I was shaking when I woke up, as though I’d seen something I wasn’t supposed to. It was a long time before I could get back to sleep, or even wanted to, afraid I might see Jared on hands and knees, fueled by regret and emptiness, rooting in the piles of pigshit, saying, “I know it’s here. I know it’s here someplace.”
But I don’t see Jared anymore.
He’s around, though. I’ve seen the writing on the wall.
It was weeks before I made the connection, entertaining the notion that the painted silhouettes which had begun appearing on building walls had come from Jared’s hand. No two were the same, black silhouettes as crisp as shadows thrown by someone who could have been standing right next to you, but wasn’t. Each one looked tensed, as if startled by the coming of something that cast no shadow of its own. There was one on our building, one on Terry’s. One inside the alley where Serge had been murdered. Others, and I wondered if they’d been chosen at random, or if they too had some special significance.
Now and then I’d hear people talk about them, wherever people lingered, and the silhouettes were spoken of with great curiosity. Where they’d come from, what they meant. Everyone loves a mystery.
But no one else had been privy to the things that Jared found most significant when he looked at the world. No one else had sat with him one evening while he paged through a book, horrified and fascinated by photos shot fifty years earlier in the wastelands of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of the silhouettes of human beings that had been seared onto walls at the instant of the bomb blasts.
What if those were their souls, he’d wondered, souls yearning in that instant of sublime and blinding violence for some record of their passing, even as their bodies were vaporized.
It gave us something to think about.
And now, every day, I look at the silhouette he painted on the side of our building, hoping I’ll find it gone. Hoping against all rationality that in the night it will have peeled itself free of the bricks, and gone seeking the flesh where it so rightfully belongs.
But even if I get my wish, what a long search it has ahead.
The city grows at night, and I don’t see Jared anymore.
* * * *
Brian Hodge has published six novels, Dark Advent, Oasis, Nightlife, Deathgrip, The Darker Saints and Prototype, and close to seventy short stories and novelettes in a wide variety of magazines and anthologies. His first collection of tales, The Convulsion Factory, was themed around the idea of urban decay and was a finalist nominee for the Bram Stoker Award. A second collection, Falling Idols, features stories with spiritual and outré religious themes. When he’s not playing the didjeridoo, Hodge reviews music and books and has been scripting for comics publisher Verotik. About ‘Little Holocausts’ he says: ‘My girlfriend and I had driven through several hours of cold autumn rain to spend a weekend with a houseful of friends. As soon as we arrived, we learned that the long-time partner of one of the friends we’d expected to be there had died the night before, of AIDS complications. So we went back out into the rain with everyone else to attend the wake. I’d not yet met the man who died, and would not have recognized him from a picture that I saw, he’d changed so. After the wake, several of us went to the apartment he’d shared with our friend - the home where he’d died - and we ate and drank and laughed and told stories, the way you do at these times. You laugh a lot. At one point I walked into the empty kitchen for another Heineken and noticed a box of adult diapers, waiting to go out to the trash, no longer needed. In its implications, that sight was just the most heartbreaking thing. The whole story came out of that moment. That, and this climate of intolerance we live in that never really seems to go away.’
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* * * *
Fat Mary
JULIAN RATHBONE
It was, I suppose, a small thatched cottage, but you don’t see them like that any more - a two roomed cabin, made of mediaeval daub - a mixture of cow-dung and fine gravel, terracotta-coloured where the whitewash had peeled off. The thatch was dark brown, covered with blackish moss, roof-tree sagging. There was nothing picturesque about it at all, no briar-roses, no hollyhocks. Thin chickens squabbled over the dusty yard, a white lean rooster with a spare handful of tail feathers racketed amongst them, occasionally fucking them. The hens paid no attention, often just went on desperately pecking at the ground for a grain or seed they might have missed.
There was a shed, a barn and a stable. In the stable, in a stall too small for her, a fat old sow suckled six out of eight piglets. She had eaten the two runts along with all the afterbirths in order to have milk for the others.
There was a pond, shrunk in July, within a saucer of chocolate-coloured cracked mud, sheeted with emerald green algae and beside it a dung-heap which heaved with thin white worms.
It was all set at the top end of a narrow coombe at the end of a chalky track that threaded the three ten-acre fields she had. The steep sides of the downs were filled with beech and birch woods, but the back end was crowned with an ancient yew forest, planted by Henry VIII to provide longbows. Too late someone told him about gunpowder so the trees were never used.
We crouched in hiding on the edge of the beech wood, James and I, watched, waited and speculated. We were pupils at Minster Hill, a boarding school that claimed to be a public school. Minster Hill prided itself on its progressive approach to education so, on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, we were let out to walk around the countryside at will.
We were wearing the summer uniform - grey Vyella shirts with sleeves rolled up, grey corduroy shorts, very baggy and loose, wollen stockings, sandals. The sandals were impractical, but there we were, there was nothing we could do about that. I wore a sheathed SS dagger my uncle had brought back from Germany. The hilt was wound with silver wire and there was a swastika on the centre of the cross-guard. I carried it under my shirt when we left the school buildings, but threaded the sheath on to my belt as soon as we were clear.
It was a hot sultry day. The flies were a bother. We headed into the woods and searched out rotten silver birch trees, which, we had discovered, could be pushed over. Often you had to rock them first, then they would begin to crack, and at last they’d topple. Occasionally they would break in three or four places up the trunk and concertina down around us in a flurry of soft umber shards and dust. When we couldn’t find any more trees that would go, I took out my SS knife and we practised throwing it at the trunks of the beech trees. These were grey and wrinkled and put me in mind of the giant legs of huge elephants. It wasn’t easy to make the point stick in. You could either throw it point first in one sweeping underarm movement, a method which worked over short distances. Or, over five yards or more, we held it by the point and made it turn in the air three times or more, always hoping the point would hit the tree first. Sometimes it did.
After a time, when our throats were dry and prickly and an itchy sweat was building up inside the Vyella shirts, we sat awkwardly on the ground, undid our buttoned flies and pulled our pricks into the warm air. We did it to ourselves, not to each other. There was no passion in this, not even much friendliness. Indeed, back at school James and I were in different forms, different dormitories, kept away from each other, though occasionally we exchanged expressionless, unblinking glances when we met.
James was a dark, saturnine lad, pretty in a sort of Spanish or Levantine way, with olive skin and a mop of black hair. He said little, seemed to live in a world of his own.
When we’d done that we pushed on down the hill, through the trees, to the electric fence that bounded the highest of Fat Mary’s fields. And while we waited for her to appear (something which did not always happen) we rehearsed the myths that surrounded her, adding our own embellishments and speculations, and listened to the five second pulse on her wire - enough to keep her three Jersey cows in and the deer out.
‘She weighs sixteen stone.’
‘More like twenty.’
‘The hair on her chin is bristly.’
; ‘So is the hair between her legs.’
‘Her bosoms are great fat sacks of pink blancmange.’
‘With giant strawberries for nipples.’
In those days even to say words like ‘bosoms’ and ‘nipples’ was a thrill, a frisson, at any rate.
‘Her bottom is huge. Bigger than the two biggest melons you ever saw . . .’
‘Far bigger. And her bum-hole is a black pit.’
‘Her feet are rotting and smell like over-ripe Camembert. . .’
But we weren’t that interested in her feet.
‘On very hot days she takes off all her clothes and walks around with nothing on.’
‘On one very very hot day she made Smithson-Haig go into her bedroom and do it to her.’
‘So he says.’
‘Don’t you believe him?’
‘Not really.’
‘Nor do I.’
I pulled a long succulent stalk of milky barley grass, easing it from its cellulose sheath. I sucked it, then chewed.
‘Would you?’ I asked. ‘Would you go into her house if she asked you?’
‘Yes. If you came too.’
‘And do it to her?’
‘I don’t know about that.’
* * * *
The distant chug and rattle of a pre-war bull-nosed Morris had us looking back down the track. Changes in the note and speed of the engine and we knew that just out of sight, around the corner of the woods, Fat Mary had got out of the car, opened her five-bar gate, driven through, and closed it behind her. And here she came, driving between the fences, leaving a thin slipstream of chalk dust mingling with the black of her exhaust. A second fence and a second gate, then she half-circled the foetid pond and came to a standstill outside her tumble-down lattice-work porch. Hens and rooster scurried away towards the barn, the cows looked up from their pasture above her, a very large and mangy ginger tom woke up from wherever he had been sleeping and pushed his chin and cheek against the rough lisle of her stockings.
She was huge. And in spite of the July heat she was wearing a tweed suit, the heavy skirt cut long below her knees, the jacket mannish, very sensible shoes on her feet, and a sort of battered felt trilby on her head. She had gingery straw-coloured hair which was probably quite long since it was always bound up in a large bun above her neck, beneath the trilby. Her shoulders were broad and heavy, her back a rounded wall beneath the tweed. Her bosoms, behind a not over-clean white blouse and a structured bra or corset, forced the lapels of the jacket apart above one strained button. Her hands were like dinner plates with pink uncooked sausages for fingers.
Although we could scarcely make out her face, we had seen her in Sherborne on market days and knew that it was broad, once fair, now red with weather, with broken capillaries on the cheeks, small pale blue eyes widely spaced but almost lost beneath heavy lids, a spread stubby nose, a big mouth with rubbery lips and discoloured but otherwise large and healthy teeth. She had a large mole beneath the corner of her mouth, and yes, it did nourish bristly hair. Her voice was deep, as mannish as her jacket and shoes, the accent touched with Dorset, but not incomprehensibly broad.
She got out of the car, went round to the boot and hoisted a sack from it, feed of some sort, perhaps, or fertilizer, certainly a hundredweight. Grasping it around its waistless middle she carried it, not with ease but certainly without much difficulty, into the barn. Then she came back, wiping her hands down the sides of her massive hams, and plucked wicker baskets filled with brown-paper-wrapped or bagged shopping out of the back of the car. She put most of it on her doorstep, then reached to a ledge inside the porch for a big iron key and let herself into the cottage.
I batted flies off my forehead, eased my knees away from the coarse grass that had imprinted a network of ridges into them, and ran my tongue across my top lip.
‘Come on,’ I said, and stood up. ‘Show’s over.’
James looked back at me, up over his shoulder.
‘Maybe. Maybe not.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Follow me.’
And, bent double, he scouted along the fence and back into the wood. I followed him, but made a less than elaborate attempt to keep hidden. He pushed on, always near the fence to the meadow, and round to the top of the coombe and so into the edge of the yew forest. This was very different from the wood and I wasn’t too happy about going into it.
In the first place it was dark and gloomy and cool - after the heat, almost chilly. Almost nothing grew beneath the low heavy branches, leaving exposed a steep slope of dusty earth, flint stones and chalk. Amongst the dark oily green of the needles yew berries hung like drops of blood. These were obscene - first because they were notoriously very poisonous, but also because of their form. Each was a tiny succulent cup of red flesh nursing inside it a seed. At one and the same time they suggested to the adolescent mind the glans and foreskin of a nearly tumescent penis and some hazy speculative idea of what the parts of a girl might be like. If you squeezed the flesh they exuded a colourless ichor, balanced somewhere between stickiness and slime, which matched exactly the tiny drop of fluid that could hang on the end of your prick when it lost tumescence without ejaculation.
You must remember that all this took place fifty years ago when, for an adolescent boy in a boarding school, anything to do with sex was cloaked in ignorance and imbued with compulsively attractive feelings of deep, dark guilt.
But there was a second reason why the yew forest was a place of very ill omen. Twice, four years and two years previously, boys from Minster Hill had been found hanging from their belts from one of those dark, seamed boughs. The forensic details of their deaths had not been made public, though in both cases it was rumoured that sexual activity had preceded death and verdicts of suicide while the balance of the mind was disturbed were returned by a bemused and horrified jury. On both occasions the school Chaplain had used his sermon on the Sunday following the inquests to attack, in coded terms, the practice of masturbation, dwelling on the feelings of shame that could follow, a shame intense enough to make a young lad take his own life . . .
None of this seemed to bother James though he did keep to the lower edge of the forest. Presently he edged forward again as far as the fence that overlooked the meadow and, this time, the rear of Fat Mary’s smallholding. We were much closer than we had been before, not much more than a hundred yards away, and looking down on a graveyard of agricultural machinery.
An old tractor rotted away on huge flat tyres, the multiple tines of an ancient harrow looked like the ribs of a giant dead fish, the rust-red discs of a plough like saurian vertebrae. Grass and brambles grew through them, willow herb too, in spikes of dark pink bloom, and sorrel already brown and crusted with friable seeds. Long ago Fat Mary’s father and brothers had ploughed two of the fields each year and grown rape and flax, barley and oats. The brothers died in Burma, in the forgotten army, Mother hanged herself, Daddy died of drink. Fat Mary survived on and by the animals she reared and let the fields return to pasture.
There was also an ancient pump mounted on a fluted cast-iron column - the only water supply she had . . . And just then, as we settled down to watch again, the back door opened and she came out.
She had taken off all her clothes.
She went to the pump, worked the long handle, filled a bucket, tipped it over her head. Then she did the same again. Next, she scrubbed herself all over with a huge bar of green Fairy soap, before washing the suds away with a third bucketful. The fourth she took to the lean-to toilet shed at the end of the building. We fancied we could hear her pissing. Then she went back indoors. All in all she had been visible to us for about five minutes.
She was magnificent. In the bright, hot July sun her body glowed pearl and rose and a deeper red where her clothes had been too tight. Her neck was an ivory tree-trunk, her shoulders were like fat rounded hams. As she worked the pump, her huge breasts swung like sacks of cream netted in blue veins and nippled with discs like saucers. Once, whi
le pumping, she straightened and used her wrist to wipe the sweat from her brow which was streaked with her coarse, gingery hair and for a moment, upright, with her huge torso tilted back a little, she was a goddess.
When she tipped the flashing water over herself it slid through the suds, driving them down, and the acres of her skin looked sleek and strong like a whale’s. Her huge dimpled buttocks were so pressed together that the cleft was not obvious, until she put her hand between to soap inside, and when she turned her stomach hung like a stuffed hammock and all but buried in shadow the multiple creases beneath and the flattened triangle of straw.
The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Dark Terrors 05] Page 22