope for them, they deserved to be treated as if there were.
The room itself was plain, the furniture, perfunctory and there were no colours. Nothing to excite the inmate. Within he sat alone, staring out through the wired glass of the window, listening to the tread of footsteps coming closer, closer, closer.
“Oi, Barmy Tom?”
He didn’t react to the overweight orderly’s jibe.
Dilys shot a look at the portly man. “That’s unnecessary.”
“Why? He is bloody barmy. I should know. I’m the cunt who has to strap him into the jacket when he loses it. You see this?”
He pointed at a scabby scar running down his left cheek.
“He did that to me.”
She said made no comment and felt no sympathy.
“Well, you remember to give me a shout if he starts up, or he’ll do the same to you.”
He closed the door behind her.
I hope he doesn’t have a wife, Dilys thought.