The Leaping

by Tom Fletcher

  However far we thought we had come, we were only ever balancing on the edge. The world we knew was just the thin slippery spine of a high fell, and surviving with your mind intact was just a case of absorbing impacts, welcoming them into your body and dispersing the damage throughout yourself in order to prevent it being a force that knocked you from your feet and into the abyss. Sometimes I thought the best thing to be was something like an empty box, some sort of shell, designed only to hold. Either that or something completely shapeless, neither one thing nor another, able to adjust to anything at a moment’s notice, not true to anything or anybody, but accommodating to everything and everybody.

  Or both. Just being nothing in particular.

  I opened the barn door and despite the holes in the roof the smell of a butcher’s shop hung in the air like smog, and it took a moment for my eyes to adjust, but when they did I saw a small fell in the corner, an actual fell, with ridges and peaks and crags and gullies. A fell in miniature. I knew that it was made of bodies, though, and so I approached the mound apprehensively, half hoping that one of the bodies would move, crawl out of the mass and be OK. I realised that I was desperate for another face, a friendly face, somebody to talk to that wasn’t Jennifer. But, in reality, if anything had moved, I would have split its head with the shovel.

  The bodies remained motionless. There were lots of them. Lots and lots of them. I nearly tripped over one that was stretched out on the floor and was evidently the one that Graham had killed with the axe. It looked just as human as the rest. And there was that element of tragedy in everything, that idea of only being human at the end, a body like any other. Was that the case? Or was there some spirit in these lycanthropes that found somewhere else to go once their physical human shells had been broken up? I didn’t know, and I didn’t know which was worse. That body was going in with the others though. I was only digging one hole.

  I didn’t get too close to the pile of things that had been my friends – I moved into the opposite corner and started to dig.

  Inside, Jennifer was continuing with the clean-up of the house. I had left her mopping the ceiling of the living-room. She was displaying single-mindedness and stoicism that unnerved me. I was split – most of me was trying to maintain that she was an angel, swallowing her grief and distress in order to push through this period of readjustment intact and pull me through with her, to keep it all together for both our sakes, as I had demonstrated that I was woefully incapable of doing so myself. The rest of me – only a small part – was convinced that Jennifer was a lycanthrope, a monster, and that was the only way she was managing to get through it all without a breakdown of the kind that I had had. That way of thinking was deeply arrogant, assuming as it did that she could be no stronger than I was. But even though the fear was only a whisper at the back of my mind, it worked its way right through every thought, every working of my brain. There was the proverb – a barrel of wine, a barrel of sewage. Put a teaspoon of the wine in the sewage, and it wouldn’t make the sewage any more palatable. But put a teaspoon of sewage in the wine, and the wine would immediately be toxic. The world was weighted in this way. The quiet voice that insisted that Jennifer was one of them, a monster, that voice was the sewage inside me. Despite most of me believing in her virtue, that quiet voice slowly ruined everything.

  I dug into the hard earth. The smells of meat and piss and shit clogged my nostrils and I imagined ruptured bowels leaking into the open air. I kept looking towards the door and being hypnotised by the movements of the blue-grey clouds across the archway. In there, in the barn, it felt unnaturally dark. I scrambled from the hole I was digging and surveyed my progress. The hole was maybe three feet wide, four feet long, a couple deep. I was sweating and I needed a torch, so I dropped the shovel and headed out of the barn, headed into the yard. It didn’t have to be a torch, it could be a lantern – anything that would shed some light. From the yard, I saw Jennifer through the kitchen window. The room was warm-looking from out there, and she was beautiful. The air was a deepening blue. She was washing something in the sink and I paused to watch her. From where I was standing there was no sign of all of the violence, the gore, the fear, the hellish creatures that had broken into our lives. All that was locked away inside my head as recent memory, together with apprehension. I knew that it wasn’t over.

  Hesitantly, I put one foot in front of the other and made my way back to the house.

  ‘I’ve just come for a torch, or a lantern or something,’ I shouted through, pushing the front door open and wiping my feet on the mat. Just out of habit.

  ‘OK!’ Jennifer shouted. I could hear music coming from the kitchen. It was fast and lively and there was a fiddle in there somewhere. It put cold rods up my back. I saw that the living-room was clean now, more or less, apart from very faint pink stains on the walls. The upholstery had been taken off the furniture and washed and was hanging on a clothes-horse in front of the fireplace, in which Jennifer had stacked and lit a tight bundle of bunched newspaper, thin sticks and dusty coal. The flames licked up the back of the fireplace, hot and cheerful, and the room felt nice, or it would have felt nice if things had been otherwise. You could have walked into this room and believed that everything was normal. The room was normal, almost. The valley could have been a wonderful place to raise a child. We could have cleaned the house right up and tried to start a family, and turned a spare room into a nursery and given the hypothetical child a fantastic attic bedroom with skylights, everything. I turned around in the living-room and looked at all of the walls and yes, everything was kind of normal, but that music – I couldn’t bear to hear that music. And I had work to do, anyway.

  I went through to the kitchen, and gave Jennifer a quick hug and laughed at something nice she said, I didn’t know what, and moved away as she tried to kiss me. I pretended that I was just looking elsewhere, pretended I was not seeing her face getting closer with her eyes half-closed and her lips beautiful and hungry. I floated through into the utility room at the back. I found two torches – a big chunky red plastic one and a small metal one that I could slip into my pocket – and an old oil lantern that we always meant to take camping.

  I picked the lantern up with one hand, then rushed back out through the kitchen so that Jennifer didn’t see me and ask what was wrong. I picked up the box of matches from the mantelpiece above the now roaring fire, and went out through the front door.

  I stopped in the yard and looked back over into the kitchen window. If I had a gun would I be able to stand there and shoot her? I could have got one, I could have got one from some Tony-Martin-esque local farmer, and it would have been easier to do, more palatable, than attacking and killing her at close quarters. It would have been easier to do it in a split second, before changing my mind, almost by accident. Thinking about it would almost be the same as doing it, once I was standing there with my finger on the trigger.

  I turned and made my way back to the barn. Of course, I didn’t have a gun and besides, if I had it in me to kill her with a gun, I had it in me to kill her without. But I was not going to kill her. She was just a person, just a human, only human, like me, and I could never have done that, not to Jennifer, my Morgana le Fay, my love, not you.

  If only I was one of them and I could banish all doubt and worry, just like that, because rationalising did nothing for me. If she was one of them she would surely have tried to kill me by this point, but the idea was still there, a black thing polluting every thought.

  Inside the barn, I lit the lantern. The flickering light warped the shape of the whole place, made it appear as if the walls and the ground and the bodies were bouncing to and fro, stretching, snapping back, bending one way, then the other, wavering like insubstantial things, films of water, flames, holograms, sheets of rain. It was as if things were jumping into my field of vision and then out again, whereas really I supposed it was my field of vision that was shifting. I put the lantern down between the hole and the bodies – I didn’t want them where I couldn
’t see them – and I turned both of the torches on and laid them on the ground so that they illuminated the area in which I was working, and I picked up the shovel and started digging again.

  I dug and dug and dug. I got too warm and took my jacket off, and then my jumper and then my T-shirt and still I was too hot. Sweat ran down my body in streams, cascading down from beneath my hair, under my arms, between my shoulder-blades, my forehead, and soil stuck to the sweat and slowly I became covered in mud. I dug and dug, and the torches shone their light horizontally across the top of the hole, so as it grew deeper the bottom descended into darkness and became invisible. Every now and again I stopped and looked across at the bodies and I recognised some of the visible faces but could not attach names to them, even though three days previously I would have counted most of them as friends, people that I could have talked to. I carried on digging.

  I thought more about Jennifer’s words of consolation. Jack. My darling. My kitten. My Jack. But there was so much blood in the air. I stopped digging. I wanted us to be OK, but how? How could we keep ourselves safe? We could leave, of course. Yes. We would leave, move to somewhere well away from there and that godforsaken house, but – what if Jennifer was a werewolf? How would we stop her from changing? How could I live with her? Was keeping myself safe possible? No. We couldn’t ever leave, not as long as there was a chance that Jennifer was one of them, because there – Fell House – was the perfect place for keeping something like that hidden.

  And I supposed we could never have children. Not as long as I didn’t know.

  I threw down my shovel.

  I climbed out of the hole, more slowly this time because it was deeper than before. I left the barn and went around the back.

  At the other end of the barn there was the small outhouse, not visible from any of the windows of the main house. I flicked the large, outdoor light switch and the low dangling bulb flickered on. The small metal chair and hacksaw gleamed dully in the dim glow. I looked at the door and it was heavy, sturdy wood, much like the front door of the house. I checked the padlock, which was slightly rusty, but looked like it would still work. The key was lodged inside. I worked it free and slipped it into my pocket.

  The space would do, if it came to it.

  I returned to the hole. The light from the lantern still trembled. The two torches caught the pit in their crossfire and it looked blacker than black. I climbed back inside. It was big now, but still nowhere big enough.

  It grew darker outside. I was lost in the digging. When the barn door suddenly squealed like something alive, my skin tightened so much that it might have broken open. I poked my head up over the edge and saw that the noise had been made by Jennifer entering. She knelt down at the edge of the hole and put down a tray with a cup of tea and some sandwiches on it. She lowered herself down on to all fours and brought her head down to kiss me.

  ‘Thank you for doing this,’ she said. ‘It must be awful.’

  ‘I forget they’re there,’ I said, nodding towards the bodies. I looked back at her, and her huge eyes bored into mine. Resting on her elbows, she brought her hands in towards her chest and started unbuttoning her shirt.

  ‘Jennifer,’ I said. ‘I don’t know if now’s the time.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said. ‘There is something to be said, maybe, for the way they live. We only have so long. This is something that we know, everybody knows it all the time, but with so much death happening all at once. Makes you think. I saw them dancing and I saw them fucking. It was like we could be, Jack. People could live that way. We could be like them. Without the killing. Just the pure joy. The passions.’

  ‘You don’t really want to be like them,’ I said. I knew she did, though, and I knew I did too. ‘We couldn’t all be like them, anyway. Nothing would ever get done.’

  ‘I wouldn’t want to miss an opportunity to love you, Jack,’ she said. ‘And besides. You stand there with your shirt off, covered in sweat and dirt, looking at me with eyes like that and tell me you don’t want me?’

  ‘That’s not what I said.’ I pulled myself up over the side. Jennifer moved backwards so that she was resting on her knees. Beneath her shirt, her nipples were visible above the cups of her bra, hard in the cold, and she carried on unbuttoning and then shrugged the shirt off. She unhooked her bra and removed that too. She stood up and undid her butterfly-buckled belt and rolled down her jeans, bending over towards me as she did so, and everything was either blue in the light of the moon or orange in the light of the lantern or black, silhouetted. She stayed in that position for a moment, leaning forward. Her back was smooth and almost horizontal, lit blue. I was at an angle to her, and saw her slightly from the side. Her hip, like her back and the side of her buttock, was also blue. Her hip marked the end of her straight back and the start of her curved buttock and was marked itself by the plain white fabric of her knickers. Her legs were straight. Her breasts hung and swayed gently, orange and flickering in the uneven lantern light, and her face was open, her mouth was open, her eyes were wide open, her tongue delicately probing her blushing lips. Her hair was long and flowed over her face, down her shoulders. She raised one arm and steadied herself on me before stepping out of her rumpled jeans, first with one leg and then the other. She stood back up again, slowly, because she knew I was watching her.

  I was watching her, all of her, but my eyes kept returning to her mouth. If she bit me … if she bit me, would I try to resist?

  I took my shoes and socks off and then started to undo my belt, but she took over; I had thought my hands were moving at normal speed, but her hands were much quicker than mine. Next to her, it was like I was moving in slow motion. I lay back and lifted my behind from the earth so that she could take my jeans and boxers off, and I lay there naked, and against my skin the earth felt wet. I hoped it was just the sweat that had flooded from my body as I had been digging. I lay there and watched as she slowly walked back over to the barn door, her skin pale, and pushed it wide open. The light from the stars and the slim crescent of a moon poured into the space. She was a silhouetted shape under the archway, a beautiful shape. She walked back over, slowly, swaying, and my already swollen penis grew as she approached. I stood up and when she reached me she put her hands on my shoulders and pushed herself against me. She lifted her mouth to kiss mine, and I jerked my head back, thinking what if? But I didn’t have the willpower to walk away as she took hold of my erection with her muddy hands. Mud, I thought, dimly. Mud. She gripped me firmly, and looking into her eyes, I thought I just don’t know. It was a simple fact that my body was overpowering my mind by this point, although no part of me – body or mind – was left untainted by the fear of her, the fear that she was one of them. It didn’t matter what I thought, what my mind was doing – when she went to kiss me my head pulled backwards instinctively.

  ‘Kiss me,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ I said, more brusquely than I had intended, although I wanted to, I wanted to feel her teeth sinking in. She pushed down on my shoulders and I knelt before her. She parted her legs slightly and I touched her between them and felt that she wanted this too. I took off the brief scrap of white cloth that covered her. We were both naked now. My knees were wet and I looked down to see that the ground was turning sloppy, and it must be blood, I thought. Blood. I looked over to the pile of bodies and saw that they were bleeding profusely. They had not bled at all when I was alone. It was as if some rule or some natural law had been suspended. Had all of their dead hearts just started beating in order to pump that sudden blood from their mouths, from the holes in their chests, stomachs? I remembered Graham talking about the grid, his science, his earnest concern, his panic.

  I pulled Jennifer to the ground and pushed her on to her back. She leant up to kiss me again, but I forced her down and held her arms and slid inside her easily. Her arms and my hands were half submerged in that bloody mud and still the stuff cascaded down from the little fell, waterfalls of blood running from a hundred mouths, spilli
ng over the other bodies and creating that ooze for us to writhe in. I held her down so that she couldn’t raise her head to kiss me or bite me and she arched her back.

  ‘Get behind me,’ she whispered.

  I withdrew and she rolled over on to her front, supporting herself on all fours. Her breasts and flat stomach were covered in mud, mud that I knew would be rusty in colour if the light was true and full, and the stuff dripped from her budding nipples as we juddered forwards and back, making them look bigger, longer. She lowered her head and threw it backwards, her hair streaming across my face. I reached underneath to find her clitoris.

  Between her fingers the weird earth slimed up. I looked at the back of her head and wondered if her face had changed shape, if her mouth was stretching open like it was giving birth.

  Every beat of my heart sent a jerky pulse through my penis and simultaneously seemed to bring fresh gouts of blood from the openings in the bodies in the corner. I watched them and I saw this, saw this connection, and they had become part of our sex. Everything was collapsing together. She groaned and shook as she came, driving her face into the ground, her teeth finding one of my fingers, closing, breaking the skin.

  She twisted away and turned to face me and grasped at that suddenly exposed part of me that was slippery and cold, covered with her internal fluids. I felt the orgasmic heat start to build deep within, and this was the beginning of the end. But she slipped and fell into the hole, disappearing into the dark. She rose up, her side orange and her front blue, and took my glistening orange erection into her mouth. It started to happen quickly, unstoppably, and it was only as I sensed the gathering of the first muscular spasm that I realised where I was, and I thought about her teeth closing on me again. I pulled out of her mouth and it was immediately then, as I started to turn away, that the thick white seed flew from my body, arcing across to her side, falling, always falling, and vanished into the black pit. I watched it and I thought, that came from inside of me.