A steep concrete staircase led down into a fathomless darkness; as I stepped down I briefly questioned my actions then pushed the thought away. I was acting on pure impulse now, shutting off my mind and going with my gut instinct. If I stopped, I would panic: if I panicked, I would bolt––probably drawing attention to my presence in the process. All I needed was one look, a single glimpse into what I knew must be the control room of this sinister organization. Then I could go to the police armed with proof, and bolstered by the knowledge that I wasn’t imagining some convoluted conspiracy and these people actually existed.
The stairs led into a large basement, and it was blacker than night down there; there was no natural illumination, and I doubted that I would find a light switch even if I were foolish enough to try. So I walked into the gloom, so afraid by now that I couldn’t halt my momentum, like a man running full-tilt down a very steep incline. I was simply a series of actions, with little thought behind them.
Soon I was lost in the dark, unable to even guess at which direction was out. After a while I began to see shapes form out of the darkness: sketchy figures propped against the seeping black walls. There was no sound in there but that of my own ragged breathing, so I knew that the figures were corpses; immediately after this realization, I became certain that they were the bodies stolen from the morgue. I slowly counted the outlines that sat slumped against the bowing brickwork: there were six of them. Half a dozen.
My feet slipped on the slimy earthen floor as I advanced further into the room, looking for an object to take away with me as solid evidence. Something crunched loudly underfoot, and I pitched sideways in a clumsy fall. As I went down my right hand pushed against, then slid off some vaguely familiar shape on the floor. My fingers poked into moist holes, and I felt teeth rattle against my wedding ring. A face. There was a face on the floor.
I looked down, unable to help myself. Blind eyes stared back at me, an open mouth yawning emptily into the chill air of the room. It was only then that I realized I’d been walking on the dead all along; mutilated bodies lay in a thick carpet of decay on the basement floor, and as my eyes at last became accustomed to the darkness I realized that not one of them was Caucasian. I was lying on a crust of murdered immigrants.
And that was when I saw al-hakim. Or rather what was left of him. The top half of his torso stood upright amid a heap of severed limbs to my immediate left, his torn face sporting what were obviously teeth marks. Bleached bone showed through like plastic where hungry mouths had scooped out hunks of his wrinkled golden brown cheeks.
I looked again at those six immobile figures that leaned against the wall, at their lurid sports casuals and stained Burberry baseball caps. Something strained at the centre of my mind, a thought that couldn’t quite escape its cage. And then they moved. The bodies. All six of them, twitching and jerking like marionettes as they attempted to get to their feet. But still not breathing, not any of them. They were dead; but they moved. Towards me.
It was only then that I managed to regain control of my senses, and ran blindly across the corpse-layered floor, looking for an exit. The figures reached for me as I fled, loose white fingers groping for my living flesh, but I kicked them away, screaming now and not caring who heard. It was only through blind luck that I stumbled upon the stairs, my flailing hands bashing against the chipped concrete and three fingers breaking against the jagged treads. I climbed them in a blind frenzy, wanting only to get out. To be away from that place and those things…
Nobody accosted me on my way back to the car; it was as if I didn’t matter, they didn’t care what I’d seen because nobody would believe me anyway. I sat behind the wheel for an hour, just waiting and watching the greasy sun struggle up from the eastern rim of the world. If they wanted to silence me, they had only to come for me. As I sat there attempting to set my broken fingers I thought about how easy it would be to steal a few corpses, especially if the authorities were in on it. And I thought about what it might take to raise the resentful dead. To focus all the rage and the bitterness, the hostility and xenophobia that exists at street level to something higher, something darker. Call it urban magic, ghetto voodoo.
If you could bring back the dead you could do anything, even use the undead puppets at your command to cleanse your town, your country, and whip up even more crude bigotry and warped nationalism along the way. Dress them up in England shirts and tracksuit bottoms, and send them out to feast on the foreign invaders, to consume before we are consumed.
When I finally started the engine a watercolor dawn was smearing itself across the steel-grey sky. Curtains were opening in windows on the estate––early risers getting ready to face the new day. As I drove back to my family, to my own imperfect little world, I knew that I wouldn’t ever fully understand what I’d seen. But what exactly had I seen? Even now, eighteen months later, I cannot be fully sure. But I’m certain that it’s still out there, in some form or another, perhaps biding its time in some fetid basement darkness, growing angry and hungry and waiting to be unleashed.
It was only when I arrived home that I realized they––whoever they are––had known about me all along. They must have been monitoring me, waiting to see how much I would learn. Someone must have tipped them off about my interest in the disappearance of al-hakim. Perhaps it was Claire, consuming before she herself was consumed by whatever the fuck stalks in darkness. I just don’t know. I’m not sure of anything anymore; I don’t even know what is real and what exists only in my mind.
The front door was ajar, and as I walked into the hallway my heart stopped beating. I felt dead; as dead as those things that must have come lurching through the twilight towards everything that I held dear.
Tanya was lying face down on the stairs, her left arm stretched out before her as if she’d been reaching towards something upstairs. The nursery. The back of her head was red and matted, the ivory bone of her skull showing through in patches. I didn’t turn her over; didn’t want to see the expression on her face. I looked up, towards the upstairs landing. The bathroom door had been kicked in; it hung from its hinges like a bomb had gone through it. I felt my body move, taking each stair as if it were a mile high. I knew what I would find when I walked into the nursery, and I wanted to delay the sight as long as I could; forever, if that was possible.
Tears streaked my face, but my throat was too constricted to release any sound. I didn’t want to know, didn’t want to see, but still I had to ascend and acknowledge what had happened. As I stepped onto the landing carpet, I imagined Tanya moving behind me, raising her head and opening her mouth to reveal a gaping darkness at the centre of her. Lifting herself to her feet and shambling up after me.
But that didn’t happen; not yet. Hopefully, it never will.
By the time the police found me cradling Jude’s cold, cold body in my warm hands, the tears had finally stopped. The world spun around me like some mad, gaudy carousel, and I could sense things hiding in the shadows of the world. I looked up at the uniformed officers, and had a vague recollection of summoning them with the mobile phone that now lay on the floor under Jude’s crib. I looked at my daughter’s pale face, smiled at her and wished her pleasant dreams and prayed to God that her sleep would last forever.
I told the police officers about the house in Wishwell––of course I did; but it was no use. They didn’t see what I had. The apocalypse in the cellar was still there, although nothing else remained but the images in my mind. Their colleagues had probably been there first, hastily shepherding those un-breathing things into the back of a van and relocating them to somewhere else in the depths of the estate.
I didn’t do it: I didn’t kill my all of those people. But nobody will believe me, not the police, the psychologists, or the friends that have deserted me since my arrest. I miss my family, my babies. They would have believed me.
And somewhere out there––in the shithole squalor of a broken-down housing estate––it’s still happening. I read the newspapers with interes
t, specifically the stories of attacks on foreigners. Last week, an Asian child went missing. The week before that, it was a Serbian mother of three. It’s started again.
It’s getting dark outside, and nights are the worst. That’s when I hear uneven shuffling footsteps in the corridor outside my cell, and hear my name whispered, as if by the wind.
Muddy Waters
BRIAN KNIGHT
The big man was not photogenic; he was a conglomeration of sun burnt scalp, greasy red facial hair, and sallow, liver spotted skin. Mona watched the tape, listening to her questions and his grunted, mumbled replies with a mixture of awe and disgust. After the interview he had grabbed her ass and asked her out.
She would use the footage anyway, it leant her piece the rustic roughness it needed. It was only a five minute story, and not even a lead, but she meant to upstage KLUTV’s star reporter, the bitch Susan Potter, every chance she got until the producers either promoted her for her efforts, or she got a better offer.
Her crude interviewee, a saw shop owner named Harris Baugh, stood beside the seldom traveled highway outside the little town of Pierce, Idaho, next to the narrow dirt side road and a sign that said Campbell’s Pond - 5 Miles. All around them was the green of Spruce and Pine, supported by a thick base of Huckleberry bushes and other underbrush. The narrow road to Campbell’s Pond was like a dim corridor into nowhere. Above them the sky was gray with clouds, it had rained only minutes after the conclusion of her interview with Baugh, who was returning from a fishing trip at the pond when they talked him into the interview.
“It ain’t a natural pond,” he said. “I don’t think anybody knows for sure how it got there, but legend has it old Preacher Campbell did it in the early eighteen hundreds when Pierce was called Oro-fino City.” Baugh turned from the camera, stared down the shaded pond road, eyes narrowed and beard bristling. “His old church house is still out in the woods, there’s a trail that goes to it, but folks around here mostly leave it alone.”
“How did Preacher Campbell create Campbell’s Pond, and why.”
“He didn’t create it lady, he was one of God’s preachers, not God himself.” Baugh smiled at his wit, and continued, “There’s a creek that feeds it, Oro-fino Creek. Campbell diverted it into the valley where the pond is now, then spent the last few months of his life damming the other end up with dead fallen trees, rocks, and dirt. The department of lands dumped their own load of rock on it about ten years ago when they built the road to the campground over it. It leaks a little, but stays full with the creek still feeding it.
“Why,” he said with a far off look that wanted to be thoughtful but came across as dimwitted. “God only knows.”
The camera paned back to Mona, looking out of her element in her crisp KLUTV wardrobe. “It was at Campbell’s Pond Camping Ground where little Timothy Walker was last seen. Timmy Walker, seven years old last January, was last seen around the shore of Campbell’s Pond and is presumed drowned.” She wore her solemn face like a mask, could exchange it with any of her many camera faces without an effort. She was convincing. “Mr. Baugh, could you detail the search for Timmy Walker.”
The camera paned back to Baugh, who seconds before was fixated on Mona’s breasts. He looked up just before the camera can catch his drooling stare. “Well, me and some other fellows from town,” he poked a thumb back in the direction of Pierce, “we searched the woods all around here. We searched the old church house and fished around the shores of the pond.”
“Why didn’t the Search and Rescue search the pond more thoroughly? Campbell’s Pond isn’t large, or deep.”
Baugh’s stance became defensive at that question, as if she had called him a coward. “Lady, only a fool would go out in that water. There are almost two hundred years of rotten trees, pondweed, and lilies at the bottom of that puddle. The waters so muddy a man would be stuck fast down there before he knew it.” Then, like an afterthought, “I’ve fished here since I was a kid, bit I’ve never like that pond.”
The cameraman panned back to Mona on cue. “You mean you’ve come here all these years and never once went into the water.”
Again, Baugh’s wide face filed the screen. He paused, seemed to be in deep thought. Probably for dramatic effect, then concluded. “Lady, not on a dare.”
* * *
Mona stopped the tape and grinned, satisfied. The station gave her shit stories and she turned them into gold.
“Kiss my ass, Susan,” she said, sliding the news van’s side door open and stepping out into the quiet campground. She knew that it would be full again by Saturday, drowning or no drowning these locales loved their fishing, but on that Wednesday afternoon, it was deserted. Her only company was a lone moose, as big as a horse and with a monstrous spread of antlers. It trod lazily in the shallow water at the far end of the pond, eating strings of slimy weed and lilies from the surface.
She decided to wander around for a bit, take in the scenery and find some good angles for filler footage while the cameraman was back in town with her car picking up food and picnic supplies. Since there were no campers out today, and no crackling campfires to take pictures of, she decided they would create their own. Roast a few hotdogs and marshmallows like campers do. Mike, the cameraman, was pretty good looking and not too dumb, so maybe when they got back to the station she’d talk him into buying her a drink or two. She’d thought of trying him out while they were up here all alone, but she wanted to get promoted, not fired.
The campground consisted of several interconnected clearings, some pond side and others farther away. Each boasted a picnic table, fire pit, and concrete barriers to mark a parking spot. There were a handful of public restrooms, little more than glorified port-a-potties which Mona didn’t care to explore, and three fishing docks that reached into the pond’s muddy waters like slimy wooden fingers. It was all too quaint, too typical. Your average Idaho mountain campground. She wanted something more distinct, a memorable parting shot for her story.
Mona walked to a camp spot on the perimeter of the campground, farthest from the road out to the highway, spotted a trail into the forest beyond, and followed it. She didn’t know where Preacher Campbell’s old church house was, or even if it still existed as Baugh claimed, but if it was out there she meant to get footage of it.
Much of the wood out here was dead. She didn’t know who owned the land, but whoever it was had chosen not to log or thin the area. The last few years had been dry ones, so all it would take is a touch of lightning, or a carelessly flung cigarette but to burn this wilderness up. As she got deeper into the woods the trail forked and branched.
She continued on the straightest path, noticing how it became rougher and less hospitable the farther she walked. Deadwood littered the stony, uneven path. Wild shrub, thistle, and what looked like nightshade crowded in. Low hanging limbs, which were trimmed away from the trail farther back, became an increasing annoyance, and she had to duck and twist around them every few feet. Mona knew she was working on assumption, but right now assumption was all she had to work with. It made sense that if the locals who frequented the campground left the old church house alone, the trail there would not be maintained. Finally the trail ended, swallowed up by the woods, a dead end. She cursed her luck, and the wasted time, when a sound in the distance caught her ears. Probably a dear or something, breaking through the brush as it fled her presence. She didn’t see it, but when she looked she did see an old weather worn building, brooding in the darkness of a tightly packed clearing.
If the trail had been neglected, then the old wood plank structure had been blighted. The walls were a warped mess, the windows, which might have once held glass, were ugly moss lined sockets. There was no front door, just an old flap of burlap nailed over the entrance, caked with moss and filth. Someone had spray painted the legend God Damned This Place on it in bright hunter orange letters. Even the bit of rural graffiti was old, dull. That the place still stood was a wonder of the ages, or at least the past two centuries. Standin
g, somewhat crookedly, atop the square, two-story structure was a bell tower, minus the bell.
Mona approached the building with some trepidation. She wasn’t bothered by the morbid legend painted on the rotting cloth door, or even the utter decrepitude of the place, but by the thought that some large, perhaps dangerous animal might have a den in the deserted church. She knew that these woods supported bears and mountain lions, maybe even a few wolves, and though most simply ran at the sight of a human, that hungry or hurt animals were very likely to attack a lone traveler.
She stepped to the door, almost screaming as her foot struck something small and furry. A large squirrel, laying on its side, staring up at her with eyes the pale color of curdled milk. It was quite dead, its matted fir crawling with flies and not a few maggots. The tail twitched slightly, the work of undead nerves, or maybe an imperceptible breeze. She watched it closely for a few moments, but it remained dead. The tail did not move.
She stepped around the small corpse and grabbed the edge of the rotting burlap and pulled it slowly to the side. No animals were in evidence, what she could see in the darkness within were a few old wooden chairs, rotting in neat rows, and a primitive looking pulpit, the sign on the cross was carved into its graying wood.
A dry rustle, the sound of breaking limbs and disturbed brush, made her jump, dropping the cloth back into place. She breathed deeply, cursed herself for being so damned spooked, but could not bring herself to open up the burlap flap again. Maybe later, with Mike at her side and the camera rolling, but not now.
Best New Zombie Tales Trilogy (Volume 1, 2 & 3) Page 18