by Richard Ayre
‘One Gilda,’ said the old man.
‘What?’
‘Ten Euro’s.’
Scaggs gave the man a hard look. The old man turned away and moved into a doorway Scaggs hadn’t noticed until that very moment.
‘Ten Euro’s?’
The old man nodded, but stopped when Scaggs spoke again.
‘No Triple X?’
The old man, lit now by the partially opened doorway, looked at him, his face unfathomable. He eventually nodded. ‘No Triple X.’ He moved inside the door. After a moment’s hesitation, Scaggs followed him. He was surprised by the size of the room he found himself in.
Opposite the doorway was an old fashioned wooden reception desk, complete with a little push button bell. There were some bottles behind the bar on shelves and the old man moved here, busying himself with clinking glasses. To Scaggs’ left was a wooden bench, and opposite this, a row of what looked like statues. Intrigued, Scaggs moved towards them, but the old man by this time was finished and turned to him with a shot glass full of a greenish liquid. Scaggs raised his eyebrows.
‘Absinth,’ said the old man. (Abshinth.)
Scaggs nodded and took the drink, sipping it. The minty liqueur burned his throat but it seemed oddly at ease with his surroundings. Without another word the old man turned away and left through another door to the right. Scaggs was left alone with his Absinth and the statues. He moved over to them.
There were eight of them, and they were all in roughly the same position; crouched down as if they were staring at something near the floor. The detail on them was extraordinary. They were all wearing real clothes and Scaggs guessed they must have been stitched onto the statues because the crouched positions meant it would have been impossible to dress them normally. The one nearest to him seemed to be wearing flared jeans and a plaid shirt with platform shoes. It had long stone hair tied back in a ponytail and the work was exquisite. Scaggs could actually see individual stone strands sticking out from the (real) leather thong that held the stone hair in place. The beard on the face of the stone man was short and well-kept and again the detailing was like nothing Scaggs had ever seen. There was a look on that stone face. A look that bespoke a sexual arousal of such magnitude that Scaggs felt his own loins stir just looking at it. How had the sculptor captured such a look?
He moved to the next statue, again in a similar crouched position. This one was wearing an army uniform. It was grey and dusty, and it looked old. Scaggs looked closer at the boots on the statues feet and the belt around its waist. It was German. World War two. Scaggs had seen too many war films not to recognise the style immediately. He had seen many men dressed like this chasing Steve McQueen on his motorbike or shooting ineffectually at Clint Eastwood and Richard Burton. (‘Broadsword calling Danny Boy.’) He shook his head again at the detail. The statue’s face was poorly shaved and he could see the individual stubble on the cheeks and chin, and that same look of arousal that seemed to light up the face of the stone man.
Along with something else. A look in those granite eyes, a capture of change. Moving from arousal to something else. Fear? Recognition? Some fatal realisation of something. The work really was remarkable.
One by one, sipping his Absinth as he went, Scaggs looked over the clothed statues. He slowly realised that the clothes were going back in time. The last one was wearing material so thin that holes had appeared in it, the colours bleached and faded. But even so Scaggs recognised that the crouching figure was wearing tights and a quilted doublet, a small rough around its neck, yellowed and moth eaten now. There was even the pommel of a rusty looking sword sticking out of a dry leather scabbard. Scaggs’ hand was just reaching out to touch this when a voice spoke in his ear. ‘She is ready for you.’
Scaggs spun round, spilling the last dregs of his Absinth. He hadn’t heard the man approach so intent was his scrutiny of the statues.
Without waiting for a reply the old man turned and walked back towards the door he had disappeared into earlier, his boot heels clacking on the wooden floor, and for an instant, a fleeting millisecond of flashing, chrome terror, Scaggs thought his feet were not booted at all, but were clacking because they were hooves; two hooves instead of feet, black hair showing just above where the ankle should have been. Scaggs stopped and blinked, and immediately he saw that the man was indeed just wearing boots. Polished black boots. The old man was waiting at the doorway now, holding back a thick green curtain. Scaggs entered the room, staring at him warily. The old man held out his hand for the empty glass and Scaggs handed it over.
The room was just that. A room. Small, about eight feet square. Its walls were wooden; thick planks that looked like oak in the dim light coming from the room outside, and the floor was the same. That was it. There was nothing else.
The old man let the curtain drop and Scaggs heard him walking away. He stood in the shadows, wondering what was going to happen next.
Suddenly a light appeared in the wall in front of him. It came from a round hole in the wall, about three feet from the floor, and from that hole music began.
It wasn’t a glory hole was it? He had told the old man. He only wanted to watch!
But that music captivated him. It was like nothing Scaggs had ever heard before. There were some noises he recognised, drums and tiny cymbals, but the reedy, flute-like main pieces escaped him. It sounded old, this music. Older than time.
The light in the hole flickered. Scaggs realised that there was something moving beyond it and he crouched down, his eye looking through, into another room.
The light seemed to be firelight and it danced and flickered in that room. He could not see the whole room because of his cramped position, but he could see a wooden floor, bedecked in what looked like some kind of thick, Persian rug. Around the floor were oversized, plump looking cushions, silky smooth and coloured yellow and azure blue and ruby red. Candles burned in metal lamps, aiding the stronger light that flickered from God knew where.
But Scaggs barely noticed the finery of the room. He had eyes for only one thing. And that was the slowly dancing, slowly turning, naked figure in front of him.
Because of the angle of the hole in the wall, Scaggs could only see up to her shoulders. Try as he might he could not position himself to see her face and head. But after a second, this became unimportant. His eyes drank in the vision in front of him.
Her legs were long and lightly tanned. They looked athletic, with muscles showing underneath that silky smooth skin. Her feet were small, with bright red toe nails and some sort of tattoo on one ankle, maybe a dragon.
Scaggs’ eyes travelled up those slowly dancing legs, stopping to linger over her buttocks as she turned and gyrated slowly. His gaze travelled up her back, her perfect, smooth back. He could see the small muscles moving here also, her shoulder blades sliding. And he could see she was now completing her turn. She was starting to face him.
He let out a gasp as he felt his penis harden suddenly. There was no warning. It was just suddenly erect, pressing against his trousers. His hand slapped the wall as he pressed his eye closer to the hole. It was as if he was trying to push himself into the other room, desperate to see everything this woman had to offer.
She turned, still dancing seductively to that misty music. Scaggs gasped again, emitting a primitive noise; ‘Gah!’
Her stomach was flat, the same light tan as her legs and back. Her navel was pierced with a tear shaped ruby. He could see the muscles here too, moving under the skin. They bespoke youth and vitality. She had no hair that he could see, and the smooth mound of her labia fascinated him; a line of beauty that shone in the firelight. It glistened, as if smoothed with oil, and Scaggs again grunted his hoarse cry; ‘Gah!’ Her hands rose and touched her breasts, her perfect breasts, full, but pert, seeming to leave that oiliness on them too. She cupped them, her palms making the nipples erect. Her hands then moved down to her vagina, her fingers sliding over it. Into it.
Scaggs felt the ejaculation coming from
deep within himself. Although there was no-one touching him it felt as though her long, red painted fingers were moving up and down his shaft, becoming quicker and quicker. He moaned again in delight at what he knew was about to happen.
In front of him, the woman was still dancing, still moving her hands over her exquisite body, and Scaggs felt those warm hands on himself as his breathing became more ragged.
But he still couldn’t see her face!
He thought he heard her moan, and that small noise seemed to spur the invisible hand around his penis. He suddenly ejaculated with what felt like a roar, his ears full of the music and the woman’s moans as he spurted again and again, his eye pressed against the hole in the wall and his body jerking convulsively.
Eventually, he was spent, and he rested his head against the wall, feeling semen cooling against the inside of his trousers. He panted, trying to get his heart to slow down.
When he could eventually look again, the music had stopped. Inside that other room, the woman was standing still, gleaming, breathing hard also. Her legs were slightly apart and she stood with her hands on her hips.
She seemed to wait, and when Scaggs did not say anything, she turned away to leave.
‘Wait,’ gasped Scaggs, his head still spinning. ‘Please wait. I need to see your face. Please. I need to see your face.’
The woman returned into his field of vision. She said nothing.
‘I’ll pay extra,’ wheezed Scaggs. ‘But I need to see your face, please.’
Her voice, when she eventually answered, was throaty, sensual, lightly accented. It wasn’t Dutch, but Scaggs was in no mind to wonder where she may have originated from. He just needed to see the face of this goddess.
‘That is not part of the deal,’ she said in that husky voice. ‘My body was the deal.’
‘Please,’ said Scaggs again, almost whining now. ‘Please. I’ll pay extra.’ He was repeating himself, but he was desperate.
‘Extra ten Euro’s.’
‘Yes! Of course. I just need to see you!’
The woman did not move for a long time. She stood, still with her hands on her hips. Then she stepped forward. Scaggs kept watching as her body closed up tight to the hole in the wall. He moaned once again as her naked vagina was placed inches away from him. Incredibly, he felt his penis harden once again. He could smell her musk. It made him gasp again.
‘Are you sure?’ she asked, her voice slightly muffled now by the closeness to the wall between them.
‘Yes,’ said Scaggs. And they were the last words he ever uttered.
She dropped to her knees in front of him. His gaze travelled rapidly up her stomach, across her breasts, past her shoulders.
The scream that began was rapidly choked in his throat as he stared into her face.
The oily smooth skin faded as it reached her neck. It turned green, with scales replacing the tanned smoothness. Her chin was long and tapered, with pointed, ravenous teeth that grinned at him. The nose was hooked. And around her head, instead of hair, was a heaving, pulsating mass of snakes that hissed and spat at Scaggs.
But it was her eyes that killed him. They glowed with an intense, silvery white light that burst through his body, burst through him. The dead light froze him, choking off that last scream as his vocal chords petrified instantly. His body emitted a screeching creak as it was turned to stone, the pain it caused all consuming. Until it was gone and he felt nothing more. His stone gaze continued to stare. Even as the creature on the other side moved to one of the cushions. It reclined on it and closed its hideous eyes. It was replete. The sliding cover over the hole in the wall dropped back into place.
After a while, the green curtain was lifted and fastidiously tied back. The old man in the leather apron walked in with a wheeled trolley. With a bit of grunting he heaved Scaggs onto the trolley and wheeled him out into the long room. He stopped beside the row of statues. He then heaved Scaggs off again and placed him in his new position. He flicked a piece of fluff from one of Scaggs’ eyes, removed twenty Euro’s from his pocket, and then clacked off down the room, whistling. He stopped at the bar and poured himself an Absinth, raising his glass in a silent toast to the stone dead carcasses in their row. Then he went outside for a cigarette.
He waited.
This is a modernised version of a story I wrote more years ago than I care to remember. It’s probably one of the first horror stories I wrote. If I remember correctly I think it was yet another doomed competition entry for a horror magazine, but I don’t know which one. I believe the winner wrote a story about werewolves coming out of people’s skin. Or something like that.
Communication
What do you think of when you think of how the world will end? If you’re anything like me you’ll probably go down one of these routes; 1. A nuclear war, 2. A meteor strike, 3. A catastrophic disease. There are many more scenarios, but I bet you never thought that the end of the world would start with an app. Who could even believe anything like this?
It took a year or so. The app had appeared, as many do, seemingly out of nowhere, and had suddenly taken off. Everyone had it.
DreamSphere. It sounded great. An app that would record your dreams so you could watch them back during the day. You could watch your nightmares, your erotic fantasies, or just laugh at the weirdness of your sub consciousness as it dredged up lurid, vivid cartoons for your entertainment later.
When I say everyone had it, I actually don’t mean that. Obviously not everyone had it. Most British people did, most Americans did. But like everything else, there were parts of the world where the population could not afford electricity, never mind a phone, so they struggled on, trying to earn enough money to buy a crust of bread while in the West, we committed mass consumeristic suicide.
It was a free app. That’s why most people had it. And within a couple of months of its launch, people were uploading their (carefully selected) dreams onto FB and Twitter and all the other social media platforms. It was funny. It was ‘a laugh.’
I didn’t have one. I didn’t need to. My wife had it on her phone and my kids had it on theirs. At the beginning I didn’t take much notice of it. As a jobbing artist, I was obviously tech-savvy, I had to be. But only in my chosen field. The explosion of eBooks in the last two decades had meant a surge for the likes of myself who could design both off the shelf and bespoke covers. I spent a lot of my day creating themes and images, most of them digital, but some were still on canvas. The moving of the brush across the pallet was something that never lost its thrill, and I suppose I spent more time on this than I should have. Not that it matters now.
A while ago, I turned off the light in my studio and went downstairs. My wife Charlotte was, as usual, on her phone. Michael and Will were in their rooms, no doubt texting or messaging each other instead of talking face to face. I grabbed a beer out of the fridge and sat next to Charlie.
We didn’t speak. After eighteen years of marriage we didn’t really need to. It was a comfortable enough silence. I turned on the stereo and drank my beer, thinking about the work I was still finishing upstairs.
It was getting there, but it still wasn’t quite right. I had painted over parts of it several times and it was now very different from how it had started in my head. But that was art I suppose. Back when it mattered.
After a while I turned to Charlie.
‘What you looking at?’ I asked her.
She was silent for a while, her eyes still looking at the screen, but her head moving slowly towards me.
‘Dream I had last night,’ she replied. ‘Want to look?’
I didn’t. I thought her dreams should have been hers alone. I thought that private thoughts and private visions should be just that. Private. It seemed that everything everyone did or said, or even dreamed now, was public property. Everything needed to be on show. No one could just sit quietly and think their thoughts anymore. I thought it was invasive. I thought it was just plain wrong. But I was definitely in the minority. Nobody
else seemed to think like this. Privacy was a word that was starting to be looked upon with suspicion. Why did anyone need privacy? What were they trying to hide? But Charlie was handing me her phone. I didn’t really have a choice.
I took it from her and clicked play. The dream flickered into existence and played silently. DreamSphere didn’t have sound yet, but no doubt that would come soon. For the moment people had to watch their sub conscious play back with no volume.
The footage showed Charlie in an old, dark building. Her dead father was with her, and he was constantly talking to her, and trying to pull her back from walking down a decrepit corridor. I glanced at Charlie over the screen and she smiled a sad smile at me.
I returned my attention to the dream. It had changed now, and Charlie was at work, in her office. She was naked and trying to write an email. But she kept hitting the wrong keys and was getting increasingly frustrated. Then all of her workmates were there, pointing and laughing at her nudity. The playback ended.
I shook my head and handed Charlie her phone back.
‘I really don’t know why you bother with this stuff,’ I said, annoyed. I was annoyed because I had just witnessed my naked wife being ogled by all the men she worked with. A couple of them were my friends as well as hers and had been to our house on numerous occasions. But I saw the look of lust in their eyes. And I knew that the dream was Charlie’s, so that lust had been dredged up by her. I wondered what that meant.
‘It’s just a laugh,’ replied Charlie, taking the phone from me and looking on FB.
‘What’s funny about seeing your dad?’ I asked her. ‘Doesn’t it upset you?’
She shook her head. ‘No. It’s nice to see him again. I get to see him move and interact with me. It’s like he’s here again for a while.’
I remained silent as she started to laugh at somebody else’s dream on FB. I got another beer from the fridge.
She had finally put her phone down when I returned and was watching the TV. It was a viewer download show called Dreams are made of these. People sent in their dreams from the DreamSphere website and other people laughed at them. This was the pre-watershed version that concentrated on silly antics and ridiculous escapades. There was another version on later in the night that showed much more lurid and exotic fantasies. And people sent these in themselves. It seemed they would do anything to get on the telly.