by Gary McMahon
Light webbing drifted down from the ceiling, like the web of a spider, but longer, firmer, thicker. At the top of each frosted strand there was a small bundle which began to unfurl. Dusty petals opening. Striving for the light.
“What are they?”
“The Slitten.” Hayley bared her chest to the room, throwing back her head and closing her eyes in an expression of near ecstasy. The Slitten responded en masse; scores of them dropped like desiccated spiders from the ceiling, rolling across the floor towards the bed. They were shadow and half-light, lines and slashes, more thought than substance. Their features were vague, like stolen shards of daylight trapped in sealed rooms, and their limbs were many and sharp-clawed.
Lana suddenly realised why Hayley never wanted to undress in front of her – it was not, as she had thought, a simple case of teenage modesty, but an attempt to hide her saggy little belly, engorged breasts and long, red-leaking nipples…to conceal the fact of her recent motherhood. The baggy clothes, the moodiness, the increasing secrecy – it all made sense now, at last, in terms of this virgin birth.
The Slitten crawled up onto the bed, swarming over her daughter and obscuring her lower torso. They reached up and began to suckle, taking it in turns to slake a thirst born in darkness. Lana watched in awe; her daughter was a mother to monsters, and for some reason the thought did not fill her with terror. Instead, she felt a sense of purpose.
Soon the Slitten were satisfied; they rolled off Hayley and gathered around Lana, their movements slow and heavy.
“Ask them,” said a voice from the bed, in the shadows. “Ask them again.”
Lana reached out her hands, and began to speak.
****
Sometime in the early hours, not long before the blood-red wash of dawn, Lana once again left the relative safety of the flat. Hayley was sleeping, worn out by the night’s demands on her young body. Lana’s wounds ached, but she was tough enough to ignore the pain.
Beneath Lana’s long winter coat, the Slitten – her grandchildren – had attached themselves to her body, pumping resolve into her system while supping the life from her veins. She was a being of contrasts: guardian and wet nurse, victim and criminal; strength and fragility, darkness and light.
Crossing the road, she allowed herself the brief indulgence of imagining Bright’s face when he saw her, his look of horror when she opened her coat to show him what he and his perversions had helped sire.
This time she would not succumb to his distasteful demands.
This time, as requested, a debt would be paid in full.
WHY GHOSTS WAIL: A BRIEF MEMOIR
It was a dry, overcast Tuesday evening in the cold mid winter when I came back from the dead. Night was falling in slow shades from a sky that looked flat and grey as old slate.
I hauled myself from the river in which I’d drowned over a year ago – losing control of my car on an invisible sheet of black ice and plummeting to a watery demise – and stood on the muddy bank. Dripping.
The moon was heavy and bloated, drooping through the thin clouds like a pregnant woman’s belly and birthing a cold, hard light that did little to illuminate the way. I stared at the surrounding countryside, noting how much it had changed in my absence. Trees were bent and crippled, sporting layers of powdery mould from some ferocious blight; grass was brown and spiky, starved of moisture and sunlight; even the water from which I’d risen ran thick and black as crude oil.
Everything seemed tainted, polluted.
I walked in the direction of my old house, planning to look in on Molly and the kids. I didn’t plan to haunt them; that would only cause them alarm. No, I just wanted to check that they were surviving their grief, and that their lives were back on track since my small, ill-attended funeral. I wanted to see that they were okay.
I passed O’Malley’s place and saw old Tom crawling around in the mud outside the empty ruins of his family farm. He was down on all fours, like one of the animals he’d bred back when he was still among the living, and stuffing great handfuls of mud into his mouth. Tom’s face was drawn and elongated, his mouth stretched open like a grain sack. It made him look like that old painting, The Scream.
The clumped dirt just poured through him, returning to the ground where it had originated, leaving no trace on his transparent form. Tom had been dead for five years.
Tom’s wife and son had left the area not long after they’d buried him, relocating to New Zealand. Their absence must have driven Tom’s wraith insane, and all he could do to be near them was ram fistfuls of the earth they’d loved into his maw.
The dead have boundaries, lines and borders that cannot be crossed. We are tied to places, not people; and sometimes those we leave behind move on to destinations where we are unable to follow.
I averted my eyes and moved on. I had no desire to attract Tom’s attention, or to disturb what must be his nightly ordeal. Unstable spectral images of livestock that had been culled during the last B.S.E scare flickered in and out of focus around him, like a weird strobe effect. Tom reached out for them with mud-spattered hands, but the cows vanished before he could make any kind of contact, only to reappear elsewhere in the field, as if teasing him, or playing some kind of ghostly game of tag.
My clothes refused to dry as I walked, and my skin remained grey-white and sodden, the colour and texture of damp tripe. A consequence of my return, I thought. I didn’t even pause to wonder why I’d been allowed back into the land of the living, just accepted that I was there. To paraphrase a classic, there are far stranger things in heaven and earth than my limited philosophy can comprehend.
I passed not a single car as I trod the narrow and winding road to the cottage; nor did I see any other pedestrians braving the chill night air. Whether anyone would have been able to see me is a question that I cannot answer. Perhaps, I thought then, only those dear to me might perceive my presence. Or perhaps were I to enter a building, I’d register only as a faint wind in the room despite closed doors and windows, a sudden chill in the air, a partially glimpsed movement in an otherwise empty chamber…
The little rose garden I’d tended in life was overgrown and stricken with weeds, the plants and flowers all gone brown and rotten. Things had been left to die, just like I’d done. I guessed that Molly must still be deep in mourning to allow things to slide in this way.
The lights were on in the cottage, and I could see dim figures bobbing behind the dirty windows. The front door was chipped, the paint peeling like scabs from damaged flesh; even the bricks were flaking away, shedding in great patches like dry, reddened epidermis.
This was the house we’d bought together three months after the wedding, the place where Molly had given birth to our children, and where we’d begun to raise them. And here it was falling apart at the seams, sinking deeper and deeper into a mess of disrepair and neglect.
The state of the house seemed to reflect the condition of my wasted mortal remains when they were put in the ground, and of the three broken hearts that it held within its crumbling walls.
I glided right through the battered wooden door, passing into the house on a current of stale air that rushed to aid my transition from one place to the next.
My young son, Gary, was in the process of climbing the stairs, a moth-eaten old teddy bear in one hand, and a glass of water gripped tightly in the other. As if sensing his daddy’s spirit, the boy stopped, turned. Gazed down into the dark hallway.
I screamed but no sound came. Only dark water leaking from the sides of my mouth.
Gary’s face was prematurely aged, his eyes sunken into a haggard midget’s skull. His pretty blonde hair was thin and wispy, falling out in dry clumps. He’d become an old, old man looking out from the body of a four-year-old boy.
I went through into the lounge when my son resumed his steady ascent to the first floor, and saw my three-year-old daughter sitting before a flickering television screen. There was a framed photograph of me on the low table beside her – a portrait taken long
ago, when she was just a babe-in-arms.
One of Katie’s arms was dangling slack at the shoulder, the joint having jumped, or been pulled, from its socket. The right-hand side of her face was crumpled inwards, as if from a heavy impact, and her remaining eye was staring blankly, milky-white as marble, from all that ruin.
I tried to cry, but only more stagnant river water poured from my useless tear ducts: it seems that the dead don’t cry for the living. I felt only an echo of a greater despair; an ironically phantom feeling that haunted the inner sanctum of my being.
Molly entered the room, looking groomed and beautiful in a pair of dark blue jeans and a white woollen sweater. She was the only point of brightness in a dim landscape, the only thing that looked as I remembered. My wife. My lovely living wife.
“Molly,” I tried to say, but only succeeded in sending a violent draught of air across the room, slamming the door behind her. She couldn’t hear me, or sense me; even the closing of the door had gone unnoticed. In that brief moment I felt far less than even the ghost that I am.
Then Molly turned partially away from me, and bent down to offer Katie a cookie from the open pack that she held in her delicate veiny hands. Her distant gaze fluttered like an insubstantial airborne insect and came to rest upon my picture. I could see the pulse beating rapidly in her neck, as if an invisible finger was repeatedly pressing her there. As she turned back towards me her eyes were moist, and she quickly wiped them dry on the sleeve of her sweater.
A large fist-sized tumour was suspended on rubbery strings of matter, dangling from a gaping rent in Molly’s back, located in the area near the kidney. The roughly circular cluster of angry cells twitched; evil, malignant, expanding in diameter as I stood there and watched.
I raised my hands to my river-wet face, and they passed straight through my head to meet empty air on the other side. Nothing could erase the awful sight.
Is it any wonder that ghosts are always seen moaning and wailing and mournful, their faces twisted and fixed into expressions of perpetual terror? When glimpsed by the living, spectres are never smiling, waving blithely, or radiating an aura of happiness.
And I’ll tell you why.
Because this is what they see: the whole wide world winding down like a big old clock, everything turning to ruin, and their loved ones gradually assuming the aspect of how they will eventually pass away…little Gary from merciful old age, Katie beaten to death in her early twenties by some late-night assailant or would-be rapist, Molly quite soon from a cancer that hangs like a monkey on her back and will never, ever stop until it has devoured her.
And I could see it all too: what little future they had mapped out across the pale white parchment of their living, breathing bodies. I could see far too much, and they didn’t even know I was there. But I had faith that they would see me eventually, catching sight of my tired spectral form whenever the pain and the rage allowed me to momentarily pass through the veil that divides us.
I tucked my legs up under my body, and slowly lowered myself down onto the floor, being very careful not to pass through the dusty carpet and creaky timber joists into the dank basement below.
And now I sit and watch the slow dissolution of those that I cherish, waiting for them to cross over. Wishing that time and space would just grind to a halt and freeze them there, in living poses, so that they no longer have to die. The other side, you see, is worse than where they are. Far, far worse than where you are.
One of these days I know my wife will join me, slipping her tiny ice-cold hand into mine as I stand watching our children weep. And we’ll wait together, Molly and me, wailing into the emptiness, trying our hardest to warn the rest of the family; and attempting to tell them to get on and live their lives before it’s too damn late to make any difference, any difference at all.
ACCIDENTAL DAMAGE
After the road accident, things began to change for Chester. It was not just a question of his perceptions – how he viewed the world – it was other things, tangible things. Like the way Lucy had stopped coming around, and his friends no longer telephoned to see how he was. Always a solitary man, Chester did not crave the attention of sick-bed revellers; he simply wanted his friends and lover to show some concern.
Maybe it was the scars. The doctors had shaved his head for the surgery, which made him look dim and thuggish, and the shiny white scar tissue traced a thick band across the top of his scalp, down over his forehead, to terminate at a point between his eyes at the bridge of his nose. It was an ugly injury, and he’d been told that the damage would never fully fade. He was scarred for life, tattooed with a physical memory of the accident in which he’d almost perished.
His actual memories of what had happened were vague, nebulous. All he could recall was driving back from Lucy’s place at the other end of town two weeks before Christmas. It was late; they’d argued over something he could not remember and which she had not mentioned since he’d regained consciousness. It was dark, cold. The roads were icy. The police thought he must have hit a patch of black ice; the back roads were known to be treacherous with it every winter. All Chester knew was that he’d suddenly lost control of the car, and had then been swallowed by blackness.
He climbed out of bed, pushing aside the books and magazines that littered the area around him, and went to the window. The day was grey; the sky shimmered like sheet metal. The fields around the house seemed to close in, narrowing his world to the immediate area outside his door, but he was all too aware that this effect was merely a reflection of his psychological state.
The winter-stunted trees shook like skinny figures, their branches twitching in a slight breeze, and he glimpsed a dark shape gliding across the flattened horizon. Was it very small, like a gnat stuck on the glass, or simply far away? He could not be sure: nothing seemed stable since the accident, even his sense of self. The shape grew in size, as if either bloating or drawing near, and then it vanished, perhaps an animal ducking into a burrow or nest at the edge of a field.
It took a few minutes for Chester to realise the ringing in his head was the sound of the telephone downstairs, its shrill voice nagging to be answered.
“Who’s this?” he said, hoping it was Lucy, perhaps calling to ask if she could come to the house. He left the room, catching sight of himself in the wall-mounted mirror on the landing – long, thin face, scratchy patches of partially re-grown hair on his head, wide stripes of scar tissue – and inched down the stairs, all too aware that any sudden movement might bring on one of his headaches. The stairs creaked, the banister shifted beneath his hand, his legs wobbled as he attempted to reach the phone before it rang off.
Slamming into the doorframe, he entered the lounge, and just as he lunged for the phone it stopped ringing. The silence it left behind vibrated like a tuning fork; Chester’s ears stung. He picked up the receiver. “Hello. Lucy?”
Nothing but static greeted him. It sounded like the shifting of ice floes, the cracking of glaciers. Chester gripped the cold plastic, his hands weak and unable to apply much pressure. The static cleared and he heard a series of distant clicking sounds, like the swift closing of a bird’s beak or the snapping of teeth. Then the line went dead.
Later that day, after a light lunch, he watched some television. The local news station was broadcasting a piece about a nearby farm where human remains had been discovered, half-frozen and buried in shallow graves. The farmer had been arrested before Christmas, when the bodies were first uncovered, but the news station replayed old footage of open graves and gave empty updates every day. They seemed obsessed with the events at the farmhouse, despite there being very little fresh news to impart. The farmer was awaiting trial but was reported to be so frail that he might not last that long. A relatively young man of forty-seven, he was said to look closer to eighty years old.
Chester watched as a tall, grey-haired anchorman walked from room to room in the old farmhouse, pointing out the strange graffiti daubed on the walls, annotated entomological sket
ches of insects torn from text books and hung with pins, piles of books and dirty clothing stacked against the doors and windows. The kitchen sink was thick with filth; the plates stacked there teemed with cockroaches. Strange stone carvings sat on every available surface: on shelves, benches, even on the floor, standing against the skirting boards.
“Mr. Winchester lived alone, and still denies all knowledge of the remains. The victims were killed a long time ago, and if he is indeed guilty of the murders of these people, he either stopped killing or found somewhere else to store the bodies long before his secret was uncovered.”
Chester turned off the television and stared at the wall above the screen. It was as if good news was no longer worth reporting. All he ever saw or heard or read about was murder, violence and bloodshed.
He took some pain killers for his head and stood at the back door smoking a menthol cigarette. He remembered giving up smoking this time last year, but after his surgery had started up again, seeking solace in the smoke that even now filled his lungs with thin, coiling fingers. The sun was a washed-out smear in the sky, and clouds shunted each other like dodgem cars at a funfair. A single bird flew in ever-decreasing circles above the roof of the house, and he watched it as the cigarette burned down to ash in his hand.
He turned around and went inside, making a decision. If Lucy would not come to him, he would go to her. He put on his heavy coat and left the house, climbing into the four-wheel drive. It wasn’t the first time he’d driven since the accident, but he had deliberately kept away from the vehicle, and whenever he was forced behind the wheel he kept to the side roads, his speed considerably lower than the legal limit.
Chester started the engine and sat at the kerb, wondering where it had all gone wrong. Before the accident, his life had been on course. The house was an inheritance from his elder sister, a spinster – left to him, along with substantial funds, when she finally lost her battle with cancer three years ago. His job was going well; Lucy was all over him, almost clamouring for his touch. Then, in a cosmic finger-snap, everything had changed. Darkness had flooded in.