The Oeuvre

by Greg James

  The burning erupts in his skull, surging into his mouth. Arcade feels his body go into spasm. He pukes out a gluey yellow trail of feathers. Acid scars his mouth. His eyes become thick with tears. The spasm subsides. He can breathe again. He wipes away the tears. He can see again but, God, it fucking hurts. In the corner, as before, rests the axe. It glints and shines. Arcade goes to it, as before. What happens next is different.

  It began with the bird, a scrap of roadkill. A grey smear of feathers and putrefied guts. The knuckle of the head mashed flat by car tyres crushing it, day after day. It took a good while to scrape it all off the tarmac before bringing it here. To the empty flat on the Estate, where they hang out. Do some Bombs. Drop a few tabs. Smoke whatever they can get. Haze a newbie. The hands in Guin’s hair are evil, yanking and tearing threads out by the root. Voices jeer, tease and mock. Got to prove yourself. Got to do this. Be like us. Join us. Be in the gang. Gangs look out for their own. Loners are targets.

  You don’t want to be a loner, do you now?

  Her face is so close to it. She can taste the bird’s death. See pieces of it. How rotten it was. How alone. Like the bird that died when she was five. She can see the quills of its feathers and the black wires of its bones. A breeze, from somewhere, stirs them. Makes the grubby feathers tickle the tip of her nose. Bile courses into her mouth. She dry heaves, catches it, swallows it back down.

  Can’t be sick here, not now.

  The shame would be too much. The shouting, the jeering, the howling in her head. A tsunami of sound descends over her. Battering and beating her into submission. Making her go low, down low, until her face is right in the dried feathery carcass. She breathes in, feeling the foetor of it in her nostrils, tangible. The feathers stroke her eyelids, her lips, her cheeks and her earlobes. She breathes out. She feels knees and elbows on her, prolonging this episode of reeking horror. She feels the dead bird stirring.

  Something soft and damp crawls onto her skin.

  Guin screams.

  Arcade’s steps are slow. The burning has not left him. It brushes up and down within his oesophagus, driving him on. His eyesight blossoms and blurs. The axe whunks and thunks as he weaves his way from the darkness of the cellar, up the stairs to the dimness of the floor above. It is in the walls, the thunder, the merciless clamour, the endless beating of those wings. He follows it. It is taking him to them. Arcade’s mouth forms a broad smile, showing cracked and bloodied teeth. His eyes are crimson spheres. The burning is fierce, so hot inside him. The wings are in frenzy. The door is there. The women are here. He will kill them for good this time.

  Make a feast of their deaths.

  Inside her head, over the jeers and shouting, she hears it. The whistling of her breathing through its bones, a quiet cooing, as her face was pushed into those remains, all those years ago. That charnel sound, it was her. That calling, from the cellar. Down through the years, through the dark, backward through the abysms of Time. Shaping her. Shaping her fear.

  Arcade stands before the door, his head swimming. He closes his eyes, sees the sulci of his brain haemorrhaging tacky clots of plumage. The black eyes of the birds are opening in there too. He feels a bristling along his spine, a crackling of cartilage, as a hundred points of pain struggle under his skin, puncturing him further. His tendons are mere strings. He can feel them snapping inside as the hungry beaks snip away. Blood trails from the portal of his left ear. They are taking him, their meat puppet, to pieces.

  He must kill the women, or the birds will kill him.

  Guin awakens in the filthy bedroom with newspapered windows. Libby lies beside her, still asleep. Her face, unwounded. She understands now, sees the design, feels the structure that she has made over the years. This place is the root of the fear. It radiates out through her life, her past and future, from here, this nexus point. She never knew but she knows now. She can make it stop. She looks above, to the ceiling that is not there. Those dirty white flakes come down, dripping so much blood from their quills, waiting for her scream.

  Guin reaches out. She opens her hand, unfurling her fingers. She watches a feather fall. An unpleasant tremor of gooseflesh tickles along her fingers as it comes close to her palm. She does not move.

  The feather comes to rest. She was holding her breath. She does not scream. She breathes out, easily. Guin’s heart feels so light.

  A bird freed from its cage.

  He can hear the birds. He raises his voice in unison with them. A choir ever-growing, a screeching multitude. Arcade stands alone in pure eclipsing pain. He is them and they are him, trapped together, bound in dark communion. Raw tears run through the ruin of his being. Arcade shakes his head. Clears it, for the moment, from the confusion of the birds and their pain.

  He opens the door to the room. Guin and Libby are side by side on the bed. He raises the axe high. Spitting chewed feathers and sticky bits of blood. He opens his mouth, tries to shout, instead a high and horrible screeching comes out.

  The axe comes down.

  Into one, into the other.

  There is no blood.

  Nothing flows from the wounds.

  Nothing but feathers. Billowing bright clouds of feathers, not speckled, not soiled, but clean and glossy. Settling over Arcade and the rest of the room. They are not here. They have gone. These things are not them. They are leftovers, husks conjured by bitterness of the birds, by his hatred. Arcade howls, calls out, lashes out, hacks and tears at the wood-wormed walls. Shatters the door into splintered fragments. He pulverises the remains of the feather-stuffed mannequins. Shreds the facsimile flesh. Rips away the false hair and plasticised faces. How he hates them. How much he wants to hurt them. He can feel it, the black stuff, oozing inside him, hurting, so hungry. No longer able to feed on them, it feeds on him.

  Arcade weeps blood. More blood gushes from his mouth, from his tongue, which is growing fatter and fatter. He wheezes tightly as it becomes too much for his mouth to contain. He can feel them digging in, scratching hot wet lines across his palate, the needle-tips of wicked quills emerging from his distended tongue. His red eyes burst, giving birth to a shower of pale embryo curls that fall, calling, cooing, through the gaps in the floor. Into the dead and thoughtless space beneath, where they will wait, until footsteps disturb the dust and voices upset the silence.

  The street breathes out. Guin and Libby breathe in. Their lungs feel heavy and rough as they run out from the darkness. Libby feels her face, where the cut should be. She smiles. Guin pauses, she looks back into the darkness where no light shines, where they have left Arcade. What will the birds do to him? What will he become?

  Then, she turns away and they walk away. They leave it all behind. Fear, bitterness and hatred, such things are best left to the shadows. Libby kicks at the cardboard box that once held Arcade’s chicken and chips. A cold piece of fried white meat still lingers inside. Dark grey nuggets of bone show through cooked flesh that is sweating an oily syrup. The syrup darkens, it colours, running more thickly. Staining the card ruddy, flowing out into the gutter, then dripping down into the sewer, into the darkness and shadows there.

  A blood-tipped feather flutters to the ground.

  His Loathsome Kiss

  The moon went out without ceremony; leaving a hazy red smear to dissolve across her field of vision. Marie looked up the street and down the street. It was early in the morning, winter-dark and cold. Not many people about at this time except for those like her - night-shift folk with washed-out skin and tired eyes. Insomnia was a low-level subsidence in the fissures of her brain; slowly dragging her down through these long and lonesome hours. There was only so much she could do at home in the claustrophobic cell of her studio flat so she got up, got dressed and went for walks. Long, long walks until the houses around her became sketchy and unclear. A drowsing child’s dream-idea of a town; crayon-edged and crumbling, lines not meeting right, scribbles over empty spaces trailing off into a sodium-haunted nothing. She had been sitting on the wall outside a block
of council flats, where it was all dark and quiet, when the moon went away and the stars began to do the same, one by one. Marie didn't know why she was not afraid. She should have been. The sun, the moon, the stars and the clouds that stray across them were constants; meant to remain when all else in the world quickly aged, loosened to frayed elastic and then fell apart. But even though the moon and stars were out, it did not get dark. It did not get dark because the city was alight in a way she had never seen before. The windows in the houses were pulsing with a strange colourless illumination that was an inversion of the principle - it seemed to be glowing inward; an emanation disappearing into itself rather than radiating out. Looking at it hurt her eyes and felt like stiff, dead fingers were tickling through the soft folds inside her skull. Turning her eyes away from the light in the windows, she slithered off the wall and began to walk her way home.

  Home was the same as the other houses; the windows alight, leaving unsteady and convulsive images flickering across her retina in carousel slow-motion. The off-colour darkness, all-pervading, was the same as when a bulb pops and you’re left alone in a lightless room. After-images roam everywhere, smears of television static and colour-ghosts. You see them as much as you can feel them, moving about, circling around, dizzying, feathery and electric, like being tickled all over but not in a good way.

  Marie remembered how it felt when she spun and spun on the spot as a child until she was sick. What she was seeing felt just like that as the after-images went grimly circling faster and faster around and around; promising to strip her bare, to take away skin, sense, being and reason, to leave everything that was unnecessary in a bloody pile on the ground, to crucify her skinless insides onto the nonsense grid of reality itself where she would be endlessly flayed to the bone by life’s blind, twisting mathematics.

  “We-will-suckyoudry!”

  Then, as if summoned or called off, the after-images drifted away and apart; leaving Marie bemused and blinking as she came back to herself, wondering what had just happened, what she had just communed with.

  Marie walked away from home, thinking about how quiet it was. No, not just quiet, this was silence, the kind that comes when a world ends. She had seen no-one since the moon and stars went out and the lights came on.

  Am I all that's left? The only one?

  The houses around her seemed to be pressing in, keeling over, leaning golems of stone and mortar threatening to crush her down to nothing. Her breath shortening to threadbare gasps, she ran out of the street that for too many years she had called home.

  In the gardens, on the street, lying by the walls and crumpled in heaps in the doorways, there were shapes; very pale shapes, rustling like dry, dead leaves even though there was no wind to stir them. The rustling became a crackling when the sound of fast footsteps echoed down the street. The crackling was accompanied by a thin sibilant hissing and slowly, ever so slowly, the shapes arose and began drifting, drifting after the retreating echoes of that sound.

  Marie was wheezing hard, she could feel her lungs shrinking tight inside so she stopped to rest. I can take all the time in the world, she thought, now I'm the only one that's left.

  Was this real?

  Was this madness?

  She knew madness, she knew it very well. The psychiatric wings of several hospitals had been home to her for months at a time. Each relapse was no romantic fall from grace as each time she was left in a bloody mess; having her stomach pumped, her slashed wrists and cut throat patched up. One time, a razor blade had to be removed from her where she thrust it into genitals. Luckily, the doctors said, no damage was done – except for what was done by the cures they had to offer.

  Being talked at, at a constant pay-the-bills rate, by caring professionals until she would cave in and scream a “Yes!” to whatever diagnosis they proposed and, each time she saw them, the diagnosis changed and then so did her prescription and subsequently so did the patterns of her mood and behaviour, never for the better. There were bright patches but there were many dark holes torn in the skin of her life by the interfering hands of well-meaning but ignorant others. Whenever she reached for brightness and light herself, to illuminate the dingy corners of her persisting insomniac twilight, darkness always fell.

  So, with ECT, they tried frying her brains to the point that she no longer cared. She would sit in her room afterwards, with the duty nurse peering in on her minute after minute; on suicide watch wondering why ECT was thought to be inhumane. In its own way, it stopped the pain, and a lobotomy, that would kill the pain altogether. Diagnosis after diagnosis just left you sinking ever deeper into the mire; living a life without ground, no foundation, a life out of which nothing could be made.

  A life that sucked you dry.

  Then, one morning, she woke up and she was fine. This had happened before, it meant that her brain had settled, filing away all the damage, depression and violence for another day. This was the high-point of the cycle that circumscribed her life. In time, she would descend again; plummeting towards the low-point once more. Was this it, already, so soon? Had she finally become so lost in the darkness that she could no longer see the world as it truly was?

  The shape rose up before her, coming out of the shadows, peeling away from them as a scab coming free from flesh. It was the skin of a man without anything inside; no skeleton, no muscles, no organs or teeth, no tongue, no eyes. The lolling orifices in its fluttering face looked like holes torn in wet paper and the lips of the mouth were making damp kissing sounds as it came drifting towards her, its cured texture scraping over tarmac and pavement. “Won’t you stay awhile, my sweet, and watch this dead skin dance?”

  Marie heard the rustling, the crackling, as more and more were showing themselves, flowing over front lawns, rustling through bushes, nursery windows spilling out frail child-skins mewling like crucified cats.

  “Give us your meat. We’ll kiss it from your bones. Peel you so softly so you may sing with us as this and other worlds die. Give us your meat, my sweet. Let us suckyoudry!”

  Their grasping hands tickled lightly through the air before her. She could see the hollows of scars on their faces. She could see into the wet pits of their eyeholes, see the skin there quivering, twitching, aching to reach inside her and draw out red, dripping meat.

  “Suckyoudry-suckyoudry-suckyoudry!”

  Marie fled.

  Which way? Which way?

  Fuck, fuck, fuck!

  The crackling horde of skins was at her heels and everywhere else, so it seemed. Their palsied faces hanging in the air, lips and eyeholes fluttering wherever she looked. Her legs were hurting from running and her lungs were scorching pockets, barely able to hold more than a mouthful of air. The windows kept shining and pulsing and the skins kept roaming after her through the shadows.

  Where can I go?

  Where can I hide?

  Is there nowhere safe left for me?

  There were so many of them. She could see some creeping over rooftops; others slithering out of chimneys and alleyways. They would catch her soon and she would be sucked dry by their dreadful lips before she could wet her throat enough to cry out. The scream punctured the city's polluted ether as a flare burst brilliantly overhead. Another followed its trajectory, creating a further chorus of shrieks and wails. The skins hissed and spat at the phosphorus giving light to their night-time world. It would not last for long, just long enough to seriously piss them off. Blinking, shielding her eyes, Marie looked for the source of the flares.

  A hand grabbed her arm. “Come with me, quick, I have one more flare, that’s all, and we’re going to need it.”

  Marie could make out that her saviour was a young woman as dark-skinned as she was fair. “Where are we going?”

  “Somewhere safe.”

  With those words, she stopped, turned and ignited the last flare, shooting it high and far and not a moment too soon. The skins were swarming after them, an undulating tide of near-white flaccidity. The flare ditched into the middle of t
he hissing mass, igniting dry hides, turning them into shrieking, guttering, greasy torches. A smile crossed her saviour’s face. Marie saw something appearing out of the gloom; powder blue, trimmed with rust and a fading beige rainbow adorning one side.

  “That’s an ice-cream van!”

  As they shut the doors, the woman pressed a button on the van’s dashboard and a tinny rendition of the theme to High Noon chimed out.

  “Listen.” The howls of the skins echoed from every direction. “Bright light and this sound. They hate it. Don't know why but they do.”

  Both women slumped down into the van's interior, exhausted.

  “We’ll be okay in here. For a while. Cornetto?”

  Marie was struck dumb by the question. After everything that had happened, it was the last thing she had expected to be asked.

  “Strawberry, thank you. What’s your name?”

  “Amanda. Here you go. Strawberry.”

  As they finished their Cornettos, from the rear door of the van came a familiar rustling. High Noon chimed out loud and clear once more, sending the skin scurrying away, screeching.

  “We’ll go mad listening to that and them.”

  Amanda licked the last pieces of chocolate from her lips and smiled coldly.

  “Better that than stay sane.”

  “We can't be the only people left,” Marie said, “has this thing got any petrol in it?”

  Amanda shrugged, “Dunno. It's shelter, that's all I was looking for to start with and the more noise you make, the more skins come after you.”

  “We can drive. Get away from here. Look for survivors.”