Ten Open Graves: A Collection of Supernatural Horror

by David Wood

  This was her moment, her reconciliation.

  'You're still alive,' she said, a breath.

  I was crying. I hurt so much I was crying.

  And I couldn't let that breath out because it was the most precious thing in the world.

  Silence Beautiful Cry

  One

  There were no words between us still, though now the silence was because words were unnecessary.

  Silently, Aimee loosened the silver buckle of her belt and then the buttons on her black jeans, peeling out of the skin tight denim in a sinuous perfection of motion. Her skin was alabaster pale, the tattoo of coiled lovers the only colour on her bare thigh, their intimacy a palpable promise of pleasure.Beneath the jeans, she wore a faded pair of my old boxers dotted with washed out faces of the Pink Panther; typically me. Without taking her eyes off my nakedness, Aimee slipped her hands inside the waistband and eased the borrowed boxers down over her hips, stepping out of them.

  The tattooed lovers coupled erotically with the flexing muscles beneath the alabaster, the artist's creation pursuing the tantalising languor of sex in a manner surely unplanned, as she stepped into the bath and straddled me, still wearing her baggy black sweater and everything underneath.

  A waterfall spilled over the side of the tub and I couldn't have cared less. Her fingers touched my lips, traced my broadening smile, caressed my cheek, my neck, trailing a delicious line to my nipples. I made to match her motion but she eased my hands away, leaning in to gently bite at the skin her fingers had so recently vacated.

  I wanted the flood of sensations her mouth brought on to last forever. Her skin smelled faintly of rose petals, an inviting sweetness that invaded my every pore. The touch of her tongue and teeth conjured a deluge of memories, scents, images, sounds, feelings to dispel the ghosts that had taken residence inside my mind those past days.

  Her fingers rested on my shoulderblades, gentle pressure points holding them back as her mouth moved up to nuzzle into the soft flesh of my nape, then danced lower as the nuzzling intensified, play making way for hunger. I felt the full touch of her hands on me, still teasingly light as she drew me on. Holding me like that, Aimee's lips parted to kiss mine. I was breathing heavily, for that second tasting her hunger on my tongue, a delicious thrill that set tiny aftershocks to tremble through my entire body.

  Almost as soon as the kiss had begun her mouth had moved on with its explorations, intimately relearning every contour and angle of my flesh.

  The sight of Aimee half in, half out of that drenched sweater, black wool shaping itself around her as she shaped herself around me, the intensely erotic taste of her desire, the feel of the still hot water breaking on my skin, the sultry voice of Nina Simone, that faint hint of rose petals, all of them combining to make strange things happen to me. Her body and its heady mix of passions something for my hands, my eyes, my mouth to savour.

  Her hands kneading my head through wet hair.

  And then she was moving with a purpose, her explorations directed by that need, that hunger that had brought us both this far.

  She took my hand in hers, raised it slowly to her lips, drew my index finger in, out, in between teasing teeth. Eyelids closed, her head tilted back on a swan's neck, Aimee licked the length of my fingers as I eased them down her neck. Both hands meeting at her waist, I eased them beneath the ride of her sweater, slowly, slowly up, my thumbs making tiny circles on her taut belly, to the shallow rise and fall of her breasts, the different skin of her nipples.

  She offered me her smile and that was what I had missed most.

  Her back arched as she moved her hips to accommodate me, her hand guiding me into her body with an urgency, a fragile moan and a deep, deep breath as she made the penultimate surrender of her body, and suddenly we were both moving with the same purpose, making love with the same frightening hunger, the same need, our bodies caught up in a perfection of motion to match the tattooed lovers, and despite the tender prelude, the sex was harsh, animalistic, desperate, our cries too close to pain as we gave ourselves over to it.

  Two

  Its essence:

  Sex and death.

  Death and sex.

  The two irrevocably joined in the single act like the lovers they are.

  A moment for ourselves. A selfish moment where pleasure is all and everything. A confirmation of the flesh in the most carnal of ways.

  And it was good.

  Three

  I can't go home,' I told Aimee, not wanting to explore the limitations of my resurrection in a bathtub of cold water, but not seeing a satisfactory way to evade the issue of what happened next.

  We had some pretty damned basic things to talk about, things dictated by the bounds of the city and their effects on my body.

  Aimee's head rested on my chest, listening to my heartbeat, or the remembered ghost of my heartbeat. Her fingers light on my arm.

  The cold water was making me cold, but I wasn't about to move and put distance in the place of that closeness. Nina's voice might have gone, but I had Aimee to keep me company. Aimee and the mounting sounds of the night outside; the engines, people, rain. When the music stopped there was always those same night sounds to fill the emptiness left behind. There was some small comfort there, in the familiarity.

  'Not back to the flat. Not across the river.' Not explaining, simply stating.

  That night, at least, we had Ciaran's.

  Aimee didn't raise a 'but'; she waited for me to go on, to tell it in my own time. I tangled my fingers in her wet hair, smiling at the recent memory that saw the bath water gradually turn blue-black as the sweater's dye spread through it. Both our skins had been dyed that same ghastly hue.

  Not across the river. . .

  'Let's run some fresh water,' I suggested, thinking about what I was asking Aimee to give up.

  'They're just walls,' she assured me, reading a fragment of the thoughts weighing down my mind. 'Home is about warmth, Declan, it’s not the place that's warm. It's not about the things around you, or familiarity. It's about us being together. A cardboard box under a flyover could be home if the warmth was shared. If it was our warmth.'

  I kissed the top of her head, knowing she meant it, knowing she would give up everything if sharing a cardboard box meant we could cheat death a while longer.

  That helped me feel the same way.

  We stayed that way for as long as we could bear with the promise of warmth and the brass taps so close to hand.

  Pulling the plug, I refilled the bath with more of Ciaran's searing water and turned Nina’s cassette over. With her between us to play gooseberry there wouldn't be any awkward silences when my side of the conversation broke down, as I knew it would… only Nina reminding us not to smoke in bed or playing little girl blue for her audience of two. Aimee knew me well enough to know what I was doing, but didn't make me feel lousy for doing it. She peeled the rest of her clothes off and sank into the bath with me, soothing soap into our bluish skins.

  We lay there, skin on skin, and I told my story again. Parts of it she already knew, some too well, but repetition didn't hurt: it brought things home, showed the links I wanted to show. It still sounded every bit as crazy as it had telling Ciaran, but this time it was different, because Aimee had seen my downfall… because part of her desperately wanted to believe in the glimpse of wonderland I offered to counterpoint frightened memories of the Oz Parasites and the corruption they represented, and because, in some horrible way, the worst aspects of it were all starting to make a grim kind of sense.

  'You can't stand back and let them die.' Ever the idealist, she meant it. It was that black and white to her. 'Not if you can do something to prevent it. It's murder, Declan. However you dress it up, it's still murder.'

  It was, and I knew it was. That only made things more complicated than they already were, because my world had stopped being black and white. All of a sudden everything was a turgid shade of grey. I didn't know who to believe. Who to trust. Which way to turn.


  I needed an anchor… a foundation to begin building on top of, and there were these nagging doubts preventing that security from being put down:

  'What if the priest was right. What if the man who brought me back to life murdered hundreds of innocent souls in his ascendancy? Does that one act of atonement cancel out the murders? I can't believe that it does. I can't believe in forgiveness for atrocity. There has to be justice. Retribution. Why should I defend a murderer, because he is weak now and can't defend himself? Surely it’s right to watch natural law see him undone in violent retribution. An eye for an eye? Jesus Christ, if he did it, I keep thinking why don't I kill him myself? I know where he is, what he's done. '

  'Because you're not a killer,' she whispered into my chest, quietness owed to uncertainty. I was back, yes, but was I the same man? Was I a classically trained jazz pianist in way over my shoulders, or was I something new? A creature with murderous tendencies of my own? That doubt lingered.

  And inside me, the unvoiced fear: If Malachi dies, what happens to me?

  Was my resurrection tied to his survival.

  Even then, in my heart of hearts, I suspected it was, and that Malachi had known all along that he held the trump card in this last call, because I would fight for myself, wouldn't I?

  I hated the smugness of that voice inside my head.

  Despite the water, a rash of goosebumps crept across my flesh.

  I felt sick.

  'I'm not a killer,' I agreed. 'But I'm a poor man's saviour. I can't fight with swords or guns. I can't make magic. I'm not one of them.'

  Which translated to: how could I defend him. What could I do against my tramp and his kind?

  Liar, liar, liar. . .

  Do you remember what it feels like to be betrayed. . .

  'No,' Aimee agreed. 'But you are a good man, and that counts for something. You can't stand by and watch slaughter, it's not in your nature. Don't forget what we owe Matthew and Malachi for our second chance, talk to them, give them the chance to defend themselves. You have to believe in something, Declan. To me, Malachi seems like a good thing to believe in.'

  'But what if-'

  'What if there were no risks and the world was good and evil and nothing between, right?' She was shaking her head. I knew she was smiling, I could feel her cheeks on my chest.

  Maybe she was right, maybe I was being taken in by layer upon layer of deceit. . .

  Four

  We made love again that night, gentle refamiliarisation of bodies, neither one of us wanting to close our eyes in sleep in case when we awoke the dream was over.

  The bed clothes tangled around my sweating limbs, chasing the Artex whorls on the ceiling with my eyes, listening to the gentle keening of the wind beyond the window. Aimee's breathing.

  The sound of the wind. Shadows from the world outside, the faint glow of the streetlights casting restless silhouettes. And somewhere out there, somewhere in the night, I heard the faint, mournful call of a train's whistle.

  Bearing more runaways. . ?

  I made a decision.

  I would stick by my original promise to Malachi; I wouldn't fight, not physically, but I would do something.

  The train's cry gave me an idea what.

  Five

  In the morning we occupied ourselves with a procession of very normal things; a breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon and hash browns, strong black coffee to wash it down; music and the news of the world on the radio; conversation at its most mundane; flat-hunting, Aimee scanning the property section of the local rag; Ciaran running down the listings in the forthcoming attractions.

  After breakfast, we made appointments to see three promising flats in the city centre before lunch and promised a rendezvous with Ciaran for a bite at The Lotus House, a jack of all menus eatery on High Bridge Street.

  Suspending his disbelief, Ciaran promised a practical avenue of research, visiting shelters and such to test out the list of names I had given him; Crohak, Sephuentes, Drake, Malachi, and Matthew.

  Six

  If I were to look up the meaning of the word luxury in the Oxford English I'm pretty sure it would say something like: expensive, very comfortable.

  Within an hour of traipsing around the low spots of Newcastle it was readily apparent that the property section's advertisers had freely corrupted the term to mean: expensive, not a bedsit, and occasionally has own central heating.

  The flats we looked at were squalid, the walls alive with cultures, the jumble sale furniture flea-ridden and threadbare. All of the would-be Rackman's made a point of saying: 'No pets, and definitely no children are allowed. Too much trouble.'

  I had forgotten just how depressingly fruitless an activity looking for somewhere to live was.

  The adverts had their own indecipherable codes, the images conjured by the words never even remotely like the bricks and mortar at the end of the rainbow.

  Very quickly, after the second squalid encounter, we decided to stop phoning after anything advertising itself as less than designer status. Not because we could afford designer prices or had designer pretensions. We needed the extra room for the junk we had managed to accumulate and experience told us that nothing short of ‘designer spacious’ would have enough room for us to swing our respective cats in.

  Lunch was a pessimistic affair of noodles and water chestnuts, Ciaran's pilgrimage no more fruitful than our own as it turned out.

  I imagined I could see the doubt so briefly suspended beginning to resurface in my brother's face. I couldn't blame him.

  'I found a lot of blank stares,' he confided, after we had had our five minute rant about the hovels we had wasted the morning visiting. 'And a lot of tight lips.'

  I read the unspoken subtext as the less obvious one: Either the homeless world of the streets was unaware of what was living in its name, which after everything else I found difficult to swallow, or Crohak and his cronies had their silence well and truly bought with razors, bicycle chains and meat hooks.

  That just hardened my midnight resolve.

  I had to find a way amongst them. I had to find a way of being accepted amongst the street people. That meant more than a visit to the charity shopfor a moth-eaten great coat and taking a breadknife to the rest of my wardrobe. I needed a backdoor into the street culture that wouldn't announce my presence like a beacon and wind up getting me killed by Crohak's Oz Parasites all over again.

  'All the evidence points to me being barking mad.' I tried, unsuccessfully, to make it sound like a joke. I offered a misbegotten little smile and a slight shrug.

  Ciaran disagreed. 'You weren't there, Dec. You didn't see the way they suddenly clammed up whenever I mentioned those names. The reverential looks that took possession of their eyes. It was fucking frightening, kiddo. They know what's happening and they're hungry for it.'

  Not all of them, surely, I thought, and then I didn't want to think any further through the ramifications of Ciaran's words.

  They know what's happening and they're hungry for it.

  Seven

  Aimee circled another promising sounding flat in the lunchtime edition of The Gazette and placed it on the table between us.

  Theatre Village: Newly renovated spacious open plan accommodation in private complex, all natural floorboards, sparse furnishings, fully fitted kitchen, gas central heating. Fully alarmed. Grounds patrolled by on-site security. Private parking. Short term tenancy. Suit professional couple.

  'It can't hurt to look,' I agreed, fully expecting the spacious open plan accommodation to be an attic with a hole in the roof that cost £800 per month for its tag as a prime piece of real estate. I could feel the beginnings of a headache coming on, money-induced.

  Aimee phoned after the ad and arranged a viewing for that afternoon, giving us a few hours to unwind before we had to clamber back onto the treadmill again.

  In that time we did all the things we used to love doing: milkshakes from McDonalds, leap-froging the bollards around the Monument, walkin
g arm in arm around the lake at Castle Leazes, feeding the ducks soggy bread, but some unidentifiable piece of the magic was missing, almost as if we were trying too hard to fall in love again. To be easy with each other.

  I squeezed Aimee's hand as we walked. Hand in hand the only way to walk, slowly, the hands between us swinging just slightly.

  An ordinary young couple still very much in love; that's how we must have looked from the outside, but from the inside you didn't have to look too closely to see the tension that kept muscles knotted, one last barrier still to be scaled. My headache wasn't getting any better.

  The park at Castle Leazes is one of Newcastle's best kept secrets. In the shadow of the football ground it offers up a little slice of Utopia for children, adults and lovers. Blue water and boats, green leaves and acorns, footsteps and kisses. It's a place to fall in love and offer impossible promises. A place to forget there ever was an outside world.

  Fathers played with sons and daughters while mothers read romance in the shade.

  The looks we shared caught my heart and wrung the darkness out of it. Our eyes soothed, said everything was going to be all right. Given time. Time that could be stretched and squashed, pushed and pulled and made to fit but couldn't be promised.

  'Don't ever leave me,' Aimee said, giving up on her attempts to feed a peevish duck with a chunk of bread borrowed from little girl at the lakeside. The youngster laughed to see the duckling turn its beak up at Aimee's bread in favour of the sweaty chocolate she offered to coax it away.

  'Traitor,' I said, with a wink to the sweet toothed duck, not letting the rash promise Aimee was looking for slip through my lips. I held her close, kissed the tip of her nose. 'Come on, let's walk. We've got a home to find, remember.'