The Fallen Boys

by Aaron Dries

  He looked like a man, like a person who had the potential to string words together, like a person who might be able to sit down and work in an office, pushing keys and controlling other peoples’ lives; like a person who someone might fall in love with; a person who would make a wonderful father.

  Only he wasn’t any of those things.

  Within the husk something bounced and vibrated. It was energy. Horror. It was the image of a demon jerking off in the dark. It was a nun, her habit pulled up to expose her vagina, fucking a shotgun.

  Sexual. Infantile. Stupid.

  Terrifying.

  “‘Time’s put the end in my Endsville, a stake in the heart of the USA.’”

  The machete whistled through the air and embedded in Brian’s neck.

  Something in Marshall woke up.

  Guy yanked on the weapon, dislodging the blade.

  Crack.

  Marshall screamed.

  Brown blood spurt through the air, covering the floor, coating the ceiling. Some landed on the light bulb and simmered and smoked, casting half of the room in a scarlet glow. Napier hacked at Brian’s neck again and the head split from his body and tumbled into his lap before landing on the concrete.

  Whatever numb defense Marshall had been guarding himself with vanished.

  Terror exploded. Marshall heard Guy’s spiel unrolling in his ear for the first time. He saw images of himself being cut open, gutted, a nail driven into his gum—Marshall saw the boy tied to the wheelchair. He saw his wounds

  (oh to be that age again!)

  and screamed louder—so loud his voice cracked and only a high-pitched sigh escaped.

  Marshall watched the boy kick and jerk and knew this fate awaited him.

  You’re going to scream, just like the others did.

  Napier threw down the machete. Clang.

  Marshall wriggled and shook himself against his binds until it burnt. And through it all, he continued to scream, mouth open and no sound coming out. A river of saliva ran from between his teeth, dripping onto his chest.

  Napier picked up Brian’s severed head. He weighed it in his hands, up-and-down, just the way someone would inspect a chunk of meat before purchasing. Napier held it there, still and immobile. But only for a second—the next, he threw the head at the concrete floor with all of his might. A sickening crunch.

  Napier crouched down, straining his haunches. “Oh shit, my back,” he moaned. “Not as young as I was.” But he persevered. He picked up the head and inserted his fingers into the exposed throat, yanked hard and tossed the sloppy mess onto the floor. “Yuck,” he said.

  Marshall wanted to close his eyes but he couldn’t. Something deep within him told him that he needed to see this so he could prepare himself for what was to come. His eyes ran with water, but he blinked through it. He forgot to breathe and started to turn blue.

  Napier inserted his hand into the neck and forced his fingers beneath the skin of Brian’s lower jaw, working it like a puppet. He stood with a grunt and swooned around the room, dancing on the spot, singing.

  “‘I’m waltzing with the wrecking ball, ’cause this ain’t my home anymore.’”

  Napier danced in and out of shadow, from red to all the colors of the stained glass. He spiraled on the spot and made a ring of blood around him; it splashed over Marshall’s thighs. It felt cold, which surprised him. Isn’t blood meant to be warm? he wondered.

  That’s because the kid’s been dying for a long time.

  Sound burned bright. Marshall fainted away.

  Chapter Forty-One

  The sun over James Bridge bled across the sky. The town appeared abandoned; dust devils swirled in the wind. Buildings shivered in wavering heat waves.

  Marshall walked The Bridge’s streets, some of which were wide enough to allow four buses, whilst others were unpaved and narrow. There was no consistency, no elegance to the town planning. Nothing felt finished, or fully realized. Some said these features were a part of the town’s charm. But there was bitterness in the streets; something seethed that he couldn’t see but had always been aware of.

  Houses stared like the open-mouthed faces of dead children. Out past Combi-Chance on the outskirts of town, there was an abandoned cattle ranch, the old doors screaming when the wind poked and prodded at the rusty hinges. A dusty playground near the carnival oval. There were no children there today.

  He knew there was a homeless man who lived under Flagman’s Bridge. The kids used to say he fed off goats and brown snakes, that his teeth had been whittled down to points. Although Marshall had never seen the man, he never doubted his existence. It could be sensed, and that was enough for many. Some said the same man was a millionaire.

  But Marshall knew that if you looked hard enough you’d find humor. Kindness.

  Somewhere.

  But there was none of this humor or kindness on this day. The town was inert. Flat. Whatever magic wove its way through those wide and sometimes untended roads had been killed by the dream.

  A hot, swampy wind blew through the trees, throwing leaves against Marshall’s back. It was summer in James Bridge—a season he’d almost forgotten about. For so long he’d experienced nothing but rain and cold and endless drizzle. Walking today reminded him of what it was like to have the sun on his skin, to have an Australian Christmas—all sweat and afternoon naps.

  Marshall was home.

  He walked down Maitland Street, passing the two pubs on either side of the road, their wide doors open. The Chinese takeaway store—which had been Marshall’s sole exposure to foreign food until his late adolescence—was now overrun with vines and moss. The front window was shattered in a web of glittering scars. There were broken bottles glowing in the afternoon light in front of the Video Store where he’d worked for a year and a half. In those aisles he’d discovered inspiration and love for the cinema, both the good and the bad. He remembered the VHS covers staring up at him, the bucket full of old, torn posters on sale for fifty cents each. They had lined the walls of his bedroom for many years. Marshall and his school friends had discovered that when you took a video off the rear wire shelf, you saw the back covers of the films on the opposite side. There, they saw brown breasts, nipples in mouths. Huge cocks. They saw the letter X, like a branding on a cow’s hide. Marshall remembered how it had excited him and of how they had spoken about what they’d seen in hushed, excited voices later on.

  Marshall blinked and stood in another part of town.

  He stood before an old vacant lot full of dead trucks and wood piles. Windshields covered in grme. Broken furniture in the shade of the eucalyptus trees. Here, he and the same friends used to play—even though they weren’t supposed to. It’s dangerous there, their parents said. Glass everywhere. Snakes. Spiders.

  They didn’t care—they were kids. There was no danger in words like snakes and spiders, there was only adventure. Games. They played cards in the collapsed hub of a semi-trailer, and made small fires at sunset just to watch them burn. One afternoon, one of his closest friends—who in a couple of years time would step onto their school bus with the remains of his first shave tucked behind his ear—had been climbing through the wood pile and stepped on a rusty nail that had wormed its way out of the rickety throng. Marshall could still hear the boy’s screams, and could still see the way his flip-flop was nailed to the underside of his foot.

  Blood stained the grass as they ran to get help.

  The shouts of adult voices.

  He was now in another place within the town limits—but only just.

  There was a bottle-green bench on the side of the road; it was covered in graffiti and bird shit. Next to the bench was a sign that read, BUS STOPS HERE. Marshall used to catch the bus into Maitland—a good half an hour drive—many, many times to go to the homes of friends, to the cinema and later, to senior high school.

  But it was the trips to the Reading Cinema in town that lingered the most. When Marshall closed his eyes, he could still see the plush bus seats and t
aste the excited expectation of the film he was en route to see. Each movie was a doorway into a more exciting life. It was a way out. And yet, it was more than just that. They were journeys to places he never thought he’d go. There were dinosaurs and mighty spaceships captained by men who answered to Spielberg and Lucas. It was a wonderful, safe place, smelling of dust and hot butter, where happiness could be bought for five dollars a ticket.

  There were thundering sounds from the west.

  Marshall turned towards the sun and saw the open fields, the hickory grass swirling. It took him a minute to realize that the sound he’d heard wasn’t thunder at all, but the echoes of exploding bombs at the Singleton army camp, twenty minutes drive north. He’d always hated those sounds.

  They scared him.

  The field was treeless; no life stirred there. He couldn’t see any birds and there were no insects among the flowers. The field, like the town itself, felt unfinished; as though it only existed when he was looking at it. Beyond the reach of his eyes, James Bridge was nothing but a black hole drawing in on itself, and into that darkness went voices and people and pets and memories. The hole was a mouth, chewing and swallowing.

  Sharp teeth waiting for him to turn his back.

  Marshall was in a new location.

  It was the local Catholic school that he’d attended as a child. The last time he’d been there was on the day of Noah’s funeral—they’d had his wake in the hall, serving weak coffee and tea to people that he didn’t know.

  Marshall gripped the porch handrail. He could see one of Noah’s memorial ribbons caught in a rose bush near the principal’s office. In front of him was the great peppercorn tree where he and his schoolmates had played marbles for recesses on end. There was a silver bench in its shade and on it sat an ancient woman.

  Marshall had never forgotten her face.

  When he and Claire had decided to travel in different directions after falling for each other in Thailand, she’d gone to Vancouver via Seattle and he’d taken a brief trip to Vietnam. The plan had been to meet her in a month. Marshall hadn’t been quite ready to leave behind a life without responsibilities and adventure at the time. After all, for so long he’d never thought he would ever get to see the world—it had been such a small town mentality. It hadn’t been so long ago that he’d thought he would live and die in James Bridge without ever going more than two hours in any direction.

  But he’d budgeted well and still had the finances—and the determination—to see a little more, so off they had each gone. Even though Marshall was having fun in Vietnam, he missed Claire in a way he never thought he could miss someone. He longed for her. For her auburn hair in his hands. Her taste.

  It was a long month.

  He had seen the old woman on a corner of a busy Saigon market, surrounded by severed dog paws and pig’s ears. Her face was full of grease and grime, black in parts. Powdery eyes blinded by her failing cataracts. A tin can in her hand, rattling a few loose coins. The old woman’s legs were each the width of her torso, bulging outwards like potato-filled sacks. One foot was missing, the other whittled down into a crablike claw. Around her neck she wore a sign, the two misspelled words had been printed in thick lettering by a shaking hand. AGNT ORUNGE it read.

  Marshall had looked down on her with pity and walked away without giving her a donation. He was young and stubborn. It wasn’t his responsibility to provide for her. He hadn’t doused the country in warfare toxin. He wasn’t to blame.

  I’m just a tourist. I’m a fucking nobody. I don’t have any money myself—

  And now she haunted his childhood, his dreams. Tin can still in hand, crying tears from her eggshell eyes in the shade of the great peppercorn tree. Her pleas carried on the wind. The rattle of the coins.

  Bombs exploded in the distance, rocking the earth. They felt closer now.

  Marshall was in the church next to the school, standing at the pulpit, surrounded by wilted flowers. The white-washed walls were so bright they highlighted the hand prints of bored children; he’d been one of them once.

  Christmas Mass in this very room. The memory had a taste: stale bread and sweets. Marshall could still see the entire town crammed within the church, shoulder-to-shoulder, sweating over the pews. Complaints between homilies. Someone always dropped the hymn book at the most inopportune moment and the sound of it slamming against the floor was almost as loud as the army base explosions. One year, the electric fans stopped working mid-service and the room had filled with the stench of the townsfolk—at the tabernacle nativity, the ten-year-old Joseph fainted. Everyone stood up and started to panic; the shouting of startled mothers; the madness of heat. Marshall thought it was the least boring Christmas mass he’d ever attended. It stormed later that night.

  He looked down on the empty church.

  The Christ figure stared at his back from His place on the cross.

  Marshall could hear the echoes of the eulogy he gave for Noah.

  The windows to his left were wide open and he could feel the warmth of the sunset. His son’s grave could be seen from the pew.

  “I want to wake up,” he said to the room.

  The church shook in the wake of another explosion; a huge crack split one wall in two. Plaster fell from the ceiling. Marshall gripped the sides of the pew and squeezed. Terror cut through him. He refused to turn around—refused to acknowledge the new sounds scratching at his ears.

  No, don’t look. He wants you to look—

  The sound of nails being pried from wood.

  In his mind he saw the waxen Christ, malnourished and whipped and bleeding, climbing down from his cross. He moved in jagged, nightmare jumps, His lacquered feet dragging across the altar.

  “I want to wake up,” he said again, desperate and raw.

  Thump.

  Thump.

  Thump.

  Marshall could feel the vibrations running through the floor, up into his legs, through his chest. Into his head. The vibrations masked softly spoken words—words meant just for him.

  I’m coming for you, Marshall.

  Another crack opened in the right hand side wall. Somewhere, there was screaming. Marshall wanted to close his eyes but the dream denied this. Instead, whatever subconscious power gave strength to the dream now turned his head against his will.

  “Oh God.”

  His body was stiff as a board as it spun in a delicate, slow-moving arc. His eyes passed the window and he saw Noah’s grave. The old woman with the bloated legs and the clawed foot dug at the soil near the headstone. Her expression was nothing short of manic. The scrawled sign around her neck was folded in half and wedged between her drooping breasts. As the sun dipped closer to the horizon, the old woman’s clothes began to burn away, turning to dust, revealing more scars and deformities. Her wounds were bound with barbed wire, the welts twitched and puckered like a hundred diseased mouths. When she arched her back, Marshall saw a line of dinner forks embedded along her spine. She continued to grind her brittle fingers against the earth, tearing flesh from her bones and tossing tufts of dirt over her shoulder.

  Marshall continued to spin. The window slid out of sight.

  “Please.”

  The word slipped out of him. Had he any control he would’ve bitten his tongue. His life had become one big plea after another. Please bring back my son. Please bring back my wife. Please don’t hurt him. Please don’t hurt me.

  He stopped spinning, but the power didn’t let go. He still couldn’t move.

  To his surprise, Christ was still on His cross.

  Marshall stood face-to-face with the clown who had witnessed Noah’s suicide. His murder.

  The clown bore no expression, just the painted face that seemed to hide a world’s worth of truths. Marshall wanted to say something, but the words were lost to him. Better that than another plea, he thought. Better some pride.

  The clown opened his mouth to free the torrent of blood, which sprayed wide and fast, painting them both red.

  C
hapter Forty-Two

  Water splashed up Marshall’s legs, jerking him from his dream. One moment he was frozen at the church altar before the clown with the bleeding mouth, and the next, back in the basement. Nothing more than a thin film of consciousness separated the two worlds, and neither offered relief from the other. It also appeared he had no free will in either place—he was bound and tortured in both.

  A man stood with his back to him, hosing the concrete floor. Marshall shook off his sluggishness, and aching, and traced the contours of the stranger’s body. Bulging waistline under a plastic apron. Broad shoulders. Ham-hock arms swishing the hose spray in effeminate little flicks.

  Marshall remembered the second man at the playground. The fat man with the weaker voice. The insecure one. He panted when he was excited.

  A fraction of a second flew by, and in that second, Marshall thought he was dead. Purgatory—the waiting room between this and yet another world where there was no relief. In that fraction of a second he saw his life in slivers. Childhood in James Bridge. Adulthood in Sydney. Torture in Vancouver. And now this nowhere place where there was no natural light and the pipes groaned.

  “Help me,” Marshall said.

  The fat man jumped and twirled around on the spot, an arc of water following suit. He grabbed his chest with one rubber-gloved hand, his face twisted with shock.

  Marshall saw the tired, wet eyes. His jowls. And was sickened.

  “You ’bout scared the life outta me,” the stranger said, laughing. The sound hurt Marshall’s ears.

  “Let me go. Please untie me. I’ll just walk away. I won’t tell anyone—”