by Greg James
11:30am said the clock. She’d overslept.
She couldn’t hear Charlie. He should’ve been up and about by now.
Not safe.
“Charlie!”
She shuffled into the living room and then the kitchen. The cold floor played merry hell with her veins, awakening the pain with a severity that made her gasp and bite the inside of her mouth.
He wasn’t there.
She went to his bedroom; telling herself it was the pain coursing up her legs making her breath catch. She opened the door. Charlie was still in bed; quiet and still. She sighed and went over and sat down by him. The little devil had overslept, same as her.
All was well.
She reached out. His cheek was warm and soft as she stroked it. His eyes fluttered as she tousled his strawberry blonde hair, like Matthew’s when she’d met him as a younger man before it turned to grey and then went away altogether.
“Mum? You okay? You look tired.”
“I’m fine now, sweetheart. Fine now.”
They both got ready for breakfast with smiles on their faces.
Christmas morning and afternoon passed as a time of quiet pleasure between mother and son. Charlie loved his paint set. He also loved the cheap and cheerful Christmas lunch she made. The stuffing was a bit chewy and undercooked but he didn’t mind. There was a constant warmth in the air between them as the day passed and the sun went down in the evening. Maureen rested on the settee and stretched her aching legs out. It had been a rough night followed by an exhausting but heart-warming day. She fell asleep to the sound of Charlie’s paintbrushes stroking their way across paper. When she awoke, Maureen stared at the time on the clock for a minute or so before it registered.
11:30pm.
It was late. She hoped Charlie hadn’t been too bored with her asleep on the settee. He was a sweet boy letting her catch up like that.
“Charlie?”
She sat up straight, shuffled into her slippers, stood up and looked around. Charlie had been painting a lot. There were pictures all over the table. She looked closer and saw they were the same picture, or of the same thing, over and over again; broad strokes of red, black, and white forming a bloated man-shape with jagged fingers and crooked toes. It could’ve been Father Christmas but it wasn’t.
“Charlie?”
She got to her feet with a wince.
“Charlie, where are you? Is this hide-and-seek we’re playing?”
She hoped so. She really did. Maureen made it to the front door. It was wide open.
His trainers were gone.
“Charlie!”
*
Maureen took the stairwell. The lift was broken again and it smelled like something had died inside. God, the pain. Every step was like treading on white-hot needles. No, don’t think of it. Not of pain, because pain is the start of death and he’s too young for it. There was no-one out and about as she hobbled across the desolate concrete forecourt of the Estate. She wielded the stuttering beam of the torch, flensing the dark with its light. The image from Charlie’s paintings played over and over in her mind as she trudged across the open ground. Someone would ask her later why she didn’t ask someone for help – and she said because she knew where he’d gone, or been taken.
Her shoes crunched on gravel as she made her way to the narrow street and the driveway. The night was populated with dustbin shadows and ragged shapes that seemed to crowd in and then retreat away from the torch’s beam of light.
I will find him, she thought, I will. It’s all going to be okay. This is Christmas Day. Like the doctor said, it’s all going to be all right. She cast the torchlight up the driveway to the building and its miserable sign.
“Welcome to Christmasland.” She said.
She walked towards it. Her hands shook but she gripped the torch hard, ready to use it as a weapon if she had to. Anything for her son. She’d do anything. Maureen had called the police before she left. They were on their way – but she was going to get her son back. He was going to be all right, okay. This was Christmas Day.
The lights were still flickering behind the filthy windows of the small brick building and she could see shapes inside. They were swinging slowly back and forth in time with the changing colours – blue, orange, red, green – except there had only been one shape hanging there yesterday evening.
One, two, she counted them again.
There was one more than there had been before.
The pain, she thought, it made me too slow, too tired.
Too old for a son.
“Charlie!”
She went around to the side of the building. There had to be a door. She went around to the other side. There was no door. There was no way in or out. Maureen hammered on each window. She could hear police sirens coming closer – echoes of the winter wind’s lonesome song. The torch shattered as she tried to break the bars on the windows. She wrapped her fingers around them and pulled – nothing. She could smell the rot of the metal and see the soft, waning shadows of the hanging forms within, which began to twist and turn violently rather than gently swinging back and forth. It was a dance, a struggling – they were dying once again. Charlie and the boy who came before him. It was mocking her, the thing that took her son away.
“Charlie …” she whispered, gently, to herself.
The police sirens pierced the air as the squad cars pulled into the driveway. The hanging shadows’ dance came to a halt. The coloured lights inside flickered and faded out one by one. The light of my life. Gone for good.
The police broke into the building by the time Christmas Day was over and the sun was rising. They carried out the bodies of the two boys with care. The corpses were pale but the bruises around each throat were livid with colour; blue, orange, red, and green. There was no sign or trace of anyone else having been inside the building. There was no record of the space being hired for months. Maureen told them what she had seen. The officers nodded and made their notes. No-one believed her. No-one disbelieved her. The plastic evidence bags held what the two boys had been strangled and hung with; half-a-dozen strings of broken Christmas fairy-lights.
‘ ... god bless us ... everyone … ’
Loess
It began in a room where the walls were yellow timber and the floor was hard-packed clay. The wood of the walls was scratched and stained bloody in places. It was quiet in the room and nothing moved, nothing happened, for a very, very long time.
Then there was a change in the atmosphere. Someone had entered the room though there were no doors and no windows to provide entrance, or egress. That someone knelt down and began to run their fingers through the hard-packed clay, dredging up a sufficient amount to mould a number of spheres. That someone then set to work separating the matter of the spheres and moulding it into bipedal figures. It laid them out in neat rows until all of the clay scavenged from the ground was used up. Then, that someone arose, stepped away, and gave a languid but gracious nod followed by an obscure gesture of the hands.
The clay figures arose as if waking from a dream, yawning with their minute mouths and waving their fingerless hands about the place. They got to their feet and began to stumble unsteadily about, new-borns groping their blind way through the world. For though they had limbs to move with and a mouth through which to breathe in the fetid air of the room, they had no eyes.
As time passed, the clay figures cohered into three separate and distinctive groups. The largest group was the most prone to fighting, milling and herding about. Its members seeming to have as much desire to cling to one another as to wish to tear one another apart. The next group down, in order of size, were quieter, more contemplative but also prone to fits of temper; falling to their knees, throwing their arms out in this or that direction, followed by a wailing and singing that hurt the ears of that someone who was still in the room, observing. The largest group seemed to take a liking to this calmer one, and followed at its heels when not preoccupied by squabbling and fighting.
There was then the th
ird group, the smallest of clay figures, and it not only stood apart from the other groups but was largely ignored by them as well. This group did not fight, nor did its members scream, wail and throw themselves around in obeisance. Instead, they searched, they hunted and explored. On hands and knees sometimes, splitting off into smaller parties, they wandered extensively before eventually coming back together. After a time, they came to where the hard-packed clay floor met with the splintered wood of the wall. Running their stubby paws over the surface, making small sounds of awe, they each tore off a splinter, which appeared like a great spine in their hands. For a moment, they stood still, holding the splinters, not knowing they were being watched by a curious, towering presence.
Then, they set about their faces with the splinters, driving the wooden lengths into the soft clay of their forms, cutting, shaping and gouging. They trembled as streamers of their flesh-stuff fell away and their little mouths set into firm lines as they went on with their awful task. But, soon they were done, and when they set down their tools it became clear that this was no act of mere self-mutilation – they had given themselves eyes with which to see.
And see they did. They looked around the world they had been born into, taking in its light, its dark, its angles and aspects. And then, they looked up, and they saw that someone who had come into the room, who had given them Life.
It was leaning over them, looking back into their eyes with its own. And they saw how its tattered, scalloped robes hung to the ground, how it was yellow like a liche, and the time-cracked mask upon its face, the lingering expression that it wore.
And they took up their splinters again, and again they worked upon their faces. But this time was not as the first; this time there was abandon, there was horror in their actions as they slashed, sawed and ground away at the stuff they were made of. Desperate and frenzied, they reduced their faces to a mess of clay pulp. Once they were done, they slumped to their knees then fell prostrate, and remained still thereafter, never moving again.
The other groups did not notice nor care about the fate of their fellows, and, as they trammelled about the room, they unknowingly stampeded their lying remains back into the hard-packed clay from whence they came. And so, the remaining groups went on, one leading, screaming, shouting and wailing, wanting and waiting to be heard, and the other following, fighting, squabbling and clinging to one another, a desperate, driving herd.
The room was empty but for them now. That someone who had come in, once, long ago, had now left, having grown bored with the mundane and repetitious spectacle its creations afforded. That someone may come back, some time, some day, you never know. And when it does, there will be no more shouting, wailing, fighting or squabbling from the herd.
There will only be screams. Oh yes, there will only be screams.
The Dolls in the Window
She lived across the street from the shop on the corner for many years, since childhood, in fact. And, during that time, the shop on the corner stood quite still and quite empty. The possibility, the threat, of some strange internal movement was always upon it though, seeming to emanate from behind the windows patched with broken boards and the wasted white of its painted brick walls. The dolls could be seen through the window on the first floor - there was a second window, but it had long ago been destroyed by a vandal-flung stone and was now covered by rotten patches of tarpaulin.
The dolls always drew her eye; she always found them, whenever she was gazing out of her bedroom window from across the street at the shop on the corner.
The dolls, they were unquiet things - mannequins with weathered faces hanging loose and askew, displaying a profound decay that was not of the flesh but that gnawed away from some dark, inside place. They were pale, they were lank, and she could see the ugliness underneath where the plastic, wood, fibreglass or whatever it was they were made from had collapsed in on itself. If the light was right, it seemed to glisten, the stuff inside them, glisten and appear to breathe.
That was when she always looked away.
The shop on the corner had stood alone and uninhabited for longer than her mother could remember, perhaps since her childhood in fact. No-one she asked could remember the owner but they could remember that he was there, at some point. The words that once made up the proprietor's name were little more than smudges and smears on the old wood over the shop-front. There was nothing left of the shop, what it once was, what it once had been, except for the dolls in the window with their quiet painted eyes, and their strangely glistening, soft insides.
She grew up as all people do, and life went on with its dismays and disappointments through the years. The shop on the corner remained, always the same, always there as she began dating boys who thought they were men, and then men who behaved like little boys. She grew up and she grew tired, and, one day, her mother died and left her the house in her Will. Having lived through restless years in houses and apartments shared with friends and boyfriends (never fiancés), she moved back home. For want of a better term, she settled down. She was alone between the walls papered over with childhood memories, and carpeted by the trodden-in dust and dirt of the not-so-distant past. There was comfort there, cold but true, and she embraced it, never wanting to let it go.
Through the window of her bedroom at night, she could see across the street, those languorous shapes, like restless dreams, stirring though completely still in the shadows.
She watched them, and it was as if they were dancing in the glow of moonlight and the sodium glare of the streetlamps. The light, the dirt, the shadows, the grime, so many subtle ingredients weaving together at once, in that one place across the street, where no-one would think to look, where no-one could see.
No-one but her.
No-one but me, she thought.
They came into her dreams, or she came into theirs. She was never sure which it was at any point or time. All that mattered to her was that she was there and they were with her. The dolls in the window, making their slow waltzing motions, their creaking balletic shows of grace, partnered with shadows that had neither limbs, nor face. Music was not there, there was only the uneasy flow of their movements around her and the scratching sound of minute particles being disturbed. Their quiet eyes of cracked and peeling paint staring off into nooks where there was nothing, corners and crannies where all she could see was dust and more darkness. And that was how it went on, with the light from the moon and the lamps streaming in through the grubby glass, the dolls dancing and dancing around and around her, and those trace elements of the night embraced in their arms. Nothing came to take her by the hand. Leaving her there, all alone, without a partner, with nothing but dirt, grit and strange light, weighing heavy in her heart.
She awoke one day to find that it was just like every other day, and this is where the horror was, the nightmare, the lie. She understood that every other day was like every other day and always would be, no matter what. She got out of bed and went across to the window, knowing what she would see, there, across the street.
The window, the dolls, unchanged, as always.
Still there, still watching, still waiting.
All this time, she thought, all these years, only now do I know what it means, what I must do. And that night, alone, she began to work, knowing that it would take a long time, a very long time, that it would take forever, in fact, to do what must be done. To not look away when she thought that she saw the dolls breathe in the window across the road during the day. And to dance as if with a partner in the dreams when the dreams came at night. Then, only then, would darkness come for her and proffer a fingerless hand.
The house on the corner, opposite the shop with the dolls in the window, stood quite still and quite empty. The possibility, the threat, of some strange internal movement was always upon it though, something born of shadow, sadness and profound rot. The doll, she could be seen through the window on the first floor. Standing alone, poor thing, with her small weathered face hanging loose and askew, displaying a
decay that was not of the flesh but deeper and darker than we could ever know. And, if the light is right, sometimes, at night, on a clear night, she seems to glisten softly, maybe move a little as if to dance, and then begin to breathe.
The Church in the Trees
The way to the church was fog-ridden and overgrown, the cemetery surrounding it having been left to neglect through the years, while younger, fresher burying grounds were used by the living to dispose of the dead. There was not a new stone to be seen throughout the thirty acres; all were old, cracked, decrepit and steadily growing mottled skins of mould and moss. The pathways between the subsiding gravestones were hemmed in by bitter tangles of nettle and raw root. The grass was so abundant that its lushness had become a ripeness, exuding a cloying atmosphere of chlorophyll tinged with rot.
The way to the church was fraught, as you can see, but it was of no hindrance to me for I was dreaming. Dreaming and drifting through those charnel alleys, following a route that was both circuitous and beatific, taking in the morbid fragrances as I went along. A guide had come to take me by the hand and though I could neither see, nor even feel their presence, I knew my guide to be there, leading me on.
The way to the church opened before me. It stood in ruin though still taller and more proud than the tallest and the proudest of the trees. Evening light shone through from an exposed patch of sky, turning the church into jagged silhouette. Her spires seeming to claw at the heavens as shadows shifted and gathered around. My dreaming self drifted closer, and I took in the glassless state of the great round windows set high up in the grey walls, where signs of decay and stains of mildewed water were multifarious. The ruin was coming to the point of being beyond repair, and I felt a twinging amongst my heart strings as I realised this.
But there was no further time to ruminate upon the fate of the church as it was then that the clergyman made his presence known to me – his hair and flesh were white and his expression was so very solemn as it hung, gibbous and lantern-like, above the shoulders of his midnight black habit. This singular shapeless garment reached all the way to the ground so that I never saw his feet and never was able to conclude whether, indeed, he had feet at all. Wordless and silent, this spectral man beckoned me through the barely-open door and into an interior that was alive with movement though it was not, as it turned out, the movement of men or familiar animals.