by Greg James
Daughter dead, wife going mad, Clifton left the house to look at the stars, knowing it was in the darkness between those cold, white points of light that he would find what he was looking for, and what he wanted to do. He would go back to the Old School because he knew the one who did this was there, waiting for the lessons to begin.
I’m going to be the one who’s going to do the teaching though, Clifton thought.
*
A puppet being stirred and played with by its defaced master; trying not to listen to the sounds made by the mess of the master’s mouth. Child sounds, dying sounds, young, light, quick and breathy sounds, then worried whimperings, the tremble of frightened, tight throats constricting, strangled, bleeding and dry. All so slow, breathing so hard, hearts becoming smaller than a fist before they burst open becoming small, broken flowers defecating blackly behind his eyes.
*
Louise was living in a hostel when it happened to her, when it came for her son. Afterwards, she didn’t sleep on the blood-stained mattress in her damp ground floor room. She just looked at the yellow walls around her all night long and thought about nothing, until the day they came to fetch her. She listened desperately to Clifton’s voice on the telephone, seeing some salvation in him, a brief escape from this place where her son had died.
It had been a play-fight followed by Barry falling down the stairs. An awful accident, they said. The other boy, Tommy, crying, wailing at what he would always think was his doing. She should’ve been there, watching him like a good mum, but she wasn’t. It was as simple as that. Louise saw the man on the stairs, with his long, long fingers and a pale familiar face; smiling at her and posing an old, old riddle.
… did he fall, or was he pushed? …
All things seemed to pass away from her at that moment. She slumped to the lino, overcome, hearing her son’s cries over and over again before they were cut off by the stairs breaking his small head open.
These walls; this sagging mattress impregnated with old shapes, other people and their salt-smell, none of it was a comfort. It all reminded her how far she’d fallen, and how much she’d left behind and lost. This was all she deserved, to eke out existence, to scrape on through for another day. A slight tremble of melancholy shook her as she lay on the bed, staring at the light bulb overhead, which flickered at times, giving her a headache. When the lights were put out in the hostel, she felt there were things in the room, which walked and breathed but could not see. Then, in the morning, when the lights came back on she dismissed them and tried to forget.
She tried to mourn but could not, for some reason. There was only lethargy, slowness and a stillness in her heart whenever she thought of her boy dead but still dreaming in the Garden of Lambs at the cemetery. She missed tousling his sandy hair and the feeling of it between her fingers. She missed looking into Barry’s little blue eyes and seeing a light there, which hers had lost years ago. She stared on at the yellow walls and wondered if the things she saw in the night’s darkness were in the walls somewhere – a part of this place.
One morning, after another sleepless night, Louise saw the man on the stairs again. She was standing over the kitchen sink when something went by. There it was, for a moment, with its head hanging down and its face flickering like a pilot-light. Louise was sure she’d seen the pale face more than once in the poverty stains and crack-patterns of the hostel’s walls. It was a nest of complex scabs and intricate wrinkles with eyes burrowed deeply in; pearl-drop eggs left to rot by long-legged spiders. It was something which had left behind humanity. The mouth hung open as if uttering a hurt, aching sound – then it was gone.
The water in the sink turned cold and the suds sinking into it dissolved, turning into temporary clouds of underwater mist. The light bulb in the room died even though it wasn’t turned on. Louise saw the sooty burn on the underside of the glass, and how its surface was frosted over with a thin film of ice.
All this was past as she listened to her old friend’s voice on the phone and, as she remembered the face of the man on the stairs, Clifton told her who it was; the man who’d killed her son.
Old memories stirred, better left for dead, but crumbling fingers were stirring bones in the dark empty spaces behind her eyes. She heard a silence with voices. She felt the Greater Darkness stirring inside her as Clifton spoke. His voice broke at times, letting emotion seep in like tears through the cracks. Then his voice became sure and steady again, just like the teenager she remembered; a brute with cheekbones. He was what every woman wanted. He was what she’d wanted and never found. He told her what he was going to do and she agreed to meet him in town, near to the Old School.
“We’ll do it together, Louise.”
They would kill him for taking their children away.
*
At the Old School, inside the boys’ toilets, there were brackish smears of excreta all over the walls. The work of human hands, so it seemed. A urinal on the floor, cracked in half, clogged with dried droppings and straggling clumps of matted hair. The sink taps were the colour of dried blood and the doors on all of the cubicles were broken in – all, except for one.
The dial on it was twisted around, deep in the red - it read engaged. Underneath the door - there! - wavered a shadow not cast by light. Perhaps it was a water stain, an abstract bruise painted by years of discolouration. The pipes had cracked open in here a long time ago, maybe it was some gross graffiti left behind as a territorial marker by a beggar’s bladder. The dial on the cubicle door was slowly turning, twisting under tentative pressure; slowly, so slow. It clicked. Unlocked. The door opened.
Behind it, there stood nothing.
Then, there was a sound, some small movement within, and a cascade of shining, chattering black life came pouring from a split in the browning toilet bowl; fleeing across the disgusting floor, dodging around shattered pieces of tile and porcelain – away from it, from what was there, from what stood without standing in the cubicle’s dead space. The nothing, the shadows gathering, the silence with voices.
The thing behind the door.
*
Remember, first day at school, long way from home. Nowhere to go to. Nothing to come from. The spectacles are broken. Glass trodden-down on a concrete playground. There’s blood and screaming somewhere, and no teachers to be found.
*
The bedsit on the seafront faced out onto the languid rolling waves. The building itself was one white-wash away from total decrepitude. Behind her, Jenna could hear the sound of people on the beach; parents with children. They were calling, crying, laughing and shouting to one another over the low muttering rush of the sea. Her hand went to her abdomen. It was flat and empty. She was not sure if the aches and pains were normal. It almost felt like a tugging, like small hands inside pulling her onwards – onwards and onwards.
I must go back to the Old School.
I have money, Jenna thought, I’ve always had money as she looked at the bedsit before entering. What use is it now? If I stuffed it all up inside me, I would still be full of this empty space. She’d paid the landlady for more than a month’s stay in advance. The little woman’s face still wore the wrinkled rapture as she’d wrung the bundle of fifty pound notes tightly in her liver-spotted hands.
“I don’t know exactly how long I’ll need to be here,” Jenna heard herself saying. “I don’t need money anymore, you see, better for you to have it than me.”
The landlady had nodded, deaf to Jenna’s words, her mouth working mechanically. “Dinner’s at six and you’ll need to let yourself in if you come back late, after ten. Here’s your key. Enjoy your stay, Miss?”
“Smith. Miss Smith.”
“Smith. Of course, Smith. Fine, Miss Smith, no problem. Your room’s at the top, mind the carpet on the stairs now, it’s old and a bit loose and frayed ‘round the edges, twisted my ankle like the devil on it a few weeks back. You take care.”
Loose and frayed at the edges, Jenna thought, aren’t we all?
S
he smiled a sad smile at the landlady and went up to her room; the smallest, the attic room, right at the top of the house, away from everyone else.
Once upon a time, she thought, this could have been a nursery – her nursery.
*
When would I realise those desperate cries, those distant sighs, were nothing more, nothing less, than mine own?
*
Jenna lay awake on the bed up there; on its barely-stuffed mattress, listening to the night hours ebb and flow around her, not easing her into sleep with the rustling of darkling tides as they should. She lay awake, aching inside, trying to ignore the constant tugging. It could wait until morning. It would have to.
She listened to the rattles and creaks that the door made; loose lock, looser hinges – so minute and innocuous were those sounds, nothing to worry about, supposedly, but they kept her awake. She had a name for it, the thing making those odd little sounds. She called it the thing behind the door, and only she knew its name. She had not told anyone else about it because names have power. They are loaded with it. You give names power when you call them out; in love, in ecstasy, in panic, in anger, in hate.
Her fingers played with the crucifix in her pocket. She was praying for a protection she wasn’t sure she truly believed in, but she had nothing else to call upon. She told the people at church she was saved not so long ago – born again – but she was far from that.
She needed something to make her feel better, that was all. An inadequate salve to a monstrous wound. They say many hands made light work, she thought, staring up into the ceiling’s dark. Many hands can also make much abuse, especially when they are given weight by words, by a name, called out, again and again, in hate.
Hate and love, so different, but we never think how different, or how awful it would be for your child’s name to be called out in absolute hate rather than love.
She could hear the name of the thing behind the door; hear it being called out in a rhythm as constant as the tugging in her gut. It was unending and lost somewhere in time.
What happened back then was still happening now, the name calling was an unabating continuum, and the same was true of the laughter. The laughter and name-calling she’d joined in with and his face, with its tears, kept coming back to her down through the years. He stole sleep from her and drove men away as he drew himself onto the faces of others; making them into accusing ghosts who stared silent and dead from the evening news as well as gameshows and sitcoms. There was laughter hiding in the corners of empty rooms, for quiet moments when she was alone, waking from life’s long nightmare to a silence with voices.
There was another name calling she could hear, and this name was her child’s name and it was coming from the throat, if it was a throat, of the thing behind the door. She dreaded the night when it would work out how to operate the door’s lock, purse the handle in its brittle fingers, turn it with a clatter and a click, twist those geriatric hinges in on themselves and, slowly, slowly, let itself in – and, with her child’s name on its lips, it would come to her. It would whisper it over and over again, in hate, just as they once whispered and shouted his name. The wound was well-made inside her and the thing behind the door was preparing to work in a poison salt of its own. It was getting restless out there, she could hear it shifting; was that a moaning it made?
Child-like, wet and cold, wanting to be let in, pleading. Then, there it was, those damned fingernails going again, she thought, that insistent scrape-scrape-scrape followed by a rattling and a knocking at the door, then a draught whispering by and all was made quiet once again. The black tide came in and, this time, it washed Jenna out with it, to sleep, her one true saviour.
She dreamed a world of burning flesh flowing into beggar-man rags, all of it rotting from the inside out. And, within it, there were Greater Darknesses, endlessly copulating with one another and, oh, the colours conceived within their augurous depths. Colours that could burn a soul’s sanity down to a broken, blunted wick. And then, there was the silence with voices; how they raged, ferocious, furious, all-consuming.
Jenna heard music being made from the small sounds of dying children. She saw lampshades and decorative middle-class throws fashioned from their flayed skins. There were whisperers in the darkness here, abroad and about her. There were listeners too; always listeners, always whisperers, conversing and not conversing, muttering their syllables, so icily indifferent, calling names, names calling, laughter, tears, all failing, all falling into what was kept far down below. Waiting there, sighing and alone, was a singular darkness, which was sick and palsied with whiteness, breathing us all in.
She wanted to laugh, cry, and scream all at once as she watched it all crumble and come apart at the seams. There was blood flowing from between her legs, and something small, red and wet hung there from a cord made of her. Withered hands raised it up so she could see it crucified before her eyes.
Her eyes were open, and she was sitting up straight; so awake, sobbing his name out hard over and over again, turning the crucifix over in her fingers as she said the name of the thing behind the door.
It was near to dawn, getting light outside. He was not listening because, like all promised saviours, He was not truly there. The rest of the morning was a bad hangover as Jenna shuffled to the shoddy bathroom and turned on the taps. They spun easily and the pipes chuckled at her as she waited, standing on ceremony, for lukewarm water to glug its way out. There was mould around the skirting boards and crusty stains between the tiles. Nothing here, in the Old Town, seemed to be untainted. She splashed cold-warm-cold water carelessly about until she felt clean enough and wiped herself dry with a bristly towel, and tugged on clothes torn from the underfed stomach of her suitcase. She stumbled into a pair of laceless flats and thumped down the stairs and out into the morning mist, knowing where she was going, where she had to be. The Old School was waiting, and they would all be there – and she knew there would be things that she did not want to see.
*
Kicking, beating, pain stings deep, settles down, and goes black before the leaders of it all. Under a heel, a boot goes to the guts, and a name for a face becomes a hate, and it lasts longer than a ghost could ever hope to. When I die, I will leave it as a stain on you. One that will never wash away.
*
It was dirty and quiet inside the Old School.
James was alone there.
How he came to be there, he did not know, could not remember. Soiled shapes fluttered and scampered away from the sounds he made. Many had passed through here, but all before him had been tramps and vagrants. He saw their dried excrement everywhere, they were gone now, having found somewhere else to go. There was always somewhere else to go – so they said – but his life had spun out, leaving him dangling by a single frayed thread. There was nothing left in this world for him, no-one for him to turn to, and no home for him to go to. Nowhere but here, this place, where he now stood, on boundaries, brimming over with nothing. Sullied grey light streamed in through neglected windows. He passed what was once the boy’s toilets, now it was home to a rich, rotting smell. Gagging, he quickly left it behind. There were tears in his eyes and a tremble to his hands. He reached out to the thin air, to the Old School, out to what it once was – and he felt nothing.
There should have been understanding here, in this desolate place, for what he’d done. It knew him so well, after all. In his dreams he had come back here and so many times walked these halls; listening to the soft heartless laughter of the past, hearing his name again and again, seeing their faces in the broken squares of wired classroom glass. And yet, nothing responded to his being here. He’d bared his soul for no purpose. There was only this silence with voices. There was nothing left but shadows gathering.
James ran his fingers through the dirt on desks, scratching his fingernails over woodcuts made by long-gone protractors and pocket knives, reading the runes of lonely adolescent lives; the carved-out memories, exhumed aches, and long-forgotten pains. He traced
the juvenile outlines of an urban Ouija as a shaman might when preparing ritual ground.
He stopped.
There were footsteps outside. He was not alone, not here, not anymore. He stood still; waiting, listening, and praying. The footsteps came to an end and he heard woodworms crawling and mice lightly scuttling here and there. There was nothing else here but debris settling comfortably into ruin. He blinked specks of grit from his eyes.
The footsteps began again, light but not soft, pacing back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, impatient, waiting, gathering into a temper. He followed the sound of those feet.
There were the stairs; varnish had eaten away the banisters, leaving them as blight-white limbs, moist and sappy to the touch. The footsteps, they kept on going, pacing, pacing, pacing, relentlessly pacing above. Hairless rat carcasses and extinct spiders were the litter in his way as James climbed, ducking through gossamer veils which hung, heavy and low, with long-dead vermin and flies. The footsteps, moving quickly, so very quickly, back-forth, back-forth, back-forth, a desperate rhythm increasing, a frustration seeking release, some crescendo – was he to meet with those ferocious feet?
Fearful thoughts passed through him as half-forms. The splinters from the graffiti runes remained buried in the flesh of his fingertips. He could feel them stinging; hot and freezing, cold and burning. The footsteps stopped – where?
There, at the top of the stairs. He could feel a shiver growing inside his chest and hoped he could bear it as he pushed through the pale, clinging tapestries made by old webs. It was here; something, some part, some piece of his being became lost long ago, somewhere on these very stairs it strayed into the Greater Darkness and never came back.