by Greg James
This light of darkness had passed from Esme to her father and then on to the rest. Once this cabin was disturbed by outsiders, a maid, say, an officer, one of the crew, then it would pass to them and so on. Titanic would dock in New York and the people there … it would go on and on, spreading without end. For how does cure darkness? By illuminating it. I could not think of how this dreadful light might be darkened successfully. The scope of this, what it could become, made me shake. The only thing that upset me more was what I would have to do to ensure such a future never came to pass.
*
It was a bitter night upon the starboard deck. Esme Fairview was so light in my arms as if her bones had been hollowed out, the weight of her vitality drawn away to some other space where light was a gnawing thing of pain and darkness. I wept as I carried her, wrapped in the stained sheets that once cradled Amen-Ra's extinct form. They did not stop me, Fairview and his followers, their motivating life-force similarly deadened, I imagine, by the possessing presence. However, I am sure it saw me through their eyes and surmised what I was about. I felt it as one feels the eyes of another upon the skin, a spider-like creeping sensation upon the nape of the neck. As I walked, a dead man, mesmerised by the horror of what I was about to do, I thought on how wrong they had been - the men who deciphered the hieroglyphics of Amen-Ra's tomb. How they had misread the meaning of the princess having intercourse with a foreigner; an outsider. Dear god, what parochial fools and idiots we are. We see the things of the universe by our own small definitions and thus we do not see them at all. What fate awaits us when we are so wilfully blind?
At the side of the ship, I stopped and swayed, my eyes on the waters below, so deep and so dark. Could I do this? It was murder. I would be tried, possibly consigned to the same madhouse as Alistair Pearson. The man who buried a bullet into his brain because he knew it was the only thing that would take the pain of the light away; knowing the emptiness of lobotomy was the only certain cure. Still I hesitated, still I risked hands falling upon me, tearing her from my arms, voices demanding to know what I was about, the sheet coming away, the luminescence spilling forth from her eyes; their eyes, the eyes of one and all, and all then being done for. Esme Fairview was as Amen-Ra – with her demise, the light would be snuffed out, whether Donald Fairview and his followers would live again I did not know. I doubted it.
I felt the sudden lurching beneath my feet and, out of the night, out of the darkness, white and shining, a relentless and ancient edifice of ice, as old as Amen-Ra, carved by forces as intangible as that which she had let into our world came bearing down on me, I could already hear the screams, the shrieking of metal, the pounding of water gushing in, seeking to drown us all. It was so close, I could see it glistening as the glacial skull of Amen-Ra once glistened. Esme stirred in my arms, the sheets of her makeshift shroud slithering, a shapely bare foot dangling freely, and I knew then that I had no more time. I stepped forward, thrust out my arms, there may have been a cry from her, not from what possessed her but one last desperate sound from the lost soul of Esme Fairview. The small sound was quickly snatched away on the night's wind and, for a moment, I glimpsed a drifting scrap of pale cloth upon the waves below, it may have been her fair face, then it was drawn under and the iceberg was upon us.
I am not proud of how I escaped the fate that befell so many that night; surviving when better men laid down their lives so that the women and children might live. I had no qualms about being one of the few men found aboard the lifeboats when the RMS Carpathia came to our rescue. No, I dared not let myself be one of those sinking into the salt waters, descending to whatever fate Amen-Ra would have waiting for me beneath the surface of the waves. I saw her breathe even though she was long dead. I saw a light that was the quintessence of all suffering, which behaved as if it were a communicable disease. This knowledge wears away at the root of my brain. Such things as I saw are impossible by all the laws of existence we hold dear. I have seen what I have seen, heard what I have heard, and yet I still doubt it and wish to set it all aside and return to my life as it was before I set foot upon the decks of RMS Titanic and heard the name Amen-Ra. However, this was an impossibility upon finding myself in New York; my fortunes went from bad to worse and a nauseating grippe laid me low that soon grew into something far more onerous, leading me to guess successfully at its source and cause. I have seen it again a number of times since.
The sickness works upon me and the world about me seems to disintegrate, on these occasions, into a flowing loamy putrescence that, when I touch it, yields and evaporates to reveal planes of existence that I can best describe as endless expanses of howling prismatic glass. There is a white darkness there, roiling within. It blinds and staggers me as no light could possibly do in our world and it reaches out for me, burning with a cold despairing touch that pierces the heart. I realise this is where the light in their eyes came from as well as those glistening patches adorning Amen-Ra's bared skull and I begin to see deeper, I move into it, ashes cast by a cruel hand back into the fire. It knows me, somehow, as one might know an insect that has caused a wound from the way that it slowly limps and shuffles away, awaiting the fatal moment that is sure to come after you have swatted at it. I awaken from these strange moments, gasping, sometimes screaming, and I see more of these damnable growths upon my skin, very probably they are inside of me as well. Grief, the hurt of it all, the burning cold, the fucking pain!
Esme, forgive me! No, don't leave me! Not alone like this again, please!
My vision flickers, waxing, waning, and I do not think it is the fault of my diminishing candle this time. The walls, they grow seamy and the air is stifling, I taste blood and faecal matter in each slow breath I take. Soon enough, Nature will scream and, at the crescendo, she will come apart at the seams like thick, heavy theatre curtains. I must be quick, before the white darkness that lives beyond all the things we know pours itself into me. I must do it now, die, before it burns through those strange glacial planes that somehow restrain and hold
Author's note: This account was recovered from a small rented apartment in State Street, Brooklyn, New York on 15 April 1913. The apartment was disturbed by police after other tenants complained of a repulsive odour emanating from within. The rooms were found to be in lamentable condition, whether this was the fault of tenant or landlady is a matter for dispute. The occupant was also in lamentable condition, having expired, and when examined by one of the officers it was reported that the remains came apart at the seams, crumbling and releasing an even more obnoxious variety of the foul odour already noted.
The subsequent coroner's report makes for highly unsettling reading as it describes the bubonic and irradiated state of the surviving flesh, musculature and internal organs. However, the most discomposing detail is this, upon studying the bones of the deceased, the coroner found them to be made of a scintillating and utterly beautiful form of prismatic glass.
Fear and Wonder
Beauty is the mask we weave over the world’s unsightly visage. We mould it and shape it, from birth unto death, until reality is pleasingly deceitful; a most correct lie for us to suffer through. Those who wander, stumbling from the path, will find themselves in strange, unquiet places, shrouded syphilitic realms, where mendacious wonder disintegrates, falls to pieces, before the baleful gaze of the unknown fearful things that dwell therein and walk abroad.
The chill wind of the hills made Ariana gasp as she made her way along the small dirt road. It was barely a road; a grubby cleft cut through the grass and occasional sprouts of undergrowth. The sky overhead was heavy and grey. Mountains grew as teeth from the softer lines of the horizon and, gradually, they were becoming stained by the blood of approaching sunset. She was far from home and nowhere near her destination. Few animals roamed these parts and no birds sang from the isolated copses that she passed by. Each tree was bereft of leaves; their dried limbs twisting in ways painful to the mortal eye. Winter was coming. Autumn was gone. The land was dead and she was the las
t living thing this side of the mountains. Once she was through to the other side, there would be towns and villages; the hardship being daily visited upon her throbbing legs and aching feet would be in the past. Ahead she saw a small wood; a welcome sight, for it was the only shelter hereabouts. “I’ll bed down there for the night.” she said, “The wind won’t be as wicked with those heavy bows and boles standing about me.”
Without fear, she pushed through the rattling long-fingered branches. At the heart of the wood was a sight she did not expect to see. A caravan, all broken down, its bright gypsy wheels shattered and collapsed. The soot of a campfire resting as a dirty blackened clump near to its rear axle. There was no sign of the horses, alive or dead, that should have pulled such an antique contraption. The ground was nowhere disturbed by tracks, human or animal. Ariana felt her heart beating uncomfortably and quick in her chest. The paint on the caravan’s sides was peeling, sloughing off in skin-like reams, yellow having faded to a decayed brown. Rich reds were long gone leaving a few crusty, septicaemic orange traces. Her feet bore her towards the thing, as much as she was revolted by it. Perhaps it was all the walking, she could not stay still, she was in too much a state of being driven onward and onward to stop. Then again, it could be a sense of fascination; a desire to reach out and touch something so scabrous and lame, so obviously hidden away, abandoned by a thoughtless denizen of the world.
The door of the caravan was an open black rectangle. Her fingers grasping the crumbling frame, she pulled herself up and into the interior. It smelt bad and ripe. The soles of her boots crunched on unseen forms that scattered before her. Slowly, steadily, her eyes adjusted to the musky gloom, drawing out details from what, at first, seemed to be a colourless, blank emptiness. There were items she would expect to find in a gypsy’s caravan: decorated cloths hung over surfaces, primary-coloured cupboards, collections of exotic knick-knacks, pagan bric-a-brac and so on
In the corner, there sat a corpse. Ariana did not scream, nor did she run. The dead were dead and nothing to fear. She went towards it, her eyes marvelling at the walnut wrinkles of its face, at skin shrunken so tight over the skull that there were tears in it, revealing the bleached white of bone. Fingers, withered sticks, were clasping something, fiercely wound around a bulbous shape. For a moment, she thought it was a dead child then she saw it for what it was – a mandrake root. Her tongue was dry in her mouth as she remembered the stories of how it was used in ceremonies practised by outlaws who, being cast from society, would wander wastelands, such as she was in, riding in carts and caravans, such as she was in.
The toe of her boot shifted an object on the floor. She heard it rustle. Kneeling, she placed her hands upon the weathered leather covering of a book. Gingerly cradling its fibrous form in her hands, she found herself opening it, turning the pages, and thus reading the last words of the dead man resting before her.
XVII – 'Tis true what the legends say! Poor and hungry for so long, I have at last found my fortune. I was at the gallows crossroad this evening and beheld the latest victim of the witch-hunt. Hanging by his broken neck, his tongue thrust out, purple and black veins staining his face, turning it daemonic. The hounded soul had been executed unjustly, bare naked he was, a further humiliation to add to his ample sorrows, no doubt. As I briefly mourned and made the sign of the Darkness o’er him, I espied a bless’d miracle. Sprouting from the soil beneath his swinging feet, a mandrake root, spawning itself from the fallen blood-seed of this hanged man. Tears hurried down my cheeks and I sucked at my lips, kissing myself for I had no-one to share my joy with. I tore the thing from the earth, ignoring its thrashing and shrieking, and I locked it into one of the caravan’s cupboards. To feast on the meat of such a magical being, how sweet. I shall make a soup of it, boil it into a broth, maybe roast it and scoff it down. A bellyful of black magic, a reward I am well overdue.
XXIII – The base horror of it all! I have been foolish. Poverty and starvation made me desperate. The thing has killed me, that blasted mandrake root. I chopped it up and I ate well that night, all those weeks ago. The hunger abated but that which awaited was so much the worse. Ever since my feast, I have suffered the most nauseating of stomach aches. Acid burning hot, night and day, in my gullet. Meals not digesting themselves. Water coming back up. Tonight, I can feel it kicking, clawing away and biting at the delicate layers of my inner self. It has put itself back together inside me somehow, the cruel monstrousity, it means to eat its way out of me. Oh, what I am to do?
Outside the caravan, evening was darkening, losing the last colours of the dying day. Ariana stepped away from the dead man and the cause of his death; her eyes never leaving the infantile weight clasped to hollowed-out breast by those crumpled arms. She could feel her skin alive, sensitive and tingling, under her clothes. Waiting for that noisome bulb to react, to espy her, come scrabbling from its victim’s embrace and chase her out into the night’s dusk and yet it did not move, it did not tremble, it did not twitch.
Ariana was standing on the grass outside, wiping away dust that had settled on her shirt and pantaloons. Rubbing the gathering cold from her arms, she turned about, walked toward the trees and knelt down. She picked up sticks to make a campfire. As much as she loathed the idea of sleeping here, she knew that trying to cross through the mountain pass in the dead of night would be a fatal mistake.
At first, she thought the crackling she heard to be the sound of her boots on bracken. Then, when she stood up and was still, she knew it was not so. There were two nocturnal eyes staring out at her from the darkness. The mean intelligence in them was scalding, burning her as a witch at the stake might burn. It was accusing her.
“No, it wasn’t me. I didn’t take it.” she cried. “I am not at fault.”
Then, branches were curling in on themselves, becoming twitching tendril fingers, reaching for her. Roots came loose, tearing the soil, and the rest of the slumbering trees slowly opened their eyes. She did not run but she did scream, and faint thereafter.
Later in the night, the fire was lit though not by Ariana’s hand. Stooped and deformed they were, the kindred of the mandrake root. Hairless heads, knotty limbs, unfinished faces and their flesh was as tough and undistinguished as the bark of old trees. Their lipless mouths moved hungrily as they gnawed upon the dripping pieces of their midnight feast, unjustly slain. Tongues of flame hissed, sizzling and spitting as the fires consumed the gristled remains vegetative fingers tossed their way. Ribs heavily dented by teeth-marks. A bloodstained finger, still wearing a birthday ring. An eye that briefly shone, bright with fear, wet with wonder, before the murderous heat split it open.
What sickening ecstasies did Ariana feel as those conjured things were cooking her, then eating her alive? What foundering fevers did she suffer through? What unbearable sights did she see by the risen moon’s light? Somewhere in the wasteland, her lost soul cries out. You there, do you hear it too?
The Writhing
Angrisla Castle was a mouldering cluster of grey teeth thrusting out of the dark ground of the Scottish Highlands. The coach, dulled by years of use, hissed and creaked to a stop in the grounds. Feet squelched down into wet earth as the tourist party disembarked. Hearty American accents sounded out, too bright and heavy for the thin grey air.
Elly could see it in his eyes, his resentment at being here. Barry was not a morning person by a long way and she could see his irritation as he made grand gestures of plucking the grains of sleep from his eyes. But she had so wanted to see Angrisla Castle. According to the guide, Mr Phillips, a pale-faced gaunt, it was a very spooky place indeed. There were stories about the last owner, a doctor of some sort, experimenting with this and that, making new kinds of animals, just like in the stupid old movies she used to watch with her brother when they were kids. The stories, according to Mr Phillips, said that the doctor was arrested and put in the madhouse. They never found the things he made. “His children,” Mr Philips had said, “His children, no, they never found them. Not one of ‘em
left alive, no.”
Probably all bullshit but it gave the place some atmosphere, a touch of awe, she thought.
Barry trudged along beside her as the party followed Mr Phillips up the path cut into the hillside to the castle entrance; a gothic arch that made Elly’s heart quicken. There was something in this architecture that got her going, the weathered curves and old lines. Reaching out as she passed through it she felt the roughness of the stone under her fingertips, she felt a frisson, a pebbling of the skin.
Oh yes, she thought, I want to do something here.
Mr Phillips’ voice was an insipid drone as he led the tourists from one open chamber of the castle to another. Limp gestures of the wrist indicating worn-out gargoyles and water-battered carvings, triggering mutters of varying interest and a clicking staccato of camera flashes from the crowd. Elly’s hand was in Barry’s and she was tugging him after her, away from the party.
“Elly, what’re you doing?” he whispered.
“Didn’t you see that small archway back there?”
“The one to the crypt?”
“Yeah.”
“Mr Phillips said not to go down there. There’s a chain across it, ‘member?”
“Come on, Barry. I want to do something here.”
“Do something? You’re joking, Elly. Not now.”
“Yes now, I want you to go into the crypt and do something.”
“But he said it’s dangerous down there. Loose stones. The ceiling’s not safe.”
“You either come with me, Barry, or I’ll go down there myself and have a good time alone without you.”
“Elly-”
“You try to stop me, I’ll punch you.”