Then there were the names.
Dominic, Marucia, Rufus, Elizabeth, some guy called Mister Waller (he swore a lot), and there was some woman going by the name of Agnes Dugan (…guess who’s this then…)
There were others, lots of others. And there would be singing.
… there’s a high school… there are kids… there a-hah… sung by some very melodic young guys that I guessed were maybe in their twenties by the sounds of it (mining disaster came to mind when I heard them)
… you are like the son (or did they mean the sun)… they are following you…
What the hell for?
What did I do?
I should have thrown the damn recorder away.
I was obviously nuts.
But by now I was too scared to through the thing away and I would leave the thing running on the back of the couch as I tried to sleep, which would take me a number of goes because of that thumping and bumping just as I was, but eventually I would drop over.
And I would listen to the recordings later to see if there really were any noises, and there were, and something else.
I could hear my breathing, slow and steady as I passed into slumber (eventually) and then it sounded like I was now in a really big room all of a sudden, like the size of a hanger maybe instead of my front room, there would be this fast ticking sound, five times faster than the ticking of a clock, then that would stop and there would be this reverb.
The sound of my breathing would lessen until I couldn’t hear it at all, and then there would be these guys talking, like they were looking right down on me.
“He’s having trouble breathing again,” one would say.
“Oh yes,” the other would say.
And I knew what they were on about.
I was a dying monk, and I didn’t want to die. Not that that monk was scared of dying, but because he was scared for the ones he was leaving behind.
The monk had worked in the monastery with herbs and the doctors of the day would come around looking for remedies for their patients.
And there was something else.
To get your son into one of these monasteries, for runners of institutions we call universities now, was a really big deal. But only for those parents with standing.
But this monk had different ideas.
It wasn’t popular with the other monks, but as long as he took full responsibility it was left up to him.
A young boy, maybe twelve, and with a clubbed foot, had been taken in.
Boys grew up a lot faster in those days, and this boy, although been abandoned by his own parents as suffering from some kind of demonic taint, had had to look after himself.
The monk had taken the boy into the monastery, and took him under his wing to help and learn about the herbs.
Everyone was in cowls and habits, and the boy proved to be very intelligent. Not just intelligent but cheeky with it.
And the one thing I remember is that the boy, now fifteen had picked something up, raised an eyebrow at the monk with a look on his face saying, And what should I do with this then?
Now that monk who had taken him in had a position to look after, and although not a stern man, let the boy know that he was pushing it, even if he did turn his face away and laugh quietly to himself.
It made no difference.
As long as the boy did what he was supposed to do, then that was fine.
One abandoned waif grew into two and then into something like ten. Boys thrown out of their homes unwanted, from three years old to six, all living wild, trying to look after each other, and that monk taking them all in.
And now he was dying, there on his death bed, scared to let go because he knew he would no longer be able to defend his troop from the elders who wanted to push the waifs back out.
And that first boy, now acting a lot older than his years, crouching down to these scared kids trying to see the monk, terrified that he was about to leave them, and the young boy saying to them, It’s okay, you can go back to bed, knowing full well that their protector was dying.
And that’s why that monk didn’t want to leave them but in the end he had to. Even the draw of heaven, or meeting God wasn’t enough for that monk, for to him, in death, he would be betraying them.
Then one day I got mad.
Why couldn’t I sleep in my own bed in peace and quiet? It’s my house for crying out loud.
So it was summer, sunlight streaming through the windows.
I thought, I’ll be safe, what could go wrong in broad daylight.
Another recorder and I lay down on my bed.
Things were going well. Until I started to drift off and there it went again.
The end of the bed jumped up.
I gripped on for dear life and refused to be thrown out of my own bed.
After half an hour of drifting off to near sleep but never getting there I decided enough was enough.
And just as I was coming too fully I heard the last message.
I grabbed the recorder and played it back first to see if there really was nothing on it.
Hello… stay where you are… we’ve got your mother… we want you… then some other stuff I couldn’t quite get (and still don’t – it was about a U2) and then at the end of the recording leaving now… one, two, three, thank you… bye bye.
I never recorded anything again. The house got quiet and I could sleep at night again.
The thuds and bangs through the floors and walls got weaker and weaker.
And I can still hear that voice talking gently in my ear that day.
It was a very soft voice, very gentle and comforting yet at the same time heartbreaking.
And maybe it was because I’d never listened or heard them when I saw them after they died.
I still see them sometimes.
My mother was here about a week ago, acting as if I wasn’t there, her showing this woman around my place. A nice lady she looked, maybe hard working when she had been alive, and maybe my mother just wanting to show her how her son was living.
It didn’t matter what I said to my mother or the woman, not sure they could see or hear me anyway, and then they were gone.
When I go over to that place I sometimes do I sometimes see my father, but he doesn’t see or hear me either and maybe it’s better that way too. Still whilst I’m there it’s a nice place to look around – not much different to here though I have to say.
And then there’s my sister. She’s living at my parents place now, the old family home. And she has a son. He looks maybe about seven, delightful kid, slim, wearing a blue v neck last time I was there. He can see me, even talks to me, but he doesn’t know he’s dead. And I never say anything to him about it either.
But there I was lying on my bed and coming too that sunny afternoon with the voice speaking in my ear to give the message I really needed to know, that I needed to let go and get on with my life without them, my mother whispering my ear and talking to me one last time.
“It’s up to you now, Bambi.”
THE FURY
The furies flittered from the walls though cinnamon and smoldering cloves as he inhaled crystals of frankincense with his eyes crushed shut; demanding, pleading, wailing, contrite then acquiescent, then tantrum stomping mad until his words were meaningless screeches and roars through his tight clenched teeth, loch gates impervious to the effluvium of his pleading for each and every one of them.
‘Don’t die, don’t let them die, not yet, not ever.’
As moiré patterned shadows danced around his darkened tomb, and rhomboids and geodesic shudders tore his world apart; the rubric, his Bolshevik, leveling it all.
‘Bring it down, tear it all down, every last sodden useless molecule of life, flatten it then bring them back to me and force them all to live again.’
Until his terror of losing each and every one of them, one after the other, erupted inside of him and the truth, in a volcanic rush, hunched him over and clutched his guts, vomiting his cult of u
nreason, jettisoned it, over his feet, wave after wave of the inevitable he could not accept, that he was powerless to stop them leaving him, and crashed him down onto his hands and knees to suffocate in the stench of his own puke and bile hanging from his nose and teeth as Persephone and her furies shuffled away in terror as the candles fluttered and his anger fell into mourning leaving him alone to look up at his ruined world.
‘Divide and demolish,’ he said.
And when their funerals were over, every damn one of them, and when and he went to their graves, and stared at their headstones, then he returned to normal, or so everyone thought.
Dressed in black tie and white shirt and long black coat, and wearing very shiny black shoes, it looked as if he had grown up and become civilized for once, what with his clean cut hair line and those bright whites of his eyes of his and his irises so brown they were almost black too.
But still he would be dammed if he was going to accept the inevitable as he smiled and clutched at their trembling hands. But there was not much talk, not much talk at all as he strolled back to his car, waxed and gleaming and all black too.
I’m never going to die.
It was everyone else who would.
They can all die if they so well please.
But not him though, the new clean-cut glory boy, the born again ping pong player from one jail to another, one crime to another, one foothold in the underworld after another.
Level them, level everything, make them all pay.
And his smile stretched his lower jaw until his teeth almost cut off his own face; smile higher, wider, lips thinner, bluer, cheekbones bunching, until his eyes were almost as tight as his white knuckled grip on the Naugahyde steering wheel as his foot slowly squeezed on the gas.
Targets, every last one of them.
***
‘Shotgun, axe, poison…’
Plans on the tables, plans on the walls, scribbled notes on yellow pads.
‘Dynamite, nitro, ammonia, phosphorus, plunger, wires,’ he tick talked his way into the wee small hours with his gleaming eyes of grinning glass.
‘Implode… explode… burn… maim… chop and kill.’
List after list of destruction made he as he giggled his way into the oblivion of a billion body parts spraying mile after mile over his imagination in aftermath.
‘Now what could I use? Hmmm, let me see… botulinum… anthrax… emboli… technetium… Nope, scratch that, not deadly enough, not deadly at all.’
And on and on he went into an ever tighter spiral of sweet sick hatred screwing itself into the live and kicking dentine of an impacted wisdom-less tooth.
God, it feels so good.
He smiled, he waved, and he glowed with the radioactive enthusiasm of a sneaky little fucker newly hatched from hell.
Until the day he heard the voice calling out Hey, mister behind him and he swung around to see the smiling little girl clutching the hat that had flown from his head.
She held it up to him, her tiny teeth showing; perfect, perfect white and innocent, and he crouched down to her so low that his long coat touched the ground.
And as he held out his hand in supplication a spark discharged his grief and earthed his fury as he said to her, ‘Thank you child, for I have sinned.’
Also by Michael Sutherland
Novel
Invisible Monsters (Print publication from Less Than 3 Press, March 2013)
Short Story Collections
Passport to Phelamanga: After All, Death Trapped, Only Human, Till Dawn, Bridge to Andromeda (MUSA Publishing, 2012)
From Here to Hallucigenia: Aviatrix, Doodlebug, It’s Up to You Now, Bambi, What Goes Around Comes Back Weird (MUSA Publishing, 2013)
Short Stories
Skinz (MUSA Publishing, 2012)
Another Journey (MUSA Publishing, 2012)
Soul Vampire (Dark Gothic Resurrected Magazine, April, 2013)
An Endless Harvest (Jupiter Science Fiction Magazine, April 2013)
Forthcoming Publications in 2013
Novels
Follow Me
Invisible Monsters Too
Novella
The Fern House
Content copyright © Michael Sutherland, 2013
Dying to be Free Page 8