Most days now I’m too weak to get out of bed. At best, I sit in the chair by the window and gaze out over the fields and countryside. I thought I was ready. I thought I’d made my peace. But last night the first blizzard in twenty-three years came across from the cold lands. By this morning the world had faded to grey.
The snow still falls. I can feel its purpose, and I think that if I close my eyes a little, I’ll see the colors hiding in it. It’s beating at the door and sounds like wings, sometimes butterfly, and sometimes something heavier and meaner, and they fill me with fear and make me wish for Amelie in equal measure.
I think I’ll go outside. Maybe take a seat. And perhaps I’ll see a hint of spun gold before the darkness comes for me.
NEPHILIM
Mark Samuels
MARK SAMUELS is the author of four short story collections: The White Hands and Other Weird Tales (Tartarus Press, 2003), Black Altars (Rainfall Books, 2003), Glyphotech & Other Macabre Processes (PS Publishing, 2008) and The Man Who Collected Machen & Other Stories (Ex Occidente, 2010), as well as the short novel The Face of Twilight (PS Publishing, 2006). His tales have appeared in both The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror and Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror.
“The Nephilim are a race of fallen angels, the name deriving from Hebrew, and mentioned in the Bible,” explains the author. “Some sources translate the word as merely ‘giants,’ and there are a multitude of weird claims made about their nature.
“Some believe they are the originals of the demons that dwell in Hell, while others believe they were, in fact, ancient astronauts. Whatever they were, and whether or not they ever existed except in the imagination, the thought of them exercised a fascination over me that produced the following tale.”
THE ALARM CLOCK WENT OFF at 7:30 a.m. and he awoke. In the immediate hours that followed he had no idea what he was, where he was or even what it meant to be awake. His body was drenched in sweat and he lay staring at the ceiling. He traced the cracks and flaking paint as if charting the geography of an undiscovered land. He did not remember how to move and it was a shock when one of his feet twitched involuntarily. Then he began to look around the room, observing the unfamiliar objects with awe. But as the hours wore on he got further away from the dream that paralyzed his mental processes and started to recover his waking mind.
He tried to speak and croaked out the words, “I am Gregory Myers. I am Gregory Myers.” Then he pulled himself to the side of the bed and sat on the edge breathing deeply. He looked at the clock. It was 2:00 p.m. His waking life was returning to him rapidly now.
He finally stood up, put on a dressing gown and went into the bathroom. When he looked into the mirror he felt dumb amazement and horror. His hair had turned white. His skin was deathly white. He looked like an albino.
“I’m sorry but the doctor’s fully booked today,” the receptionist said without looking up.
“This is an emergency—I’ve got to see him and I’m not leaving until I do,” Myers responded, his voice trembling with emotion.
“What’s the emergency?” she persisted, in-between shuffling some patient cards.
“Look at me, will you?” he cried.
She put him to the front of the queue.
“Well,” the doctor said, after he had examined Myers, “I really don’t know what to say. Obviously I’d like you to see a specialist.”
“Is it connected with the dream I told you about?” Myers replied.
“Possibly, though the idea that extreme fright can turn a man’s hair white is false, you realize. An old wife’s tale that one.”
“You don’t think it’s permanent then?”
“I don’t know. To be frank, I’d hope it isn’t. But your case is, in my experience, unprecedented. I think that you should certainly ...”
But Myers had ceased to listen to him. There was another place he wanted to visit immediately.
Myers’ favored Catholic church was a huge Gothic pile just over the north side of Stamford Hill. It was only a short bus ride away from his flat in Stoke Newington and was large enough so that he retained his anonymity. He only attended Mass four or five times a year. He was not quite lapsed, for the attractions of the faith held his imagination too tightly, but he was not devout. His confessions invariably included references to his failure to attend Mass regularly. Yet at times, when life overwhelmed him, he turned to the church instinctively and would spend hours at prayer alone in one of the chapels.
There were several penitents sitting patiently and awaiting their turn for confession. The majority of them were elderly women, possibly Irish, he guessed, and they ran the beads of their rosaries between their forefingers and thumbs as if acting in unison.
Myers waited until his time came and then made his confession quickly but with a heartfelt repentance that took him back to his first, many years before. He felt as if this should be his last. Once he was given absolution and his penance he asked the priest for advice concerning his dream and its horrible aftermath. He was terrified of the great black void. Where, he wondered, had been God?
The priest listened sympathetically and told him that perhaps he had only been lost in his own mind, lost in the dream, and that God waited until release from the bondage of sin was attained.
When he returned to his flat he found a message on the answer phone from his employer. Myers phoned him back, just before the office closed, and tried to explain the situation, promising to return to work within a few days.
Myers resolved not to sleep that night, such was his terror of the dream. Strong coffee kept him awake and he found that he had to eat at about 4:00 a.m. Tiredness was a minor inconvenience. The thought of falling back into the black void haunted him much more than the feeling of fatigue. He found, however, when he was not on his guard, that his eyes began to close and that waking consciousness threatened to slip away. The gulf opened up before him and he started awake with a cry of fear.
At dawn he was shivering with cold and staring blankly into the distance.
By the fourth night without sleep he was continuously tired and found it almost impossible to concentrate. But as his body weakened, the terror of sleep only increased. He felt like a man drawn closer and closer to the edge of a crevasse, the movement forwards inexorable and the drop opening out ever more clearly before him.
When he looked at his reflection in the mirror it was to confirm that he had undergone no further changes. He would stand in the bathroom, lean over the sink and peer deeply into the glass. Before the transformation his face was not one that was easily remembered. His hair was thinning and a watery pair of eyes gazed, with no intensity, from behind a pair of rimless glasses. He had a weak chin that seemed continuously a day overdue for a shave. He ran his fingers over the now-white stubble and thought, amusedly, that his five o’clock shadow was less noticeable because of the lack of pigmentation. Before the alteration his face had been ordinary, unremarkable. But now his skin was the color of milk. People turned to look at him for a second time.
As he examined his features, his face appeared, momentarily, to become insubstantial—as if it was not real at all, but an image only half-remembered.
He pulled back his shirt cuff and looked at his watch. Just time for a shave before setting off for Sunday evening Mass.
He sat and watched the first of the communicants leave their places and file silently up towards the altar. His gaze wandered around the church and rested on a plaster statue of Our Lady surrounded by dozens of candles. Shadows flickered to and fro across the statue’s upturned face and its hands clasped together in an arch. Then he looked down at the old Roman missal he held. He opened the page marked with a silk ribbon and recited a prayer before communion by St. Ambrose:
“O Gracious Lord Jesus Christ, I, a sinner, presuming not on my own merits, but trusting to Thy mercy and goodness, fear and tremble in drawing near to the Table on which is spread Thy banquet of all delights. For I have defiled both my heart and body with many sins ...�
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A wave of exhaustion swept over him suddenly. His eyes ached at the light and he wondered whether, in this place at least, if he slept he might escape from the hideous dream that haunted him.
By the time he had finished the prayer and resisted drifting off to sleep he saw that he should take his place at the end of the queue. He stood up and edged past the kneeling post-communicants, trying not to disturb them.
He found that his whole body was trembling and he almost tottered as he made his way forward.
One by one his fellow Catholics before him took the wafer on to their tongues and he heard the familiar words being repeated, like a chant: “Body of Christ” and the response “Amen.” At last Myers himself stood before the priest, who was clad all in white, with the sacred wafer held outstretched between forefinger and thumb.
But the priest seemed not to see Myers and stood there rigidly, looking right through him as if through glass. Myers persisted, his hands still clasped together and his mouth open, the tongue ever so slightly pushed forward to receive the sacrament.
The priest continued to make no motion towards him and now had a puzzled expression on his face, as if trying to work out why the person directly behind Myers was hesitating. The hiatus appeared, for Myers, to last for hours and finally he turned away—too afraid to even attempt to receive the communion wine that was being distributed by a deacon close at hand in case the scene should be repeated.
He made his way back to his pew in a state of utter confusion and wondered if those around him regarded him with curiosity. To be refused the Blessed Sacrament! But no one took any notice of him. There were no concealed glances, no furtive and puzzled frowns, and no atmosphere of interest or discomfort. It was as if the incident had simply not occurred.
“The Lord be with you,” the priest intoned.
“And also with you,” came the response.
“May almighty God bless you, the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit ... The Mass is ended, go in peace.”
Myers’ eyes rolled upwards in their sockets. His eyelids tried to shut themselves. He grasped the back of the pew before him for support. He felt that, once he had taken communion, he would risk sleep, but not now. Not without grace. He could not confront the nightmare without grace.
And then, once the priest and the others had filed solemnly away, the congregation stirred themselves and began to leave.
Myers just sat there, clutching his black missal in his hand and gazing at the statue of Our Lady with an expression of hopelessness. It was as if he were seeking comfort from someone in whom he had great trust. He seemed to be seeking confirmation that he had, indeed, been treated very poorly. Finally he got to his feet and left the church, forgetting to cross himself as he did so.
He slunk away from the church as quickly as he could. It was very dark outside and the white, full moon had risen behind the Gothic pile. Its twin towers cast a vast shadow across the street. So pale was his skin that he imagined himself as the offspring of the moon and not akin to his fellow men at all. He seemed only to move amongst them.
He had the idea of paying a visit to a drug-dealing youth and he returned to his flat after that detour. The journey had taken longer than he’d expected. Two buses driving past him punctuated his wait at a request stop, although he had clearly signaled at their drivers to halt.
He attempted to distract his thoughts from the events that were overwhelming him by going over his papers. These were the sum total of his literary output over the last fifteen years. In the early days he had harbored an inflated idea as to the merit of his work and had even enjoyed publication in magazines that nobody read. It was only later that he discovered he preferred to write for himself alone and not for the dubious pleasure of seeing his strange works in print. He liked to dream over them, writing only when inspiration came to him, which was infrequently, and the half-formed pieces and the false starts were either destroyed or subsumed into longer writings—of which there were few. He enjoyed destroying the work that did not satisfy him. Sometimes he even wondered if he actually wrote just so he could obliterate the results.
Although he tried to concentrate on the sheets of paper that were spread out before him, Myers soon found that his eyelids were becoming heavier and heavier. The myriad words held no meaning for him and were like an alien text that he could not decipher. He had the strange feeling that the writings were protecting themselves from him (that it was not just his exhaustion that rendered the words illegible) in order that they might not suffer the annihilation that had met so much else of his writing. The thought distressed him. He began to draw random pages aside and then carefully burned them in the kitchen sink. He crumbled the blackened and charred remains between his fingers before washing the debris away.
Then he decided to sample his new means of staying awake. During his detour after Mass he had bought some pills from a thin and spotty youth who was invariably to be found skulking in the corner of a pub off Stamford Hill. Myers only knew him by sight and reputation, but he had known others who had made deals with him, and the mention of their names and the sight of ready cash smoothed over the youth’s reservations.
Gaining his trust seemed to have been made easier by the alteration in Myers’ appearance. Now that he resembled an extra from a cheap zombie film, the doomed and the dissolute acknowledged an unspoken kinship that bade him welcome as one of them.
He took two of the pills he had been given. After a short time his mind began to race and he felt his heartbeat increase dramatically. His skin was cold and clammy and he heard a buzzing noise in his ears. The need for sleep gradually ebbed to the back of his mind like the tide going out.
He lay back on his bed and stared at the ceiling, letting the hours pass, though they seemed like days, while his thoughts moved in a frenzied dance. Even this form of debased consciousness was a relief, for it kept the terror of sleep from him.
After dawn he watched the hands of the alarm clock move inexorably around to eight in the morning. He rose, washed and dressed, took two more of the pills and drank two cups of black coffee before setting off for work. The air outside was bitterly cold and a foggy haze, white as he, had wrapped itself around the city during the night.
He caught the train from Stoke Newington to Liverpool Street and it was boarded one station down the line by a ticket inspector. The official made his way along the carriage slowly, examining each passenger’s ticket with great care. Myers instinctively looked at his pass prior to the official’s arrival. It was out of date. He’d forgotten to renew it. He began to turn over excuses in his mind.
When finally his turn came to have his ticket checked, the inspector totally ignored him. He glanced at Myers’ seat as if it were vacant. The man’s eyes did not register his existence. He passed by without a pause, continuing his careful scrutiny of the other passengers’ tickets as normal. Was he, Myers thought, utterly terrified by the pale and outlandish apparition and determined to avoid any contact with it? No, it wasn’t that at all. Even his fellow passengers, he realized, had not reacted in any way when the ticket inspector had passed him by. Surely there would have been some curiosity. Then he did something that was bound to elicit a response. He got to his feet and screamed at the top of his voice. It was true that a few people stirred in their seats. One even got up to close the top section of a window as if a draught had blown through the carriage. But there was no other reaction.
He ran up and down the carriage staring into the other passengers’ faces. Again, nothing. He even tried to pull one of them from their seat, but his strength had dissipated and his fingers felt soft and yielding like wet putty.
The train arrived at Liverpool Street and the crowd carried him along as it flowed down the platform. No one saw him and he was constantly jostled and barged by people who turned to look in confusion at something that was apparently not there. But now he noticed a new development, their expressions of fear. Contact with him produced momentary recoil and loathing.
IT IS NOT GOOD FOR A MAN TO BE ALONE.
Nothing more. By the time Myers received the letter the old man was dead. They found his body washed up on a pebble beach, his face grey and half-devoured by crabs. He had lain there for hours in the early morning sunlight, lolling to and fro in the surf until someone had taken the trouble to look at him more closely.
Something else had changed. He felt utterly numb. There was no sense of distress at this memory as before. The only feeling he had was one of complete desolation, of hopeless futility. Most incredible of all, he no longer dreaded the thought of falling asleep and reentering the black void. Part of him even welcomed the prospect. For this time he knew that there would be no awakening and that his mind would return permanently to the state from which it had been momentarily snatched.
Visitants-Stories of Fallen Angels and Heavenly Hosts Page 13