by Simon Clark
Kerry had every confidence that Jacob Murrain would turn up this evening to check on the mausoleum. He’d refill the lamp to make sure it burned through the night; its amber coloured light illuminating the portrait of his ancestor. Desperately, she needed to share with him the fact that the spirits of Justice Murrain and his cohorts were free to roam the area by day, something evidenced when she’d witnessed the possession of Nat yesterday.
‘So, Mr Murrain, where are you?’ She slipped printed forms into a plastic wallet. By now, night had fallen. It turned the countryside into a mass of indistinct shapes that her imagination only too quickly turned into menacing, stalking figures. She had to look twice to reassure herself that figure of a hunched man was only a scrawny bush after all.
At one point she decided to check on the engineers. Surely, they couldn’t remain on the beach for much longer. The tide would be coming in. Taking the flashlight, she picked her way through the gravestones. They, too, wanted to trick her imagination, so she’d think they were lurking goblin figures in the gloom. With an unsettling frequency, she thought she saw one of those grim tomb markers scuttle toward her. Then she’d have to shine the light directly on to it. Sure, it reassured her that the gravestone was still a gravestone, not a crouching assassin, but then she’d find herself reading the text chiselled there: In memory of Catherine Brooks. 1800 – 1824. Cruelly done to death by vagabonds. Blessedly now free of pain.
Kerry murmured to herself, ‘Did you have to be so specific in what you had engraved? RIP would have been enough.’
As she threaded her way amongst the graves she found herself noticing yet more messages about the much lamented. Beneath the carving of a weeping angel: Drowned by shipwreck, 1873. And another: A victim of typhoid. And: Killed in an explosion at Murrain Quarry, 1st June, 1933. Many a time, Kerry Herne wished that science would deliver the archeologist a device that would allow them to see through the ground with perfect clarity. Alas, her imagination granted her just that gift, when she walked through the cemetery. In her mind’s eye, she could see down through the sod into the earth beneath, as if it were all as clear as white wine. Floating in that transparency would be the coffins. In those coffins she could picture yellowing bones. In the one belonging to the quarryman, whose life was snuffed out by dynamite, there’d be shattered ribs, femurs, thighs, spine, and, no doubt, pieces of the tin detonator case would be embedded in the bones of the face. What a grisly way to go.
Gritting her teeth, she hurried on along the cliff-top path. Here lay the buried remains of Temple Central. Beneath the gentle undulations would be ditches, linear mounds, buried ‘baby tooth’ stones and the spirit roads – all of which formed the sacred site. One whose earliest beginnings dated back 8000 years.
Kerry reached a point where the cliff curved enough to allow her a view of the beach. In the darkness she could make out white surf. Way in the distance, there were bobbing lights. Those must be the engineers’ vehicles as they drove back along the sands to Crowdale. Satisfied they were safely on their way back to town, Kerry retraced her footsteps back to the cemetery. The flashlight cast a generous dash of radiance, so she could find her way through the bushes, clumps of gorse and tombstones.
In the cemetery, she noticed a shadow moving about the mausoleum. Thank goodness for that. Jacob Murrain was here to tend his lamp. She’d hitch a lift back with him. Kerry hurried up the slope to the building. Its steel gate was open. A figure of a man was hunched over the mosaic. It must be Jacob. He’s cleaning the portrait.
When she was ten paces from him, she said, ‘Jacob. Thank God, you’re here; I’ve something to tell you.’
But when he turned his head she saw it wasn’t Jacob. This man had a heavy build. His blotchy face appeared almost purple in the lamplight. Instead of cleaning the mosaic, he rammed a chisel into it.
‘Stop that,’ she barked. ‘You’re damaging a site of historical importance.’
But no, it was worse than that. The man was breaking the face of the Ghost Monster. She recalled, with a shiver, her conversations with Jacob, and the purpose of the mosaic. This held evil spirits. To destroy it would be the same as breaking open the gates of a gaol.
The man used a hammer to pound the chisel’s point deeper into the mosaic.
‘I said, stop that!’ Kerry rushed through the entrance to grab hold of the man’s raised arm. ‘Get away from here. I’ll call the police.’
When he pushed her back against the wall she saw his face clearly.
‘Get away from here,’ he snarled. ‘S’nothing to do with you.’
‘I know you. You’re Ross Lowe. You drove a truck on to the site. I warned you then that—’
Kerry saw the flurry of movement. At first, she felt no pain. Then she noticed a wetness stream down her forehead. Another blow felled her. In the glow of the oil lamp she could see splotches of red dropping from her face as she tried to hold her head up from the mosaic. It didn’t seem right to rest her bloody head on the face of Justice Murrain. The portrait’s huge grey eyes gazed up into hers. He seemed amused by her plight. Crimson splotches dappled the cheek in the picture.
A third blow. Nothing but darkness.
10
AT TEN MINUTES to midnight the bulky figure of Ross Lowe entered his mother’s house. His brother sat with Ma in the lounge. Both Scott and their mother watched expectantly as he carried the hefty wooden box with low sides. Covering it, a thick plastic sheet.
‘Just you look at this.’ Proudly, Ross set it down on the floor at his mother’s feet. ‘Jacob Murrain’s going to be in for a surprise.’
The big man yanked the sheet back. There in the box, lit by the table lamp, was a face. A pair of grey eyes gazed up from the depths of the container. Spots of dried blood covered the portrait.
‘I got it,’ Ross crowed in triumph. ‘I got that damned mosaic!’
NO DAYS LEFT
1
CROWDALE’S TOWN-HALL clock had pealed out the chimes of midnight when it happened. The Murrain portrait had already been wrenched from the mausoleum. Spattered with blood, it now resided in the Lowe family home in the suburbs.
Justice Murrain’s army of psychopaths, his Battle Men, were free. The occult mechanism that had bound them to the earth beneath the mausoleum had been disabled. Through the darkness they glided, drawn to the defenceless people of Crowdale. There the evil spirits took possession of unsuspecting men and women.
In a shed down by the harbour two cousins gutted fish. A hard, electric light made the white-tiled walls shine. The men wore green plastic aprons and heavy-duty rubber gloves. They worked opposite one another across a steel table. The cousins selected fish from a tub of iced water, inserted the tip of a wickedly sharp knife into a fish belly, slice, then reached into the creature, pulled out its guts. Entrails went into a sluice hole in the table. Cleaned fish went into a tray full of ice. The cousins had gutted thousands of fish like this, six nights a week, for twenty years.
One grunted, ‘I think I’m getting a headache.’
‘You’re not leaving me with two hundred fish to clean by myself. Keep working.’
‘Uh.’ The man pressed his hand to his forehead. ‘I don’t feel right.’
‘Keep working,’ repeated the elder cousin.
‘Very well,’ the other announced brightly, then jabbed the point of the knife into the man’s belly. ‘Cooee! Offal!’ The possessor laughed at the sight of the man’s intestine streaming out through the wound in his stomach. Laughing giddily, he thrust steaming guts down through the hole in the table, then he hauled the dying man toward the trays of fish. Seconds later, he shoved the twitching body on to the neat rows of prepared fish. ‘To market! To market!’ howled the murderer. Then, laughing with the sheer joy of being truly alive again, he raced from the gutting shed – knife still in hand.
Oh, after all those years languishing in the earth, he’d make the most of tonight.
Three men, stumbling home from the bar, couldn’t believe their luck wh
en a house door opened to reveal a nerve-tingling surprise.
‘Boys. Come in for while. It’s cold out there.’
The woman they knew to be a widow stood in the doorway. Thirty-eight years old, she looked good. Downright sexy, thought one of the men. And, as she stood there, naked in the doorway, they appreciated just how well she had maintained her figure, cared for her hair, kept her breasts pert. Now the nipples turned black, either from sexual excitement or cold – they didn’t know which. They didn’t care which.
Too drunk to know better, or question if this was an orgy that might go seriously wrong, the three hurried inside.
‘Go straight up to the bedroom. I’ll be right with you.’
Before the possessed woman joined them, she locked the downstairs doors, disabled the smoke alarm, set fire to the house. For a moment, she enjoyed the heat of the flames bursting from the sofa. Then, once upstairs, she let all three take her again and again on the bed. The men were so inebriated they didn’t smell the smoke.
The women uttered strange words as they took it in turns to pound their groins against her body. ‘My name is Anna. I am Justice Murrain’s bed-wife. I’m free again. I’m going to taste every kind of pleasure. It’s my avowed wish to experience sensation until I am overwhelmed.’ She moaned in ecstasy. ‘Bite, sirs. Scratch away this skin, sir. I tenant it but for a short while. Press on to my throat as much as you like, sir. What’s that, gentlemen? You’d like me to do what? By all means, sirs. All of you at once … I have the capacity to accommodate.’
When they’d fucked to exhaustion she opened the bedroom door. The stairwell sucked flames upward to this floor like a chimney. The three drunks, shagged-out, disorientated, confused by the unfamiliar room, stumbled against the bed and the furniture; they cried out when they stubbed bare toes. When they realized that tongues of flame, ten feet long, had burst through the doorway they screamed to each other to get out of the house. Fumes from burning synthetics made them choke; their eyes streamed. Heat seared the tender skin of their genitals.
‘Does that not excite you, sirs?’ The possessed woman struck at their backsides as they milled about the bedroom. This confined space had become as bright as the heart of a lantern. The sheer intensity of light blinded them. Incredible heat scorched their naked bodies. Panic turned them into a screaming mêlée of limbs.
The woman jumped up and down on the bed, her breasts bouncing to the rhythm. She laughed herself breathless. Plastic hairbrushes melted into a pink pool on the nightstand. Mirrors shattered. Broken glass sliced bare feet. Blood didn’t have time to soak into rugs. Heat surging up through the floorboards bubbled it dry. Perfume bottles exploded on a shelf. One of the men was blinded by shards of a scent bottle. Screaming, he blundered through the doorway where he was engulfed by the roaring incandescence. Hairspray aerosols exploded. The force ripped away the second man’s face. His fingers explored his mangled visage until they found an eyeball hanging down against his cheek. In his panicked state, not knowing what it was, he ripped the eye away. The pain broke his mind. After that, he squatted in the corner to babble nursery-rhymes.
By now, flames from downstairs had all but devoured the floorboards. The third man had been trying to force open the bedroom window. His fingers blistered as he struggled with a lock that now glowed red hot. He shouted in triumph when he finally pushed open the window. At the same moment, however, the timbers gave way beneath his feet. He plunged through the hole in a gust of sparks to land in a pool of burning foam rubber that had poured, lava-like, from the sofa in the room below.
On the bed, the possessed woman’s hair caught fire. As it crackled with the ferocity of a firework she still bounced on the mattress. The flames were a golden halo. But Anna, Justice Murrain’s mistress, was no saint. When she had worked as a midwife she had a passion for stealing just-born babies, after she’d pushed a long pin through the ear of the babe’s mother until it pierced her brain. Oh! How she bounced with joy.
The final male survivor still sang nursery-rhymes, ‘Round and round the mulberry bush.’
Anna shrieked with pleasure. The afterglow of sex mated with the heat of the flames to overload her senses with such erotic power. Her masochistic appetites were at last being gratified.
‘I’m alive! I’m alive!’ she trilled. ‘I’m alive, I’m—’
At last, gas pipes in the kitchen blew. Instantly, the naked woman ascended into the night sky with more than a ton of masonry. A fountain of fire and gory body parts.
Elsewhere in the town that night, the evil spirits of Murrain’s Battle Men forced their way into the heads of men and women. Two hundred mortal minds were roughly shouldered from the seat of consciousness as the invaders took over. Not all would-be possessors were successful. Some mortal minds were so firmly rooted in the brain that they couldn’t be displaced. When the would-be possessors realized it would be futile to persist they sought more vulnerable hosts. Ones with minds that hadn’t such a tenacious grip of self.
After being confined in a never-never world beneath the mausoleum for more than two centuries the now freed minds sought ‘feeling’. They yearned to indulge the five senses. In the mini-mart at the all-night garage a youth raced in through the door. He wrenched the cap from a bottle of port wine, then drank so eagerly that red liquor cascaded down the front of his white T-shirt. Then he gorged from tubs of candy.
‘Here, stop that,’ demanded the counter clerk.
The youth gurgled some response that from the tone suggested Go screw yourself – although through a mouthful of pink marshmallow no words were discernible. After the marshmallow he ripped the wrapper from a stick of butter then forced it into his mouth. All the time his jaws worked in sheer ecstasy; his eyes were glazed slits of pure enjoyment.
Far from happy with this display of gluttony – unpaid for gluttony at that – the clerk rapped on the counter to attract the feeder’s attention. ‘Get out or I’ll call the cops.’
‘Ugh,’ was hardly an eloquent reply … it was all the youth could manage as he stuffed raw bacon into his mouth. Chocolate smeared his face; red liquor stained his clothes. His lips had split from trying to cram so much into his mouth, yet he still wanted more. Needed more. Lusted for more. He pressed slices of cheese into the bacon mulch that occupied his mouth. After that he broke open bags of sugar, flour, chili powder, desiccated coconut, coffee beans – all went into the chomping maw; along with bananas, grapes, bright green soap (he didn’t even spit), eggs, shell and all, more chocolate, peppermint gum, beer and cakes by the handful.
‘Hey, crazy man.’ The clerk had had enough. ‘Look at the mess you’re making. Guess who has to clean that up? Me! Now get out before I kick you out.’ He advanced on the youth.
Meanwhile, the glutton had turned his attention to the bakery shelf. The instant he picked up a loaf of bread the clerk seized him by the arm.
‘You pig! Didn’t I warn you?’
The glutton sensed he was about to be parted from the love of his new life: food, glorious food. He grabbed a hefty jar of barbecue sauce, then smashed it down on to the clerk’s head. The force of the blow stove in the top of his skull. The guy fell down into a sitting position, his back to the dairy products refrigerator. Surrounding him, shattered remains of the glass jar, together with splotches of rich, dark sauce.
The youth started work on the loaf of bread. He tore off huge mouthfuls. Soon he started to cough as a dry crust stuck in his throat. He paused, his eyes searching for something to moisten his meal. When the possessor saw hot blood bubbling out of the broken crown of the clerk’s head to mingle with zesty barbecue sauce, he nodded as an idea took hold. Squatting beside the clerk, he happily dipped his bread into the massive head trauma.
Elsewhere, men and women spilled out into the streets. The town hall clock struck one. On the cold air the single chime shimmered. At that time of night the place was largely deserted apart from the possessed townsfolk. Skanky Mal, the notorious Crowdale alcoholic, stuck his head out o
f the cardboard carton he called home. From there, Skanky Mal witnessed dozens of people walking by in their nightclothes; some pausing to peel off naked then fuck each other in the road. A bunch of women turned over a car … just for the hell of it, he surmised. These folk had the appearance of long lost friends who were meeting each other after years apart. Many of them danced. They sang songs he’d never heard before. Skanky Mal crawled out of his residence, then scrambled as quickly as he could to his feet, which for such a hard-drinking man wasn’t especially speedy. Ten men linked arms as they walked abreast. They sang at the tops of their voices – something about a pirate’s encounter with a ship full of feisty nuns. Skanky Mal gamely tried to join in the with the chorus. At the same time, he dragged a vodka bottle from his pocket. An inch or so sloshed in the bottom. He’d been saving that precious liquor for morning, but this spectacle called for a toast. Especially, when these carousing revellers kicked over garden walls then threw the bricks through windows.
‘Here’s to you, at last!’ hollered Skanky Mal. ‘How long have I been telling ya’ boring buggers to loosen up? Now, you give this bloody town a damn good shaking! Cheers!’
Two hundred possessed adults approached the town hall. There on its steps stood a giant of a man; one clad in a white suit. They gathered in front of him to form a respectful audience.
The man pointed at individuals. ‘Do you know me?’
‘Yes,’ cried a woman with joy. ‘You are our master!’
He pointed to a youth who carried a half-eaten water melon in both hands. The giant demanded, ‘Who am I?’