The Oeuvre

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by Greg James


  For those I have not forgiven,

  I will not forget.

  The Old School stood, abandoned and alone on the edge of town. Decrepit and hated, without purpose. Warty planks of wood blinding the long-broken windows. Tightly-closed doors thriving with the muttering of worms and a spreading white rot. You could smell it on the air, soft, wet and doughy. At night, children swore they could hear the Old School drawing breath, as if it meant to suck them in, swallow them whole, eat them up. It was waiting, and it was dark inside the Old School; very, very dark. And that darkness was insane.

  *

  James sat there, watching them die. Every long hour was an accretion. Each dismal day, an accumulation. The hospital around him was an unwashed and bitter place, so suitable, as he sat there watching his parents die. He listened to the creaking, involuntary tug of muscles under bandages and the stiff settling of plaster. Painful breaths escaped the embalmed bodies on occasion as they wasted away in their adjoining cage-like beds.

  It was an unlucky accident. A dirty curve, which led to shrieking across the hard shoulder and shattered glass decorating their raw bodies with murderous glitter. The car itself erupted into tempered torture-knives; severing, slashing, cutting and crucifying, making meat-hook gallery exhibits out of the two people who brought him into this world. A world where, for as long as he could remember, he had gone through one bad day after another.

  No tears fell from his eyes when he was told what had happened. No grief came. There was no sorrow ebbing to the surface; no rage, nothing. The weight of waiting was lifted from his shoulders by the news. They were going to die. It would soon over.

  He had endured just to see this day. There was no smile, no bitter laughter, only a sigh and a sitting down as he arrived, sinking into split leather and closing his eyes, enjoying the sudden quiet descending throughout his frayed soul.

  Watching them die was what he’d wanted for so long.

  The afternoon passed as a slow tragedy unfolding after the frenetic action of the car crash. They were clinging to life as parasites do; too afraid to let go, to let the last string snap and then tumble down into the abyss. So empty, both of them, yet they knew how to cling and how to feed off the living.

  A memory of being with his father came to him, when they were together at the fairground years ago. James was walking through the shrieking open-air torture chamber of lights and rides with his small hand in a larger, rougher hand. They came to the ghost train; a makeshift castle painted onto cheap boards, skeletal stains and vermin-shapes smeared across a peeling grey exterior shell. It wasn’t scary to look at but James wanted to go on the ghost train all the same.

  Please, Dad.

  Dad bought the tickets. He squeezed into the cab, next to Dad, as the car clunked and then wailed its way forwards through trailing strips of tattered black tape. A door went bang-shut open then bang-shut closed behind them.

  Inside the ghost train, it was not that dark. The light from outside, the voices and cries of the crowd seeped into the interior; killing the shadows dead, wearing them away with ready laughter. The skeletons that jumped and rattled about feebly in disco-light cages were unconvincing puppets. However, James could feel the bulging weight of his father beside him. He could smell the brawn of sweat tainted and made caustic by cheap aftershave. In here, in the dark, in the cab; he could feel how big his father was compared to him – overweight and overwhelming.

  All he would have to do to kill him would be to lean over and bear down. He could crush James flat into the cab seat if he wanted to. It would be simple and easy. James found his fingers tightening on the safety rail mounted at the front of the cab as he felt the rhythm of his Dad’s breathing. It was slowing down, becoming strange and halting – was he getting ready to do it? Would it happen in the next moment, the next minute? Would that great weight of flesh come rolling over him, suffocating him to death?

  He wouldn’t be able to kick or struggle. He wouldn’t be able to breathe for very long. He would be dead in minutes, maybe less. Out of the corner of his eye, James looked up at his Dad’s face; at how the weak light changed it, sank it with sour shadows, brought out the black-and-white static of unshaved bristles and the cinematic wetness of perspiration, making his father into a wheezing wight, a porcine monster made of manufactured moonlight.

  The car came jolting down the last incline; he was gasping, ready to throw up, when it happened. The doors that would take them out of the ghost train were just there and he could feel Dad shifting in his seat. He would have to do it now whilst it was still dark enough and before anyone could see. A glinting told him Dad was looking down at him, and his slow breathing was quickening in time with the flow of blood.

  Then, it came down suddenly; polystyrene limbs dangling loose from their sockets, making it look peculiar and ridiculous. The eyes were white rubber-balls and its yellow teeth were ludicrous cardboard cut-out triangles. It swung as an uneasy pendulum from a length of tangled rope plainly in view. A big spider with only five legs; a bad dangling joke yet it had saved him.

  James screamed and clung to his Dad. His small fingers digging hard into recently dreaded flesh; not seeking an embrace, nor fatherly affection. This was the simple urge of one living thing clinging to another for a sense of safety – a need for psychic earthing.

  His father shook him off.

  Then the doors went bang-shut open, then bang-shut closed, and they were outside.

  There was no more darkness and Dad was no longer a thing made of moonlight.

  *

  Down here, there is no light, no hope, nothing sings, no-one breathes. The shadows gather in on themselves, leftovers and flowers grow grey, mottle and rot. Something without teeth sucks the crusted skin from a dead stray cat’s skull before it licks the haemorrhaging muscle and flesh clean of slow blood.

  *

  It was night-time, very late, and James sat alone, drunk in the dark. He was thinking about what was going to happen now that Mum and Dad were dead. There would be no funeral. He would not claim them, somebody else would have to burn them. He liked the idea of them burning, but he wanted nothing more to do with their corpses. Whatever was in them whilst they were alive; he was sure he’d heard it rustle as it took its leave that day. He wasn’t interested in the dead meat it left behind.

  James remembered the moment they died. They’d departed together.

  No tears stung his eyes as it happened but memories of them stung sharply enough at his heart and mind. A woman too broken and scared to leave the man who abused her turning it all on her son; kind enough to share her suffering by passing it on to him. He remembered plates that flew, almost hitting him before they shattered hard against the wall. Words flew also accusing him of being things he was not. He once thought it was his fault, but now knew it never was.

  The man in the bed beside her was a thing he could barely look at that – a pig in jeans someone once called him. A swine; raw on the inside, cancer-black hate, a walking abortion-sac of bile, who knew only hate for himself, his wife, and his son.

  One day, the son had enough and walked away. He left them and he waited for death to take them. Dear mum, dear dad, all the best, son, with all our love, of which we have none. They owed him one thing; their last moments, every last breath, and he was here to collect.

  The heart-rate monitors went dark. There were no more beeping green lines. All was black and dead. The whistling of wet air being drawn from and driven into long, thin tubes came to an end. He did not say goodbye. Good riddance was all he felt in his heart. The IV drips were unstrung by gloved, antiseptic hands and taken away. They were for giving life to the living and these two were dead now. James thought he could hear the sound of their veins rusting over. He waited until the doctor and nurses were gone to undertake his last deed. The unbeloved son, a non-smoker all his days, lit up and sucked hard upon a cigarette. He then leaned over put it out by grinding it deep into his dead father’s eye.

  Then he went home and sta
rted drinking.

  James tried to draw his thoughts together but it was like dragging his fingers through grave-soil woven deeply with thorns and roots. The roots went deep and he did not have the strength to pull them all free and see what was buried beneath. The glass tumbler in his hand hung loosely from his fingers as his eyes looked into the surrounding darkness of the room; its fluxing shadows cast by the waning moon. He found himself admiring the subliminal tones of this near-lightless state of being. He listened to it and thought he heard its silence answer with voices telling him his own life’s tale in haunting, wordless song.

  Things always went wrong for him, even after leaving his parents. He’d torn their poison out of his life by the root and yet, somehow, some trace remained. The gnawing inside, which he’d felt all his life, it was not abating. There had been a momentary relaxation when they died, an inner muscle breathing out, but no more than that.

  Briars and black roots were stirring and something underneath was preparing to disgorge itself, because it knew what he needed even if he did not. Deep down, this buried thing, the thing that stayed with him, growing and growing, waiting for today, for him to learn, for the lessons to begin. The cigarette that he ground out in his dead father’s eye had been the beginning.

  A light calling out to the black. It had heard and it was coming. It was in the silence of the room. It was one with the voices. It was with him; a cold within the coldness stroking at his skin with its unborn breath. James bit into his lip and found himself licking away a film of blood. A memory bled out unbidden, spinning a thread of web which he clung to, drew in and followed along, hand over unsteady hand.

  The memory was of the Old School.

  It was of them; Clayton, Louise, and Jenna. He remembered the pain they put him through and so did his body, though the drinking took the edge off it a little, just a little, but the nightmares remained. He remembered walking down the stairs in the Old School, and then their hands were upon him. Many against one. Good odds. Dragging him. Pushing him around. Laughter as he blinked tears from his prickling eyes.

  “Awwh, don’t cry, bent-boy.”

  This was fun for them; a game, part of Life’s performance. He was a puppet in their black theatre. There were always more of them after a while; a crowd growing, pressing in, a crushing weight. All wanting to take part in the Act.

  The Act of Greater Darkness.

  James tried to fight back sometimes but it did no good. He was nothing to them.

  And once they were finished with him, the laughing faces receded, the audience dispersed and went their separate ways, tramping up and down the stairs. James fell forward onto the bare, unforgiving teeth of the stairs. His ears heard cries that might not have been his own. There were faces in the darkness; small, white and frightened as children always are. His limbs shook as if the bones were breaking and heard his Dad’s voice in his head, “It’s your fault, not theirs. You need to stand up for yourself. You need to be more like them.”

  James said no; to be more like them – he couldn’t do it. It wasn’t in him – not then.

  So, on went his days in the Old School; surrounded by the same hateful laughter and the same lightless sense of blackness inside. All masks were gone in those days; fallen away from the faces they so often hid. The teachers knew. They were in on it and understood this was a part of how things were. This was how it had to go. Many enjoyed their part in it, as their roles were not to be hurt but to hurt others, or to watch others be hurt and know it would not happen to them. This is how things were in the Act of Greater Darkness.

  “Maybe that’ll teach you. Maybe now you’ll learn.”

  Teachers and pupils passed by each scene calmly following their directions; enter stage right, exit stage left, or otherwise. For some, this was all they were here to do – walk on by and look the other way and to think about it a little later in life, “We did not know. We did not care. We heard no screams, no cries. We did not see a thing. Nothing bad happened here. This was a good place. We were good people.”

  No-one ever stopped, no-one ever saw, no-one ever cared.

  No-one was ever there for him, or for others like him.

  I was nothing to them then, and I’m still nothing now.

  James slumped back into the chair in his room, not realising he’d gotten to his feet. Here was the bedsit where he lived; eking out an existence on benefits and the dole. This was not good enough. Something had to be done. Lessons had to be learned. Pain given for pain received. The memories had always been there, but the feeling to them had been lost over the years. The purity had been ground away but now he could feel again. He tried to draw it out – the thing deep inside. He wound his hands tightly into those bitter thorns and poison roots, and heaved hard at the dead, black weight of everything there, and it dragged him down into the Greater Darkness waiting below.

  *

  I’ll take you to a quiet place, and once we’re there, I’ll make sure that everything inside of you hurts.

  *

  James saw threads in the Greater Darkness; a seamy cobweb shimmering with luminescent filaments, some threads thicker, some thinner, all running out from the lightless, churning of a singularity, which formed a dead-black centre.

  The threads thrashed about violently when he reached out to examine them. He perceived regular pulses, which went singing along each gossamer length, and there was a tone beating inside his skull – a single sonorous note repeated and emanating from all of them. It sounded like the heart monitors in the hospital. This strangeness before him; could it be a web of lives, but whose lives? Lives that had crossed and re-crossed with his own? Running over and under everything that is, was, and could be - the threads of a life and all of the lives it touches and has touched - could such a thing exist? It seemed so.

  There were fine, glimmering fronds trailing from some of the threads. Each was small, unfinished and wispy, wavering about in the dragging undercurrents that seemed to continuously flow through this void. With a thought and a gesture, he reached out again to the threads, these lives, drawing the paths of their steady pulses with his fingers, feeling raw static pass through him and, with it, an understanding of what he was being shown. This was them, all of them; the shouters, the laughers, the beaters, and the abusers of his adolescent years – and the unfinished threads were those of their children. So frail. So fragile. So easy to break.

  He asked a question of the Greater Darkness. “Will it hurt them very much?”

  Yes, it would. It would hurt the children of the children who once hurt him very much to die in the ways James was thinking of. He withdrew his hand, unsure.

  If I do this then I will change forever, and become something else. There would be no going back as not just one life would end. They would all burn; everyone who touched him at the Old School would be wounded irrevocably. They would know it was him, somehow. The Greater Darkness said it would be so, and thus James decided.

  “Do it. Let the children die.”

  A lone point of brilliance ignited in the singularity at the heart of the web, flaring so very bright until it became many points of light, blazing furies searing out along the lines of the web. Down the thicker threads they went and then onto those which were thinner and unfinished. There, the burning points stopped, halted, flickering but stable, waiting for his word. James felt himself become a part of the void and the Greater Darkness as he spoke from where he was, weightlessly suspended above this coruscating web of lives.

  “Teach them a lesson they will never forget.”

  The points of light erupted, screaming out silence, and then were gone as were the unfinished child-threads. All burned away to nothing, leaving only the threads of their parents, which were shining brighter than before; anger-bright, hate-livid, and pain-fierce. James could feel it; every ounce of the misery he’d caused. The deaths of so many children. Sirens were wailing somewhere outside his window.

  “Come find me and let this be done,” said James.

&
nbsp; Some of them heard him. A few would be there. He could feel their names. Burning like the darkness and pain inside him.

  Clifton. Louise. Jenna.

  Yes, they would come to the Old School – and so his work was begun.

  *

  Ugly love, crawling so ugly along, sweaty flesh-pink spiders, rutting and fucking, eating faces, speaking faeces, shitting and cumming, birthing a child and then letting it rot.

  *

  Clifton stood there for a long time, looking into his daughter’s bedroom; still not believing what he’d seen standing there as she died. A shadow on the wall cast by nothing with long, long arms and long, long fingers tapering to filigree points. Gradually, as he watched, the shadow went away. He caught his breath and knew he was awake in bed next to Kelly and that Felicity was dead. He ran a hand through his thinning hair, feeling his fingers snag on dry scalp.

  Felicity in her cot but still, so still, and he could not cry about it. Kelly could. She could cry and wail, beat herself, wake him up to fuck in the middle of the night with desperate, unspent tears in her eyes. She could cry but he could not, which left him with only one thing to do – to hate.

  He knew who to hate. For a moment, the clutching darkness cleared and he saw who strangled his baby daughter.

  “You cunt!”

  He screamed the words so loud some nights that he’d wake up Kelly. She would start crying as she came back into a world where her daughter was dead and, each time, he’d give her another helping of meds; the red ones which the doctor prescribed when she stopped sleeping, and spent all night sitting by the empty cot. During the day, she’d sit at the dining room table moving around photographs she spread out across it back and forth; arranging them, rearranging them, setting them back in their frames then removing them once more. She seemed to search the photographs endlessly for the answer – some mote of truth – but nothing revealed itself. Those brighter days with their primary colours, white smiles, soft drinks and ice cream kept their secrets.

 

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