The Oeuvre

by Greg James

  “I’m next, aren’t I?”

  No answer, and there was no escape.

  “I’d better find my place then.”

  The empty spaces, which were once her eyes, found her pedestal at the end of a row. On either side were particulate hazes, which were no longer people she’d once known. Their names were forgotten, lost to time and dust. Here they were, enshrined forever, wordlessly testifying to their crimes and his pain.

  Jenna tore the chain and crucifix from around her neck and let them slip through her fingers and fall to the floor. “I talked to God but his eyes were empty. He could not save either me, or my child so I commend myself into your embrace.”

  Head bowed, slipping shoes from her evaporating feet, she mounted the pedestal and took her place, crucified by silence, becoming one with the voices – and the Greater Darkness. Her last words could be nothing else, “Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani.”

  Saved, purified, at long last.

  Jenna was torn to pieces.

  Amen.

  *

  Down here, death caresses us with raw hands dipped in industrial waste and we are cursed a thousand times by the lips of those who never left us alone. I now bring those curses with me and lay them upon your heads, brand them into your brows and cut the names you called us into the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet. And no screams you make will encourage me to mercy.

  *

  The fairground was a morgue of memories, standing a short walk along the promenade from the old pier. Clifton made the walk there and he met no-one on the way. He felt alone in this rotting world, this seaside purgatory that he thought he had escaped from.

  All was covered over by a sky the colour of burial stone. His daughter’s life had been taken. His wife was insane. A plague of rust had crept into his life, touching and affecting everything – and one was responsible for this. There were no people visible in the silent ways and tarpaulin halls of the fairground but he could hear them; a hundred wandering voices.

  Every inch of brightness had flaked away from the rides’ exteriors; exposing bleached and bland layers of rot beneath. There was a helter-skelter wearing its weather-beaten wood, crawling with holes and open wounds. The structure whistled moistly in the winter wind, making it a dismal shadow-horn, which forlornly sounded the end of the world. He passed the big wheel, creaking with the decomposing gibbets of its gondolas. Then, there was the waltzer; a dreary house of the dead, mummified by creepers of gloom. After the waltzer, there were the dodgems; poles broken into stained splints, the cars sitting idle as fire-blistered sculptures. Their leather seats were spilling their insides out, which, in turn, were alive with some weeping, nameless form of life. The leering horses of the merry-go-round had all been blinded by eager hands. The wooden bubbles of their eyes carved out. Someone had gone to the trouble of daubing red paint as blood over the wounds.

  The thing behind the door was waiting for him in this place of skeletal structures, peeling paintwork, cracked concrete paths, and occasional tufts of starved-dry, colourless grass. Nothing was behind nothing. Nothing was here.

  He was waiting for Clifton at the heart of it all.

  James stood by the ghost train; where it all began. His colours were the same as those of the grey haunted castle. He shifted through shades of decay as he moved. Gritty air blew the ripe scent of him into Clifton’s face. He was watching Clifton come closer, with eyes light and dark and a smile that knew how to laugh at pain.

  Clifton recognised his own smile and ran at James, screaming.

  “Are you sorry yet?” James asked.

  “No!”

  “Then, neither am I.”

  Clifton’s charge took him through empty air, which closed at his back with a slow, hushing sound. He turned around, raging, breathing hard. Again, there was the smile. Clifton snatched and tore at air that kept on darkening and lightening, never allowing him to grasp onto what was there.

  “You’re worse than me, worse than I ever was. Give her to me. Now.”

  "As you wish."

  The snapping of a dead man’s fingers and something small and wet fell to the concrete ground. It was her – his Felicity. Her eyes were open and every inch of her skin was gone; stripped and peeled away. Blood stained concrete.

  “There’s your little girl, Clifton. I took the body from her grave and then I peeled her like a grape. I spent a whole night doing it.”

  “ ... no ... why?”

  “Because I want to hurt you more than you ever hurt me. I want to hear you weep. I want to hear you scream my name.”

  The last of the flint in Clifton’s eyes was gone, worn away, as he rushed over to the glistening form spattered on the ground; cradled it, loving it in his arms. She was so wet, and so cold. Her eyes, they were so empty. She’d never laugh or smile for him again.

  “She was a child,” he said through tears, “she didn’t deserve this…”

  “No, she didn’t, but you did.”

  At these words, Clifton screamed and, for the last time, fought with the dead man. His fingers snatching as ever at empty air, knowing he was lost. Tired, he stumbled and fell into the dust, cracking his chin open on the hard ground. The heel of a boot ground into the base of his spine, keeping him where he was. He writhed like a pinioned insect, just like his daughter did on the dead man’s long, thin fingers. He was kicked over onto his back and saw the crowbar cradled in those hands. It was raised high by rotting hands. There was no time for last words, barely a breath.

  It came down hard; bone splintered, flesh bled and tore. Every nerves hurt and burned as blow after blow fell upon his body. Clifton drowned slowly in pain, weeping from the many holes made in his body. His agony was a bloodied, crushed, and scraped-clean thing. He lost count of the number of times he screamed the dead man’s name. It did no good. There was no mercy in those eyes, waiting to be offered – only the greater darkness of the thing behind the door.

  Clifton tried to reach out for the skinless hand of his daughter but the heel of a blood-crusted boot ground his hand still. Clifton wept, trying to form words with his broken mouth, to beg, to plead, to call for a moment’s mercy.

  ... just hold her hand ... just once ... just let me ... one time ... mercy ... pleasegodmercy ...

  “God is not here. There is only us.” The dead man kicked Clifton’s hard in the jaw and stood back to watch a fresh haemorrhage flow. “I show you as much mercy as you once showed me.”

  The crowbar came down, pounding and pounding, until the last wet, red traces of consciousness were beaten out of Clifton. The fallen man’s heart gave out. The dead man paused to spit upon what was left of his body.

  He turned walked away, leaving father and daughter to rot together in the dust gathering amongst those spectral rides where the shadows of memories grew in the colourless grass, waiting to be long-forgotten.

  *

  Black snow falling, nuclear family ashes, dead things, romance. Black snow falling, on Dachau and Dresden, graveyard sweats, dead things talk and dream of romance.

  *

  The thing behind the door was no longer with him. The pain and desolation of his life, quieted. James walked through the Old School, feeling the energies animating him steadily ebbing away, flowing out into the Greater Darkness and its demesnes.

  As he mounted the stairs, the same he’d climbed before as a boy, when he was lost as a young man, he heard her song. She was waiting for him atop the stairs. The stairs where he became the thing behind the door. He moved quickly, eager to be done.

  She was resplendent and she was not his mother, nor any woman he’d ever known, intimately or otherwise. Her face was the white and sullied face of meds yeghern, and her laboured breath was the charnel smoke and ashes from iron ovens that once burned. Her pagan cerements billowed, caught by a wind he could not feel, and her smile was a deep grin in the skeletal dark. She’d waited his whole life for this moment.

  He reached for her first, and so she reached out for him. Her
eyes were freezing moons. She was his and he was hers. Their love, a white darkness, a blight eternal. Their fingers met, so cold, and he found peace.

  James was home.

  *

  It rains like it rains on an old town and each door is marked with a cross of plague. And the dead fill old alleys as they once filled Belsen. And it rains like it rains on an old town. And there is smoke from old chimneys. And there are screams in there. Screams underground.

  *

  The Old School was broken into by the fire brigade some time later after, following reports of disturbances at night. The bodies were found; parents and dead children, all piled together in a mockery of a mass grave. The sight made grown men weep though they would blame the tears on the cloying atmosphere, not the way the cataract-white eyes of the dead looked at them as they were recovered from their dismal resting place. A lingering odour hung over the corpses – the ripe stink of scorched and martyred flesh. There was no sign of a fire but the stench of it was everywhere.

  The Old School was demolished and nothing was built upon the open land afterwards. It was left bare to turn grassless over time. The usual parade of family, friends, and neighbours were transmitted from television to television with the usual questions being asked and no answers given, but in their dull, wounded faces was an answer. A truth they kept to themselves; buried deep in the hope it would one day die, and they could forget it ever existed – but it did not die. It never does and never will.

  It lives on in our derelict schools and other abandoned places where no-one lives. It waits in the silent spaces between the stars, waiting to be heard. When we suspect we hear someone speaking to us at night, it is there, always there.

  It is in the hearts of those who gather in the emptiest of homes to mourn and worship though they do not know for whom, why, or for what reason. They serve the namelessness of which we are all a part; a voice without sound, a silence with voices, forever dying in a Greater Darkness, which is somehow white and strangely palsied.

  “ ... whatever we might have been ... whatever we might have done ... whatever we might have become ... it is over with now ... done ... we have failed ... ”

  So says the Thing Behind the Door.

  This Darkness Mine

  Dedication

  William S. Burroughs (1914 – 1997)

  "These fragments I have shored against my ruins."

  T.S. Eliot

  Part One: Work

  My name is not important, and neither is yours. I'm awake. I'm out of bed and getting dressed to go into the office. The taste of last night's dream is on my brain and the memory's flavour goes something like this.

  It sits and rots and, as it does, it thinks. Fibrous, cold cobwebs of synapse flicker with old flame. The only outward sign of life is a vague twitching of the gristled nuggets that were once its eyes. It thinks for a time that is immeasurable to Man.

  Then, it raises one peeling hand, beckoning, and the door opens.

  I come in.

  So, how much of our lives do we live? How many minutes, hours and days are spent not as we would wish them to be? Where does that wasted time go to? The stress. The strains. The stupid worries. The many minutes in needless pain become weeks, then months, years and then decades. Titanic spans of plague-ridden time, all lost, all gone, to some abstract sphere.

  This city is a house of flies and I'm sure yours is much the same. You can taste the death in the air. Carbon grains sit on skin, darkening everything, flavouring the rationed food. The economy is crumbling along with the buildings. Trains of people tumbling through the city’s cracked concrete arteries under ashen skies. Everything rattling and shaking to pieces.

  Deal, compromise, trade-off, back-down. Time to downsize. Sell-off. Buy-up. Give a little. Take a lot. Shop the bastards. Suck in your stomach-beast. Hunt the resources. Filch the markets. Get predatory. Time to get something slain. Hands clean in the washroom mirror. Face as lined as lined can be. Dark and hungry. In need of a billion more. Another thirty-forty cars. A line of coke down the arsehole of an underpaid carpetbag whore. Compassionless, feelingless, insatiable.

  Appetites for destruction.

  It sets my teeth on edge, watching the masses go by, hiding their hate-scarred faces under the tattered veils of shadow cast by broken buildings. Paint smears, make-up over old open wounds. Torn tongues fluttering, mouths spitting poison as soon as certain backs are turned. Yes, this is humanity and their pain was palpable. Their years of toil and self-destruction, scalding from shared memories of it. Dead-white hands draw down a set of blinds and someone licks their lips, wondering what to do to the people next. He runs a cool hand across the soft-skinned boy-offering adorning his desk, making it squirm and squeal, then he bends down to feed on a barely legal cock with white teeth and slick-snake tongue.

  Something sick is here, at work under the surface, but we, the commuters, know not what because we know it’s better to know not what as we travel into work. Black things stir in the earth, spilling rivers of dead, grey maggots from sphinctoral orifices that cluster in buds across acres of graveyard-silvered flesh. They shuffle blindly in our noxious tunnels, seeking the light and the day, dragging their gastropod bulks through the congealing muck of the underground. The many openings in their bodies are ripe and sour. They are the haunters at the threshold of dreams, waiting for safe passage through.

  I see the dried blood and desolation of a passing platform as my train chunters by and I wonder at it. Deaths from a number of pandemics break out before my eyes across the newspaper page lying open in my hands. The dreary patchwork faces of politicians, unflinching, their eyes never fail to send a thrill of disquiet through my soul; the most powerful beings on the planet and with not one ounce of humanity to share between them.

  I can feel Work drawing near, making my heart clench and deny, trying to push it away. The rhythm and strike on steel of the train punctuates the decreasing distance, withering away whatever unique stuff makes me up, making me shrink in on myself. The train thunks to a halt. The carriage doors whine-slide open. Pawing sleep from my eyes, I’m on my feet and out of the doors, not thinking where I am going to, just knowing, borne along by the multitude, lost in the masses and the drone of black traffic.

  My email pings and dings and I am awake. I have been in the office for hours, maybe days. Having nodded off at my desk it takes me a few minutes to collect myself, pull the last trailing threads of my consciousness out of sleep’s black peace. I draw in a breath of unrecycled air. The numb light of the office interior sends needle-shocks through my brain. Dull, I move the mouse. Point. And. Click. An e-mail is waiting for me. I click into it. I see the latest corporate catchphrase.

  Life is a pitch meeting. We need you to sparkle.

  It makes no sense, this tasteless bullshit, so I ignore it.

  Enter the password. Another spreadsheet. Something in me snaps and groans as I open it. Click. And. Click. Scarlet numbers smear their way down the monitor screen. Formulas are embedded in the document. The work of invisible men. Letters, numbers, signs and symbols in a mathematical higgledy-piggledy that I don’t understand, never will, don’t want to. It’s my job to go through them though. It’s what they pay me for.

  Wiping at my eyes, wishing I could get more than four hours sleep in a night, I set to work. Point. Click. Scroll. Check. Re-check. Type in. Enter. Point. Click. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. The numbers on the screen are a churning river, slowly turning to a soothing black series of streams as I check them, correct them. The screen flickers and fades as do the lights above.

  I wait, pointing with my tongue, clicking with my teeth.

  Light is restored.

  Everything in the building is breaking down, wearing out. It’s hot in here so I unbutton my shirt collar, loosening it. My fingers are damp with tepid sweat, the air I breathe tastes of body odour and old cheese. We haven’t had air conditioning for three weeks. At this rate, we’ll be growing mushrooms in our hair. I wipe my brow dry and the back o
f my hand comes away shiny, slathered. My eyes flick up to the moon-dial disc of the office clock.

  Five hours to go.

  Shit. I extinguish every last trace of red from the spreadsheet. I paint it black.

  Job done.

  I stifle a yawn, feeling no sense of success, tasting the acrid afterbirth of the night before. The afternoon drags on by. The atmosphere in the office thickens until its charnel taste catches in the back of my throat. The whites and washed-out yellow of the walls hurt my eyes. The spreadsheets keep on coming. Ping. Ding. Point. And. Click. Shooting pains ricochet from fingertips to knuckles, writhing through the tight muscles of my arms and shoulders, striking home at the base of my neck. I work at the tissue there, feeling how it’s set and hard.

  The on-screen formulas cloud over, red and numinous. Jolting out of my chair, I’m walking away from my desk. The burr of my deskphone bothering my guilt responses. Someone else can answer it.

  I need a break.

  The day’s work left me seedy and tired. A snoring whore sleeps at the back of the train carriage, the jiggery-joltering rocking me to sleep, embracing me with the warm felt night. The doors creep closed. Awake, I see where I am, where I’m leaving. My station, this is my stop, wiping grains from my tear ducts, I’m on my feet, hurling myself forward too late, watching the doors snap tight against one another. Someone behind me inhales, shocked. Someone, somewhere else, giggles at my expletive. I thump at the door. The train is moving, concrete angle and edge gives way to grass and hedgerows.

  Claustrophobia to agoraphobia.

  I have miles to go before I can get home.

  As a later train picks me up, sullen, from the platform and chunters me home, my skull is brimming with glowing red numbers. Angry bright embers. Another day has been ill-spent. I emit a low tone as I feel the sensation of waste wash over me. I feel the vibration of it. It’s not a pleasant one.