by Greg James
My Daddy–
James stood over her for a while; listening to what was inside her depart, watching the eyes still and harden into marble, the skin washed white and the extremities tainted to morgue blue, then he turned away and was gone.
His work was not yet done.
*
Think about it, to never be able to walk on a hot summer’s day and take pleasure in the light and the warmth of the sun because of the hell going on inside your head. To never be able to believe another when they say they love you, or that they truly care. These are the gifts you gave to me. Life gave you precious gifts in your children, and so I have taken them away from you forever. We’re even now. Tell me, how good does it feel?
*
James, what little was left of him, pounded his forehead against the wall until the skin split, the flesh underneath fell apart, and bone from his skull began to wetly crackle. White shadows and bright spaces rushed through him and he dug his fingers into the wound he’d made in the wall, opening it wider. Letting the slow blood of the Old School flow; running down his face and marking him forever. Let there be no satisfaction, no healing, no justice here. Let there be blood, slaughter, and loss. Nothing for us but pain and the shadows. He ground the raw shit of the wound between his fingers and savaged the crown of his scalp. He remembered what it was like to live, more and more as time passed, and he knew what he had done, what he was and that, one day, he would go back to where it all began. The dead gravity of this place drew them to him, but a deeper gravity was drawing him back into it – the Greater Darkness which hung underneath and within everything. It was the thing behind the door as much as he was.
Would he have sought it out if they had not done what they had done to him?
He wondered where the pain of their deeds began and where his desire took over, where the rage and the grief collided, where hatred and bitterness took him to the point of rending the veil, tearing at Life itself.
James could not understand why he was still alive, if that’s what this state of being was. He could barely see and little could he feel. There were holes inside him. His body burned and there was a blackness before his eyes, which appeared as volcanic smears endlessly spreading and erupting. He could sense colours which came from a terrible place outside; deep and fathomless, aching with last breaths, draining everything away into the void’s unbeating heart.
It hurt to think and it hurt to be. His teeth ground on one another, stone on stone. He spat out the soft white things which crawled between his teeth. He bled out his body’s misery using the snaggles of his fingernails. He bit into his arms, baring everything from elbow down to the wrist until the flesh hung in fine strings. He would sometimes slip his penis into the mouths of his wounds, masturbate until he came, and watch a sour yellow substance pass through the labyrinthine gorges he had carved into himself.
This body was a carcass. It felt nothing. It was too dead. Its eyes saw madness as pale faces fluttering away into the air as small flakes of ash. They were waiting for when he was done here, when the lessons were over.
Something tore loose inside. Shaking violently, so cold, he collapsed, wheezing and wondering if his body would last long enough to see this through to the end. No more silence and no more voices. He laid down on the ground. Dawn was coming, he could see it showing through dirty glass as a light which was thin and clear.
He must finish this tonight.
*
They say that it’s the little things that are most important of all, so I’ll take your fingers and toes, Clifton, and then your cock and balls. After that, I’ll tear your teeth out, one by one, so you can’t bite through your tongue and end things early. I will tear your tongue out, softly dripping, from its root. And that will just be the beginning of your lessons, just the very beginning.
*
Clifton was not sure where he was, where he had come to after being dragged into that shadow of darkness.
“Hello?”
The air was dead and carried no echo and the light was that of the moon.
I fell, passed out, banged my head, that must be it, he thought, as he clambered to his feet, nursing his head. He found a bulge in the skin on the right side; firm and dense as a knuckle. A line of pain scored from one side to the other of his skull. Blinking bleariness and smears from his eyes, he began to walk back towards the school entrance.
Louise must be waiting for him there. She must be.
Retracing his steps, unsteady, resting his hand against walls as he went, he made his way back to the school’s entrance. His head was pounding and his ears sang. He must have jumped me, Clifton thought, attacked me from behind. It’s dark in here, even in daylight. I wasn’t looking properly, he was hiding in the shadows.
Louise was not there.
He did not hear Jenna answer him either when he called out. They’d left him here, lying in the dirt - why? Had they been attacked as well? Could be, he should look for them, search the school. Something moved. A face in the light of the moon. Shadowed and pale, laughing at him. A thing made of harsh laughter.
Clifton shoved open the double doors and saw they led to nowhere. His breathing was hard in his throat as he looked through the main doors of the school and found himself looking back into the school. It was a mirror of the space he was inhabiting. He took a step forward, testing the floor on the other side of the reflection. It was firm, he waited, breathing heavy, not wanting to take his foot away from the ground on which he stood, from the little reality he knew. The only difference in the reflection was there was no mirror of himself standing there, looking back into his eyes. Something in that made his spine pebble cold. Before him was distortion, a flaw in what he knew to be true of the here and now. Clifton closed his eyes, wiped a hand over his face, re-opened his eyes and looked again. There was no sign of himself there. He was gone. The thought made his bowels bristle and tighten. The idea of absence, of being rubbed out of reality so simply, was not a good one.
Clifton crossed the threshold and felt nothing as he passed from the school into the mirror-school. There was no noticeable chill or sense of change. The transition was as smooth and clean as unbroken glass. He turned around to look back the way he came – and there he was. A pale shade of the dark-skinned Clifton; his abino twin blinked as if it had awoken from a deep sleep. It saw him, smiled, lifted a finger to its lips, and the proceeded to wipe them away. Clifton shook his head violently at what was happening. He threw himself at his reflection when it began wiping at its eyes as well; smudging them away into crumbling charcoal streaks, leaving dust-clogged holes that shrieked at him with the same grim gravity as had brought him here. The pale, defaced thing opened the smeared ruin of its mouth into a leer. Clifton realised where he was, where he had been, and what place he’d crossed into.
Once again, he threw himself at his doppelganger, and did not reach it because there was a barrier between them, unseen and impregnable. The world on the other side of the threshold became opaque and drained of colour. It lost all the lines of Life and, in moments, showed only blackness. He could not return.
The Greater Darkness was waiting for him.
*
The Executioner heaves his burlap sack down the steps; gargantuan slabs descending in concentric circles swirling down into darkness. Flagstone grey water flows down a dirty old drain. This pit, this sunken well, is simply and only a place of darkness, once you are down here with us, it is forever.
*
Jenna was dreaming of life as it had been.
Her father used to paint small watercolours in a little attic studio that always seemed to be a place possessed by dusty summer afternoons. Even when winter brought ice and snow, she would sit in the corner on a cushion and watch him paint for hours and always feel warm there. He painted only beauty then; sunsets on the beach, couples walking down autumn-leafed lanes, hand in hand, always with their backs turned, modest and sweet, a bit saccharine at times. He never sold them. They were just for him – and
for her. One day, her father stopped his work. It was the day her mother died. She had a heart attack out of nowhere.
In the days and weeks that followed, he changed. Her father stopped painting watercolours and started using heavy, thick oils instead. His pictures became violent and crude with oil paints plastered on, layer after layer, building crusts which blended the colours of rot, mould, and mildew into with the forms of prostitutes and grieving men with long faces, walking abroad in bleeding streets. Other portraits he scraped together were somehow empty, eyeless buboe-ridden spaces, scoured over with the drying viscera of a cranial haemorrhage. Palsied growths of bug-eyed horror stared out from amongst the creative slaughters he conceived. The odour of wine pervaded the attic and his face grew as long and grim as those he painted. It became cold up there; always winter and never Christmas.
Jenna stopped sitting with her father. She stayed in her bedroom, pretending to be asleep, not wanting to hear the things her father said as he stalked through the house, up the stairs and down the stairs, up the stairs and down the stairs. He shaved himself badly, leaving briar patches of stubble to grow on cheek and chin, and he walked the streets at night, never seeming to sleep. They took her away from him eventually.
He was no good for her, they said, so her grandparents raised her. Her father died at home from drinking too much. She never found out what happened to all his paintings.
As she grew older, Jenna looked for the children who were like the figures in her father’s paintings; the weird ones, the odd ones, the ones who did not fit in. Those who belonged in winter and not summer. She blamed them and hated them for what they’d done to her father. It took her years to begin feeling guilty for hurting them. They never did a thing. It was all her imagination – and her hatred’s bitter work.
So, when the nightmares began, she knew she did not have much longer left, as the tugging drew her on, drew her deeper into a place where every window was smashed and every doorway now stood open.
Jenna knew this was her penance and it had to be served.
*
Oh, audient void, white darkness, blight and great absence, fill and empty me, by knife, by noose, by these white pills, open the way and then close the door. Ah, men.
*
Clifton walked for what felt like miles, traversing corridors which went up and down and then down and up went the stairs. It was like the Old School but the air was too dense and heavy, weighted down with depths and fathoms usually found in the abysses carved into the deepest stone of the oceans. The walls glistened as if they were cut from wasted marble and the frames of doors and windows appeared to be growths of a necrophagic coral.
A dream within a dream, he thought, nightmare within a nightmare.
The Old School was cast as catacombs; adrift and listless in some eternal night. He scrubbed some filth from the exterior windows with his sleeve and saw no stars or source of light in the sky out there, yet there was light of a sort. It was wan and weak like that of a palsied moon.
As he walked on and on, he was sure he could hear laughter coming from somewhere close by. Something fell into his face, wet and meaty, held together by soiled string. He pushed it away, wiping moist fragments from his face. It turned and turned in lazy circles from where it hung. There was not enough light to see what it was so Clifton pushed it to one side, and ducked out of the path of its pendulum swing back - except it never swung back. Whoever was out there in the dark of this place must have caught it, and drawn it in.
He knew who was out there. The one who killed Felicity. The man he would strangle so he could see the light go out in his eyes.
There was so little light here though, should he extinguish what was left?
The corridor stretched ahead of him, kaleidoscoping away into a flux of gloom. Clifton stalked down it with aches and fears all forgotten.He saw Felicity writhing on those long, thin fingers and the face that looked at him as she died. The face of the man he would murder tonight.
There was light up ahead; a bulb on a bare flex swinging as the meat-thing had swung, slowly back and forth. It hung over a silhouetted scene. There was an empty easy chair squatting before an antique television set hissing away to itself, with a cup and saucer sitting on a small, chipped coffee-table. The surface of the stale liquid in the cup was coated with a fine film. As Clifton watched, the film came creeping to the rim of the cup, and began spreading itself down the stained enamel sides, rippling over the concavity of the saucer. It sent fronds of silk-worm residue out over the surface of the coffee-table, weaving a web, which reached over the unvarnished edge and dripped down the table legs onto the threadbare carpet.
Clifton felt a crawling sensation inside his stomach as the fibrous blight silently consumed the scene, discolouring the cushions of the easy chair, cocooning the hissing television in staleness until it suffocated, choking on its own static. He listened to the silence which followed, standing as still as the dead television set, because he could hear something emerging from within it. Voices were being born; children’s voices.
He heard a vinyl recording spit and crackle. There were tears, sobs, and then a wail – the kind of desperate wail only a child can make. It was the sound of a wound opening.
Somewhere behind him, a door opened and closed. It was the sound of something being let in. The wailing voice on the recording was punctuated with gasping breaths, and then there was another sound; a second voice.
“My voice,” said Clifton.
The second voice laughed. It was the laughter he’d heard since he first came to this place. Clifton joined in but he didn’t sound as happy as the recording. There were wet cracks showing in his voice. There wasn’t much of the hard stuff left in him.
“That it? All of it? Ooh, woe is me. ‘You called me names. You beat me up.’ You killed my daughter. You’re a sick fucking cunt!”
The recording ended with a scrakt, leaving Clifton alone with the returning silence.
“Why should I be sorry for what I did, what I was? It was years ago, school was. I was a fucking kid. You can’t judge me. You had no right to judge her! She was only,” Clifton’s voice broke open, “she was a child! My child! She was the one good thing I’d done with my life. The one good thing! How can you make the world a better place by killing her?”
There was a breath at his back and hard, cold hands were upon his shoulders. He never heard it coming, not in the silence and not with the sound of his voice echoing over everything.
He spoke again, one last time, “She was only a child…”
The breath in his ear was calm, hard and so much colder than he had ever been.
“So was I!”
The plastic bag came down tight over his head. Clifton breathed it in, sucking it over the contours of his face. He thrashed and kicked, trying to scream. The hands were steadily winding the handle-straps of the bag tighter and tighter, twisting them into taut knots. The inside of the bag became wet with condensation and tears. Clifton pawed at his throat, tried to claw at the thing behind him. His fingers closed on nothing. He opened and shut his mouth, trying to draw in oxygen. He gobbled in mouthfuls of plastic. He could feel his lungs crumpling, withering down. He began to whoop without making a sound. Clifton saw patches of colour spreading out to form a Greater Darkness across his vision. He fell, cracked his head, and bit a few pieces out of his tongue.
The lights went out.
*
A large pear-shaped bulb set over a plain, unpainted door; a stage door, perhaps. The light winks out what once were colours; cracked grey, dead white. Murder red. The door opens.
*
It was empty. Jenna was standing in an empty room, without windows, decoration or doors. Then, at second glance, she saw the room was not entirely empty. There were pedestals as one might find in a waxwork museum and, over each pedestal, there hung a single cracked beige bulb, dangling down on a frayed flex. The sizzling filaments within stuttered from a poverty of wattage. She went from pedestal to pedestal. There
was no sign they had ever been used. There were no nameplates set out before them. She waved her arm over the empty space above one of the pedestals and, with a cry, snatched her arm back.
The space atop the pedestal was occupied though not by anything she could see – only a feeling, a sensation. Its origin had been in a body and a brain; both of which had been unmade over time. The knowledge was in her head from somewhere; a gift from him.
He’d unmade the people who once hurt him; turning them into loose jelly before dissolving and separating the motley arrays of their moist molecules. He’d pulled them apart one begging atom at a time until they were nothing but this; a slight feeling, a passing and momentary sensation. Someone, more like something, forgotten.
There were no nameplates because these were little more than traces of human identity; an uncertain blur hanging in the air, waning memory, perceptual gradients.
He’d made them as he’d once been to them.
They were the silence with voices.
This was where everyone who passed through the meathook gallery came to an end.
“Horrible,” she said, clutching at the useless crucifix around her throat. Her hold on it tightened until the fine chain felt like a choking noose.
Jenna stood away from the pedestals, feeling as empty as the dissipated ghosts hanging over them. She saw her arm was no longer there. It could still be felt but no longer be seen. She cried out as she realised why she was here.