by Greg James
“For God’s sakes, why’re you being such a hard-ass about this? Can’t it wait until we’re back at the hotel?”
“No, Barry. That’s why I want to do something different, right here and now. In England. In this castle. In the crypt.”
Barry sighed, rubbing his eyes, “Okay, Elly. You win. Let’s go. And this is Scotland, not England.”
Elly beamed, leaned in, kissed him on the cheek and led him away.
*
There was a wicked deliciousness to ducking under the loose chain hanging across the crypt archway and setting her feet on that first step. As she went down into the emptiness below, Elly could smell the mould in the air; feel the soiled dampness of the space. This place was so old, older than anywhere back home in the States. That was the attraction. Doing something bad on this hallowed ground, made sacred by its ancient age. She could hear the reluctance in each footstep of Barry’s. He was a sweetheart but he needed his training. There was no denying she was the alpha in their relationship; the one who liked to do things like this.
Elly reached the flagstones of the crypt itself and stopped, waiting for Barry to finish his descent. Through the gloom, she could see the oblong hollows in the walls of the crypt, where dust that had once been bones resided. Her eyes came to rest on what she had hoped would be there. A long, raised central stone, possibly a tomb, just what they needed. “So, what now?” Barry said, carefully, into her ear, not wanting to upset the stones hanging overhead.
The whistling of his breath, so warm, so close, made her nibble on her lip. Already getting excited by what was to come. Her palms were clammy as she took Barry’s fingers and squeezed them, “Wait out here, sweetie. I’m going to make myself comfortable over there,” she pointed at the central stone, “and then you come in and we do it.”
“You want me to be like a monster in one of those movies?”
“If you like, sweetie,” she kissed his fingers and then let them go, “if you like.”
Elly shucked off her shoes and peeled off her socks. The cold kisses of crypt-stone were like crushed ice being pressed against her soles and toes, it made her fidget with her fingers and thumbs, enjoying the moment. She finished undressing her legs, leaving her shirt on, for now. She reclined, giggling in her throat, onto the central stone, peering up into the black static of the ceiling and its corners, throwing her arms about dramatically, giggling some more. She caught a glimpse of something, white, wet and tuberous. It was moving with uneasy, trembling motions, strangely bulbous in places, like a malformed albino caterpillar.
Weird, she thought.
Then it was gone, lost among the shifting underground shades. The central stone was an arctic block under her buttocks, she could feel them growing gooseflesh as she waited for Barry to make his entrance.
Come on, sweetie, she thought, don’t get cold feet on me now.
From the darkness of the entrance there came a sound. A punctuation of the dismal air. Barely begun, then stopping suddenly. Elly felt her ardour diminish, her loins becoming less eager than they were. She closed her waiting thighs together and sat up straight, pulling her shirt back down over her bared stomach.
“Barry?” she called, low and hoarse. A footstep, a pause, then another. Then another pause, then another step. There he was, steadily stumbling in, emitting soft, throaty groans. Oh, I see, she thought, playing zombies, are we?
“You are so bad,” she said.
Barry came slowly towards her, his legs and feet as bare as hers. His manhood was already arching out, long and swollen. The head glimmered in the dim light, thoroughly moistened. A single sticky white tear wept from its tip. That’s what was holding you up, she thought, you were getting yourself ready for me over there. “Good boy.”
Elly lay back across the stone and parted her thighs for him, closing her eyes as she did. She heard his breathing, still stopping, starting and stopping.
“Really working hard at the zombie thing, aren’t you, hun?”
She felt him kneeling, then his hands moving across her feet, ankles, reaching up her legs, brushing over her upper thighs. His fingers had grown cold. They made her gasp as he teased the dampening lips of her vulva apart. They were rough too. Cool and rough like the stone of that arch she touched earlier.
Odd thought, that. No, don’t be ridiculous, stop thinking dumb shit, let go, relax, enjoy.
Those rough, cold fingers of his, they pierced her, one at a time, and she let out a cry, then a long shuddering breath. He was drawing himself up over her, she could feel his weight, so familiar yet somehow different. There was something he was doing, a halting motion in his rhythm as he pushed the hard meat of his erection into her, that made her still wonder, want to pull away, make him withdraw.
It’s just the zombie thing, she thought, nothing to worry about. He’s doing what you said to do. He’s going at it steadily, taking his time, making it last out. Being a good boy.
Christ, he was so hard though and so cold. And his cock felt rough inside her, like his fingers had been, like the stone underneath her. Elly’s breath quickened, because of him, because of what she was feeling, thinking.
Rough, cold, stone. Dead.
Everything stopped – all of it – she could feel space closing in around her, going black, growing tight. Her heart was beating in her ears. Her throat was a whistling pinhole. Her breath became as halting as Barry’s. She tried to move, raise her arms up, but she was caught under him, him inside her, spearing her, keeping her in place. This was not how she had thought it would be. This didn’t feel like fun anymore. This was too much like those stupid old movies they used to watch together when they were little. The crypt, the damsel, the monster, the ritual.
The sacrifice.
It hurt inside; his cold, hard stone abrading her soft, tender layers.
She opened her eyes.
“Barry, please.”
She looked into his eyes. She went as limp as one of Mr Phillips’ hand gestures. Barry’s eyes, her baby brother’s dead eyes, were as cold and rough as stone. His mouth hung open and, from between his lips, she saw long, white things dangling. A host of thin tubers writhing in the musty air that was coming from his broken mouth. They were strangely bulbous, trembling uneasily. She saw the deep gash on Barry’s crown, a piece of bone showing through the flesh there, where a stone had fallen. No, where a stone had been dropped. By something that looked like a malformed albino caterpillar, something that had not been found when the authorities searched the castle.
The voice of Mr Phillips spoke inside her head.
One of his children.
Then, with a grinding granite groan, Barry came inside her, hard and cold. And, whatever it was that came out of him and went deep into her, burrowing away, she knew it wasn’t semen. There was no warmth; no rush to the motion of ejaculation, there was only the writhing – cold, insipid and slow.
Nothing but the writhing.
Bernice
I
None of us age beautifully, except for her. Down through those declining years, whilst I was still in the bloom of youth, I saw faerie ebony become enchanted silver, wrinkles draw across her brow as accentuating lines rather than disfiguring clefts and her soft white skin distinguish itself as a gossamer veil of nacreous transparency. For hours, I was able to watch the slow and steady purple work of her veins and arteries, when she slept I would follow their webbing with my fingertips, lightly so as not wake her. There is a strange glory to sickness and disease and I feel myself privileged to have been a witness to it. The sombre miracle of black cancer eating her alive before my very eyes.
Her name was Bernice and we met at a time when our love was frowned upon by many. I lost friends and she lost friends because of our liaison. The few who remained true were uncomfortable around us; looks would pass between them, unkind, reproachful and killingly passive. They made my heart ache when I caught them at such guilty glimpses in my periphery, supposedly out of sight. As all of us do, I had thought and hoped I knew my friends in
side and out. This love I had found was too much for them though. I could see it, feel it; a drifting, silent snapping of the connecting lines, the web woven by Time between us. This piece then, of my Life, was to become fossilised and buried. Lost forever until the day when men are able to dig away the suffocating soil of Time’s grave and exhume What Once Was as archaeologists of the heart and soul rather than the earth. Until then, my love, our time, apart and together, must surrender itself, become one with the dust.
So, abandoned as we were, we took ourselves away from civilisation to a small cottage by the sea. A gnomish thing with hobbit-burrow windows and a stunted fanlight door, its varnish eaten away by the elemental lashes of the salty air. The walls were an odd, uneven substance that put me in mind of wattle and daub, even though the practice of using such stuff in construction was part of a long past time. The roof was an ensilvered thatch, again suggesting dark ages rather than the enlightened present day.
Within the story was much the same, there was mustiness to the air; the funk of ancient buried things and it was dismal too. The light coming in through the burrow-hole windows did no more disturb the darkness that had settled inside the cottage than a single small candle might illumine the infinite void of outer space. I am being too fair, this was not a cottage, it was a hovel. There was a bed in a weak-looking frame, close to the ground. There was a stove of old beaten iron. There were a few cupboards scattered about the place; ramshackle, badly-made monstrosities that looked ready to collapse in on themselves. This place was a black hole, an entropy pit, into which Light and Life might pour continuously without pause only to always be thoroughly poisoned, swallowed down, all consumed. I said not a word to her though of my forebodings, I merely smiled and nodded along to her chatter. A good little man-boy was I.
Bernice, you see, she loved it and so I bought it for her. We moved in hastily. Thinking back, I wonder if the loss of her friends, being left with me alone, so young and inexperienced, dropped her into a depression and that was what drove her to press upon me to take the place before someone else did. Not that I could see that occurring. I think I have already impressed upon you what a dreadfully dim space it was. Not remotely fit to be inhabited by man or woman, of healthy mind or otherwise, but there we were. I am also given to wondering whether this depression was further exacerbated by other ‘agencies’. I am not certain what else to call them as I do not believe in ghosts or the afterlife. As I have mentioned, I think that Time may well be a dimension through which one might pass from chosen point to chosen point, given the correct knowledge and tools, but I do not think it is a dwelling of the dead. It is a noisome tunnel of rats and filth through which we crawl like wights; dragging our hurting forms on and on until we succumb to that ever-feasting Force that preys on all things in the end, separating them out into their individual atoms and then balefully blowing them further on their way down the endless hollows of Existence. Crypt dust and food for worms, that is our Fate, no less, no more. So you see how if, in many ways, we are already the dead, it makes no sense that we should come back when the grave is our birthing-ground.
I digress, my original point being that I believe there was something else at work inside that hut, gnawing away at the fraying fringes of my sweet love’s sanity. I feel, in my heart, that it was the light-swallowing darkness that one could not seem to extinguish, no matter how many candles burned, lamps were lit and windows flung wide. Nothing chased it from our bedside completely, even when we made love I could feel it there, tickling at my nerve endings, slowing my blood, settling in as a hypothermic cold. Being young, I was able to shake it off without much trouble. Bernice, being that much older was not so fortunate. I have no evidence, not a scrap, but I truly believe there was intelligence at work, that some malign sentient thought was at the root of what that darkness did to her. Somehow, it made its way inside her and found a space in which to settle and grow. As it grew, she shrank, in on herself, every day and night. As I said in the beginning of this tale, she grew fairer in my eyes as she became sicker and sicker. I was equally cursed and blessed by this and I’m sure it was the doings of the darkness. The more life it took from her, the more it showed me the depths of her beauty, peeling away layer after layer, it laid her bare. The flame of cancer’s fever brought a sensuous lustre to her faltering flesh that made me need to relieve myself. Sometimes, I found myself touching her limp, insensible hands and feet against my tender private parts until I was utterly spent.
As you might guess, I was Bernice’s ill-educated nurse throughout this time. Bathing her, dressing her, undressing her, changing her sheets, all fell to me. It hurt me to leave her alone in that place when I had to go to the village for medicines. I walked the crunching wintry paths in mortal fear, thinking I would come back and find her dead each time. No, Fate was to be far more cruel to me than that. She was to slip away before my eyes, I was to again feel the painful snapping of the web of Time as she was torn free of it. In a dream I may have had, or made up since, I saw that endless echoing tunnel I have spoken of and, in it, I saw a spider with Death’s head proudly painted upon its ridged, glistening back. It had bound her as an embalmer might, mummifying her from shoulders to ankles in sticky strands of shimmering night-silk, and it was dragging her along, away from me. I was held fast by the circumference of the tunnel, it being narrow and agonising to make passage through, much as Life is. All I could do, being so trapped, was snatch and grab at her ankles as she disappeared, taken away from me into the blackness of Hell. Her death-screams, imagined, wake me even now.
So, as you now know, I watched her die.
Those last moments, they haunt me, because she never looked lovelier to me than at that moment. On my knees by our low bed, cartilage grinding against the grubby ground, I kissed her many times. On the brow, the lips, the cheeks. On the knuckles and tips of her elegant fingers. On the ankles, the soles of her feet and the pads of her toes. Then, as she breathed her last, I kissed lightly each eyelid and held her close as Life left her for good. I could not bear to part with her. As soon as she was gone, I knew I could not lay Bernice to rest and let her rot away in muck and dust like all of the others. I could not consign her to Death and let His spider drag her away into the dark. So I set about my studies; the dream, I think, if it is not my brain’s lie, gave me the idea.
I quickly sent messages out for the ephemera necessary to preserve a corpse. Friends may desert one but business contacts never do, not when there is the chance of a cent or shilling to be made. It was the cold season so that bought me some time as no flies would come yet, scenting my love as a nesting ground. I spread salt upon her to drive out moisture and anointed her nudity with oils and scented ointment before closely wrapping her in linen; not seeing the similarity between how I was arranging her and her appearance in my dream, which as I say, might or might not have been a creation of later Time. It’s all a muddle and a mess in my head, to be sure. Nothing’s certain, now or ever.
I had left her feet bare and unbound, you see, and it looked decidedly odd with them poking out like that. Especially when everything was well covered by my treated linen wrappings. I confess I was somewhat fixated on them, couldn’t bear to cover them up. The ghost of my dark dream acting on my brain or something else at work? Who knows?
I would sit there, looking at them, counting those perfect toes over and over. I saw imaginary landscapes come alive in those long, lonesome hours. I bound her feet up in the end though I was sad to do so. It was then that they intervened – those who I can no longer call friends or family. The door of our hovel was struck from its frame and I was dragged, kicking and screaming, from my beloved. I watched them bear her away for the burial I had guarded against. They wished her to vanish beneath soil and grubs. They beat me until I was unconscious and, when I awoke, I was alone. The deed was done.
Bernice was gone.
II
Daybreak came after a long dark night, filtering in through the dusty grime-caked glass. I felt sick as I was alo
ne. I cooked myself a meagre breakfast of beans and toasted bread on the stove, my mind was black and in chaos, and, at the heart of that dark storm, was Bernice. A candle flame, white with death, standing though blind and bound, patches showing on her bindings where oil and ointment had leaked through. There was something wrong with her feet though I couldn’t identify it. There was a smudge, a smear, obscuring those pretty porcelain things. Picking at my food, unable to shift this weird image from my troubled, fretting brain, I began to wonder. My eyes were searching the shack, darting from darkness to darkness, for it was everywhere, always there, evil iridescence. It gave me no clue. Told me nothing. So I spent the day aching and sore, not eating, nor drinking enough to ensure a peaceful night.
I awoke, this being my second night alone, to a shocking sight.
She was there, before me, standing in our shameful shack’s broken doorway. I could feel the cut of the night wind on my skin, raising gooseflesh so I knew this was no dream. She had returned though they had taken her from me.
That said, as she was bound, so was I, I could not move though I was wide awake. I could see her face showing through the linen, now rags, for she had been determinedly chewing it away with her teeth. I could see marks of chafing on her chin and lips; raw and vampiric they were. Her eyes, the emptiness in them, bored into me, black needles of ice driving through my heart, transfixing it. She swayed before me, a shorn and lonely harvest reed, her mouth open and uttering a cry. If I could have, I would have covered my ears. The sound was awful; a grating of dead tissue, dried muscle, cartilage and arteries. I didn’t understand, why was she here?
Then I saw it, that smear, that smudge espied the night before, a grim, discolouration below the ankles. I tried to perceive it clearly but my eyes remained unable to focus, I fell back into sickly sleep, my ears ringing with the discordant notes made by Bernice’s howl.
The light of day speared through the shack, forming a whitish web of motes and faerie dust. I got to my feet, skipping breakfast, I dressed and hurried out, stopping only to fetch a spade. I had to know, the suspicion wrestling in my gut, it talked to me of one thing alone. A reason and cause for these nightly visitations from my dear dead Bernice.