by Greg James
Chapter Eighteen
Tom could feel his heart flaring with every beat in his chest, growing hot, making his vision fog over. He could still hear sounds, whispers, tinnitus, reminding him of being in his bed late at night, listening to a midnight wind passing between loose wooden boards, rustling leaves and rattling at the windowpanes. The sun was high in the sky outside but the air was growing shadowy, a cancer blotting out everything. It gained definition, enclosing him with the angles of a room, filling it to the brim with a noxious ink. Tom could see outside of it no longer, his eyes were open but seemingly closed, his breath was catching in his throat, his spine was creeping, he swallowed a shaky but deep lungful of air, and the room was then illuminated.
Two oil lamps, turned down low, threw streaming columns of light across the space. He recognised it. It was his room, back home in London, before the war. At its sides, against the pastel walls, sat his family, away from his bed. Tom’s eyes looked over the bed. It was covered with plain white bedding; clinical, medical and morgue fresh. The top sheet was shielding a body from his sight. A very still, very familiar body. Tom looked to his mother and father. They had eyes only for the figure in repose on the bed, they turned their heads in slow, mechanical sweeps, tilting their chins to look up at him. His mother’s eyes were puffy and bloodshot whilst his father’s face was loose with grief.
“Hello son,” his father croaked.
“Under the sheet, is that - “
“Yes, son, it is.”
“What happened?”
“What happened?” His father rose to his feet, approaching his son. “You left her that’s what happened. She wouldn’t let me touch her once you were gone.”
His mother let out a moan as her husband spoke.
“She stopped loving me, hated herself, bloody thought that she’d destroyed you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The stupid cow felt so guilty about you running away that she started going to the sick wards, singing for the soldiers and the wounded. Did that for bloody years, right up until it happened. You know what that means?”
“The Spanish flu.”
“Breathed it in whilst she was singing those bloody songs to them, trying to make herself feel better. You did it, you shit, you bloody well killed her!”
*
The ward was decorated for Christmas. The men in the beds were wearing paper hats they’d made themselves from old donated newspapers, a stumpy tree stood in one corner, decorated with tin baubles and nuts on pieces of string. Matron was trying to maintain her seasonal cheer whilst making sure her charges behaved themselves, the soldiers were coming to the end of a sing-song, Bea leading them.
“There’s a long, long trail a-winding,
Into the land of my dreams;
Where the nightingales are singing,
And a white moon beams.
There's a long, long night of waiting,
Until my dreams all come true;
Till the day when I'll be going down,
That long, long trail with you.”
A few of the nurses dabbed at their eyes, knowing their complexions were flushing. The men cheered, making boisterous wolf-whistles and calling for more. A sinewy hand snagged Bea’s arm, it was a bedbound soldier with a sprig of mistletoe in his left hand.
“Give us a kiss,” the wounded man winked, showing his few teeth, “Just for Christmas, like.”
She looked at the dangling white berries and green spade leaves. Bea nodded graciously, perching herself on the edge of the bed, a rousing ‘wa-hey!’ rolled up and down the ward as the lucky man embraced her. His sagging, spit-flecked lips touching hers, briefly.
They parted.
The soldier felt his lungs clenching, cheering drowning out his coughing fit, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth, he tasted traces of copper but thought nothing of it.
*
Tom gasped as the sudden flood of shared memory faded away.
“You understand now? Bea confessed to your mother. Told her everything. See what you’ve done? What you started? D’you want to look?”
“No.”
“No? No. Don’t you want to see what you’ve done?”
“No, I don’t. You can’t blame me. You can’t curse me with this, Dad.”
His father took a threatening step forward. For a moment, Tom saw the Conductor there, before him, slime coursing over the boil-hued bulge of its non-face, dripping needle jabbing towards his chest.
Pay your fare, Tom-boy.
Tom struck out, growling, pushing his father over, the older man fell hard against the chest of drawers and then to the floor. Tears in his eyes, he did not get to his feet, seeing the fury on his son’s face, a gnawing hatred nurtured down through the years.
“Tom?”
The voice came from the bed.
His mother yelped, scampering away.
Tom, his hands shaking at his sides, turned away from his prone father. The figure under the white sheet was moving and, as it did so, spots of red blossomed across the fabric, soaking in from beneath, becoming heavy blotches, then continents of glossy scarlet glistening in the lamplight, moulding to the shape of the young woman. Tom watched her breasts become apparent, the areolae, hard with death, rising. The shroud sinking tight over her face. She sat up, peeling off of the mattress with a patter of tearing skin. Bea's mouth, clogged with cloth, spoke, spilling a steady stream of dark fluid. “You came back for me, Tom?”
Tom couldn’t speak. The sight before him was too much.
“Tom, are you there? I can’t see, I can only hear. And it’s so far away, where you are. They won’t let me see.”
“Who?” Tom found his voice. “Who won’t let you see?”
Her masked face snapped round to face him.
“The Stones. The Vetala. The Grey. You made a deal with them. You didn’t honour it. They want what you promised but did not give.”
“Deal? I didn't...did I?...oh god...I don't remember! I can't...it's all gone, so long ago, I'm too old for this nightmare, Bea. I just want it over with, done.”
“Then, they will tear your life apart, Tom, from end to end and you will have nothing left.”
Her voice broke off as a burgundy flood spattered the underside of her shroud. Then, the bed shook, a possessed violence making it jolt and dance. Bea screamed, her ravaged throat emitting it as a dead sound. Tom tried to snatch her into his arms but his embrace closed on emptiness. The bedding was still. Her corpse upon it. Steeling himself, Tom snatched off the bed sheet, a light steam, released, went billowing upwards. What was on the bed burst open, eating into itself; bones, organs and musculature breaking down, leaving a meaty putrescence to saturate the mattress. Tom covered it back over with the bed sheet. With a creak and a rush of dust, the door of his bedroom swung open, the air within was whispering, singing, inviting him in. Tom looked into the lightless oblong, seeing nothing, at first.
Then, there was light illuminating two hospital beds. In one was his mother. In the other was his father. He had nothing to say to them.
His father’s eyes opened, saw him, for a moment only. Tom turned quickly away, letting the gloom utterly consume him. “I don't want to see this. I can't, no more, I'm sorry...”
“Thomas? Tommy, is that you?”
His father was sitting up in bed.
“Sister!”
James Potter’s cry was a strangled, desperate sound.
“Sister, please!”
Heavy feet clopped down the length of the ward to his bed.
“Mr Potter? Are you alright?” asked Sister Imelda.
“No-no, I’m not. My son was here, Sister. My son! I saw him. Oh god. He went away. Turned his back on me. Left me behind.”
He was crying, shaking with grief, his body tying itself into punishing knots as she sought to soothe, get him to lie down and try to sleep. She thought about seeing if she could get him a nightcap, a Hot Toddy from the stores, but Matron had the key and Matron di
dn’t like patients to be fed alcohol unless the case was extreme.
Mr Potter was distressed but he would soon settle down.
So she hoped.
In the next bed, Mrs Potter slept on at peace.
Sister Imelda wondered at how the marriage of these two people could possibly work, such a volatile, over-sensitised, temperamental wire of a man paired to an introverted, mousey creature. Happy to sit in a quiet corner, or in her bed, knitting and muttering to herself. She guessed that it was the husband and not the wife who had brought them both to the state they were in. Mrs Potter had mentioned a girl, a lodger who had passed away from the Spanish Flu. Now, they were both going the same way, they were in the last stages, the bloodiest and the worst.
Mr Potter was in that high, excitable state that came on not long before death, no wonder he was seeing the ghost of his son, the boy had been lost at sea at the end of the Gallipoli campaign. That war was over. Now, they were fighting the flu epidemic, morning, noon and night. Millions were dying all over the world, and it was another war for which they were ill-prepared.
Mr Potter laid down, quietly coughing to himself. His body too drained by the virulent work of the bacillus to put up much of a fight, it wouldn’t be long for him now.
Sister Imelda went to check on Mrs Potter. The old dear had not been roused in the slightest by her husband’s commotion, she checked the woman’s pulse and her brow, then slid back an eyelid, checking the pupil’s dilation. The Sister laid Mrs Potter’s arms underneath the bed sheet and then she drew it up over her face, laying it down gently.
She would tell Mr Potter the sad news in the morning.
“How is she, Sister?” Mr Potter asked.
The Sister turned to him. Her face lit from beneath the chin by the dancing fire of the candle she carried. James tried to scream at what he saw - the featureless corpse-egg of the Conductor's head. It was so close that he could see its scar tissue ridges and unstitched gullies weeping runny tears of rancid buttery sweat.
The Conductor’s arms seized James, heaving him into an embrace, autumn twig ribs snapping, pressing against a mouldering bosom that gave and then burst, drawing him into it. A long, thin needle punctured James Potter’s breast, skewering his heart, filling it with poison. His back arched, his head lolled. In that last moment, he looked into the Conductor's visage and he saw it change, shaping itself into a crude, ripe mask of his son's face, old, beaten and alone, waiting to die. Then, the needle came out of him. His ticket had been punched.
James Potter died.
Chapter Nineteen
Tom knotted the black plastic cord of the telephone around his hands, wringing it tightly as the dialling tone rang into the echoing hollows of his ears. His fingers ached from the strain of dialling the three digits he needed. A coldness was needling its way down his arm into his shoulder and chest as he listened to the harsh staccato chimes at the other end of the line. Someone picked up, his heart lifted.
“Hello? Ambulance...please...soon...my heart...”
He could hear breathing, moist and guttural, patiently waiting.
“Ambulance, please!”
It was quickening, panting in his ear.
“It's you, isn't it?”
Feeling a shiver tear its way up his spine, detonating in the base of his skull, he kept speaking.
“Leave me alone. I'm old, almost done, I've nothing left. I've suffered enough. Please.”
The noise on the line was chuckling wetly to itself, then belching, hacking into his ear. Tom held the earpiece away as his vision began blistering and running with painful streams of light and darkness. Heaving, grizzling cries escalated into an atonal wail, a desolate, wordless song that resonated through his bones from the earpiece; the cold black song of the Stones.
Then, there was only the lowing of a dead line.
Tom dropped the receiver to the carpet, shaking violently, fingers curling into fists.
“ ... ambulance ... please ... oh, please ... ”
Hands were on Tom, grappling with him, holding him down.
... heart attack ...
He could see his bedroom again, a worm’s eye view, carpet had scorched a friction burn down his cheek. One of his slippers was lost under the bed, he could see it, couldn’t reach it though, his chest hurt too much, burning and hard.
... looked fine to me ...
A sea of faces swam in an amber haze over him.
... not fine now, you ...
One of the paramedics, balding in his twenties, poor sod, a thinning crown of sandy hair, vulture’s eyes.
... come on, breath ...
A woman’s face, close to his, puckering eyes.
... losing him ...
Mother? Bea? Dilys?
... oh, father ...
He could feel a tingling, a buzzing in his bones. He looked down at his hand, it was coming undone, separating into brilliant, streaming strings, interweaving, flowing over one another, in and out, out and in, stretching back and forth into sightless infinity. Tom was there but not-there, sitting yet moving, strobing into a flickering imago-flame. Looking up and around, he saw the world around him going the same way, the strings travelling along a curved spiral path, turning and burning with him at its heart. He could feel tears rolling down his face, he was passing through depths, through abysms, parting seas and oceans that were infinite and black. He was violet midnight burning in the retina of infinity's lone eye, cascades of diamond rust in the hair of a goddess, there were few barriers he knew of, even less did he recognise.
As he was, so were all living things, the longer he watched, the vaster the spiral became, absorbing all that was, earth, sea and air, all were eaten up by it. Colours ran along the lengths of the pulsating strings, he did not know their names, there were snatches of muttered sound. Forgotten words. Traces of Creation. His heart, it was going too fast. He dabbed a finger to just below his nose. Blood was there. His brain was bleeding. Too much, it was too much to take in. Then, the nameless colours receded and the glow-worm strings slowed, no longer pulsating, crawling, then stopping altogether.
His skull was pounding with a growing primal beat, and he was in another space, one that was not space, a burrow snaking through crushing grey-purple strata, scattering before him were clusters of phosphorescence, small fluxing storms of coloured static, dematerialising through the surrounding solidity. Something was coming down the striated burrow and he recognised the tones it was making, a further form of the moaning of the Stones; a rarefied ichorous tide of sound. So desolate, so alone.
And Thomas Potter saw the Stones for what they were, where their awful voracious appetite, and that of the Vetala, came from. The Stones were no more sentient than mountains, the song they sang, the cosmogonic notes of longing they intoned, these all came from here - this dead interior space beneath all things, deeper down than the haunted Gravelands.
The Stones were the black roots of the Grey, which coalesced around them as cancer cells aggregate but the Stones, they were not entities in themselves, they were mere extremities, expressions of something far more singular. Teeth without a mouth they were, but they were teeth and they belonged to Something. Each and every one of them was a penetration into existence, an extrusion from what Tom could feel was stirring close at hand to him now, a great shadow of darkness.
He could feel the piceous stuff of his being oscillating as it was disturbed by droning ululations coming from whatever was lurking here. It was near, hunting for him, this minute interloper, it had felt him come through, his presence causing a slight shift in the cloying, weighty stuff that made up this lightless span of infinity. It was following the emanations of his presence, he could feel it somehow descending, as a spider might drop down a spun length of silvered thread, though there was no sense of direction or gravity here. It was coming at him from all directions at once, a baying chaos that could not be heard, even though it heard him, knew he was here. Roaring without voice, cascading black, a molten tide, enclosing,
suffocating, it came, the sire of the Stones and the Vetala, cutting open Creation with the magnificent black spines projecting from its black-hole core, moored to every universe, every galaxy, it writhed, unresting. Existence, its transcendental tomb.
Thomas Potter hung suspended and empyreal before the audient heart of all things.
Ever seething, ever scrying, ever feeding, starved for aeons, crying out, buried here in this carrion-space. Tom saw back to when it was shut away, inhumed, when the universes were structured all around it, the scalding coils of Time and Space shaping its chains. Everything Tom knew and did not know, could and could not conceive of, was encasing it, always had been, always would be, always will be, endlessly reflecting its suffering. We be the echo; its nightmares, its ghosts, we are its dreams cast across the cracked dimensional angles of its funereal vault. An eternal prison of mirrors through which it twists and turns and screams, fitfully gnawing at itself, desperate and caught, forever howling for release, for death. And, in its unending scream, Tom heard all of Creation and all of Extinction as One – and Tom screamed with it, burning hot and cold from what he felt and now knew.
Reality soaked back in, cold, cruel and crushing. The howling in his head. He was inside an ambulance with the serpentine hiss of oxygen in his ears. A plastic mask clung to his sweat-drenched face. Tom squinted, it was too bright and too white a world to come back to, too rigid, neat and clean after seeing the colours of the chaos that crawl beneath it all. The paramedic’s back was to him but Tom could see how bald he was, there were scars in the hairless tissue, lumpen and discoloured.
Tom snatched a hand to his aching chest. He tried to, but his wrists were held tight by velcro-lined straps, tears sprang to his eyes as he gulped down too much oxygen from the shock. The paramedic heard the commotion, turning to face him, its neck making a sound that reminded Tom of Sunday dinners, pork crackling under the incisive motion of knife and fork.