Ten Open Graves: A Collection of Supernatural Horror

by David Wood

  'I'm dead.' I needed to say it, needed him to know why I was killing him. It mattered to me, somehow differentiated between man and monster. 'You killed me. You and your friends. You stole my life.' I put the blade to his throat and slashed, drawing it up quick and hard to join with the long opening carved by the first cut. Air bubbles blew out of his throat, each one coated by a skein of blood. The sound was similar to a fire in the rain, burning but being put out in the end. The third cut was the mirror of the first, from temple to temple to chin, and then beneath the skin, peeling the features from the face in the grimmest parody of a mask imaginable.

  He slumped, the wall against his back the only thing that kept him from falling completely.

  Cutting him was messy.

  The Cowardly Lion's blood ran down my forearms.

  His face didn't come off in a single sheet. It came off in chunks, like a badly carved roast.

  But it came off.

  I made damned sure of that.

  The Pain, Heartbreak and Redemption of a Broken Man

  One

  Killing them didn't solve anything though, didn't take away the emptiness, and that was the hardest lesson of all.

  Revenge tasted hollow.

  There was still that Aimee-shaped hole inside me when I woke up in the morning and that Aimee-shaped hole eating away at me when I curled up at night. Only the yearning animated my resurrected flesh and now there were more ghosts, more dead, and the world I inhabited was a worse place for it.

  That was my watershed, I think, that realisation. I would stop short of calling it understanding. It was far less than one, a little more than the other. I was walking towards a finality, a confrontation with Crohak that would see it all come down. He would end or I would end. It would be worked out, for better or worse, one way or the other and I found myself thinking that I didn't care. I walked the streets in body, but I walked somewhere else as well. I walked through the constructs of my past, my life as it was, through the dark pillars that were Aimee and Ciaran, mum and dad, my friends. The stones of my past. My foundations. I walked through their claim on me. It was like molasses, pulling at me while I tried to hold some faith in my own goodness, but then I saw the knife or the razor, or the garrotte in my hands as I choked the life out of the Tin Man, and a shadow crossed that goodness, a shadow called murder.

  I might as well have been a serial killer. It was hard to see how I was any different from them, killing in the name of love or right or whatever badge of honour I wanted to pin to my sleeve to justify it, it was still killing and it wasn't over.

  But it would be, soon enough.

  And, God forgive me, I felt a grim sense of anticipation when I allowed myself to think about it like that.

  The weather turned again, for the worse, the Indian summer evaporating as the drizzle hardened into a relentless rain. The street was a miserable place to live. Alley after alley, street after street, dead, the bricks, the buildings, the pavements, the city in mourning and not understanding why. I walked, endlessly unaware of my surroundings, listening to the wind's elegiac voices as they cried for the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion. I hated myself, scavenging after food, begging for a handout when I saw a pressed suit. Once, just once, I thought about writing a 'Help Me' sign, but despite my grief I couldn't do it. I let my 'designer' stubble grow out into a scraggy beard that kept some of the chill out. Slept in doorways and stared at the dead faces on my hands. My dead. I recognised the madness of guilt staring me in the face when I looked at them, but this time there was no Aimee, no champion of hopeless causes, to pull me out on the other side of my private hallucination in one piece. I owned these dead men and there was no one to leech away the cold that had become my body's heat. No one to make everything all right. There was just me and a handful of beautifully cruel weapons.

  I couldn't keep the weapons. I knew that much. I had to get rid of them. I thought about throwing them in the Tyne, and knew it was the right thing to do. The sludge and gunk at the bottom would swallow my metal offering up like a hungry God.

  The razor and the breadknife sank with the faintest splash as I hurled them from the river bank, but the cheesewire floated, tangling up with the weeds drowning on the waterline. I abandoned it to fight for its life.

  Two

  When I turned around I saw the outline of a rag-clothed tramp picked out against the side of a warehouse wall and, across the street, a bag lady clutching her bulging proggy mat shopping bag so tightly I knew it had her whole life in it. Her fingers were bone-white spindles from where I stood. Birds’ claws.

  She was watching me intently. But not moving.

  The rag-clothed tramp stepped aside. Behind him a gloomy doorway gaped openly, black lips around an ugly cavity-filled mouth. A dirty face.

  A pigeon swept in through the gap, disappearing into the black beyond. And another. Then another. Two more, wings touching, fused together like Siamese twins. Three. Ten. Too many to count, tiny bodies melting together like the survivors of a nuclear holocaust. And still more pigeons wheeling in the sky, banking away from the sun and the flock, being swallowed by the black cavity inside the dirty face.

  The rag-clothed tramp smirked when he saw I was lost. Cracked a smile open on broken and yellow-rotten teeth. 'Inside,' he seemed to be saying as they started pouring out of the woodwork.

  Shapes. . .

  By a burned out Subaru, a shape, stooped, thick, clutching a brown paper bagged bottle tightly to its lips; by the wire fence of the lonely generator, a shape, skeletally thin, towering; in the entrance to the alley across the street, a shape; by the telephone box, two shapes; and more, spilling out of the night like lice in two's and three's, rags and coats sweeping behind them.

  'Inside.' I heard him clearly this time.

  I broke eye contact to look down at my trembling hands. My dead were laughing at me. Laughing. Laughing. Laughing. My fingers drifted to the cold metal of the bird hanging around my neck, Matthew's gift. I imagined I felt a pulse beating in the breast of that damned talisman.

  And what choice did I have but to go inside?

  Three

  Inside Crohak's Rookery.

  They came in behind me, Crohak's beggar troupe, ushering me deeper into the Bird Man's foul warren but still keeping their distance, afraid to get too close to the man who had caused their kind so much harm.

  Outside, it was obvious the Rookery had been carved from the stone of an abandoned warehouse, but from the inside I would never have guessed it had ever been anything other than a CardboardCity put together by the army of deadbeats. Newspaper-wrapped torches guttered in oil smeared sconces, casting a fitful illumination across the lines of boxes and the string lines where torn coats and dirty sheets made a labyrinth of walls and streets through the cardboard. Shit, sweat, booze and piss, a world of smells distilled down to these four essences. Rows of pigeons lined the makeshift walls, their horrible beady black eyes watching me as I picked my way through the filth. And the boxes weren't empty, they were homes to the street people Crohak had collected about him; this was what Chaz had meant when he said Crohak took them in, gave them a roof. He gave them a box to call their own and left them to fester among the shit and the piss and the rats.

  Who was I to judge? A fallen angel come down from the lofty heights of the TheatreVillage to die on the streets. And I couldn't even do that cleanly and on my own. No, I needed to drag others down into the gutter with me. People who cared about me. I needed to make them suffer along with me. I was sick like that. . .

  I ached for it to be over.

  The fluttering darkness was claustrophobic. I could hear every bead of sweat as it broke on my skin. Could hear the pulse of those creepy birds staring at me from their white linen perches. Could hear the croupy breathing of the creatures trapped in this purgatory with me. Could hear it all beneath the demented, discordant chorus of the caged pigeons.

  Too much.

  I wanted to scream, let it all out in one abusive to
rrent, but I kept that anger bottled up inside, kept it as a tiny black seed, knowing I would need it before this scene was played out.

  I walked slowly between the press of the sheets and the cardboard walls. The street people crawled out from their pits to stare at me, more eyes on my back. A stick kid, all elbows and ribs, sprayed a black bird into the fabric of one of the walls. He pulled the sheet back as I got closer, then scuttled out of the way, blocking the only other road through.

  I ducked under the washing line onto a street identical to the one I had just left; more eyes; the same smells, but stronger here, nearer the heart. A huddle of tramps were clustered around a small fire counting out greasy chips like they were the currency of this place; one for you, one for me.Seeing me coming, one of the group crammed the sorry handful of potato into his mouth all at once, hardly chewing as he forced the things down. I thought he was going to choke but he just kept pushing until the chips were a mush smeared across his lips. His eyes darted fearfully.

  What had these denizens heard about me?

  A rat the size of my foot scurried around the edge of the fire, as at home in the CardboardCity as the tramps.

  I walked past the fire, trying to tell myself I couldn't smell their blood, that it wasn't thinned and tarted a little by the recent infusion of alcohol. That it wasn't me that was changing. The world itself blurred around me as I squeezed my way through the cardboard alleys thronged with street people, their faces pallid, taunting, eyes glazed, teeth rotten. They drew back as I got close enough to touch. Kept that distance between us.

  Finally I could see where the alley was going; in a corner, a rusted iron staircase corkscrewed down from the stone sky of CardboardCity and spiralled deeper still through the floor to some subterranean crypt. The bolts securing the top of the stairs had pulled away from the brickwork, leaving the iron railings dangling precariously. Simply resting my hand on the railing was enough to set it rocking. I didn't see how it could possibly hold my weight.

  Crohak's beggars clustered around me, dragging their feet, breathing heavily. A pair of hands shoved me in the back. I caught hold of the stairs as they pushed again.

  'Okay, okay.' I muttered. 'I get the message.'

  I started to climb. Looking up I saw two ugly faces come peering over the ledge where the staircase emerged in a room beyond the CardboardCity sky. Their heads shook slightly. I backed up, feeling the stairs rock dangerously under my change of direction. The metal grated against the stone, powdering the softer mineral. Rust flaked across my palm. There was that smell again, smoking hickory wood. . . I wondered what it was, really. I kept going down, waiting for my feet to find the bottom. They did. And there was that faint, mocking laughter that had dogged me since the crash.

  I felt the cold, creeping sensation of fear touch my skin.

  I turned.

  The stairs had led me to a large empty room, no more ranks of cardboard homes, just hard packed dirt, a faint drip dripping sound, water, and that damp, underground smell. The wall at my side was limned with a greasy moisture that my racing imagination insisted was blood.

  And there he was, close enough to spit on.

  Crohak reclined on a throne somehow carved from the crushed bodies of hundreds of tiny birds, their heads, bodies and wings fused together in a macabre sculpture. A black-flecked broken wing twitched as I stared, and suddenly I understood another aspect of the Bird Man's sick architecture – it was still alive. A sparrow's head set in to the armrest beneath Crohak's fingers craned, struggling futilely to break whatever spell held it captive.

  The throne was snared in the glow of a naked bulb, the first sign of electricity in this purgatory.

  The Bird Man waited for me to approach his grizzly throne, his bloodless white fingers caressing the brow of an imprisoned gull. The bird's swollen eyes followed me. It was dead because the wind no longer stirred its wings, because darkness and the Bird Man was its world. It was dead and was just beginning to come to terms with it.

  I wanted to say something clever, something flippant, a quip that would have tripped off my tongue easily enough a few long weeks ago, but my lips might as well have been stitched together with cat gut.

  I had thought about nothing but this moment since Malachi had failed me. Face to face with the man who ruined my life. The hunger to see him burn was all that had kept me going at times. And now here it was, that moment.

  And my weapons were sinking in the river outside. . .

  I looked into the Bird Man's eyes, drawn almost hypnotically by the gaze. I felt part of myself weakening, succumbing. It was so very much easier to be the prey than it was to be the predator, so easy to lose the will to live. . . But the will keeping me alive wasn't all mine to lose. . . I felt myself yielding, but against that I felt the tenseness of Malachi's will hardening behind my weakness. Keeping the blood pumping through my hardened arteries, in turn, keeping my will, my resistance, alive, fanning the black seed I had nurtured this far. It would flame. It would flame.

  Somehow, I pulled my gaze away from the Bird Man's mesmerising eyes. For a second I stood there, tensed rigid, not really knowing where the Hell I was. And there he was, exactly as I remembered him from the roadside. Squalid gabardine coats, that hair, that face, those eyes. . . Exactly as I remembered him. I stopped on the periphery of the light thrown by that solitary bare bulb and waited.

  'So, it comes to this,' Crohak said sadly.

  'After all we have been through together,' I agreed ironically. It wasn't a bad opening line. Not one of the very best but the delivery was deadpan and that was a triumph all of its own because inside I was a mess. The innermost angels and demons of my psyche were at war over the controls, and thank God a strange thought under the circumstances the demons were winning. A surge of black anger rose from that tiny black seed at the base of my neck and ballooned until the swollen blossom was pushing out against the walls of my skull. Pushing. I wanted to see the bastard burn for what he had done to Aimee. I wanted to gouge my fingernails into his face and rip and pull until there was nothing left of it. I wanted to crush the bones of his skull with my bare hands, grind them into the hard-packed dirt floor. I was intense. Burning cold, full of an anger that surprised and terrified me, the blood surging through my tensed body like white-water rapids, part of me screaming for his blood. It sent an icy course of pleasure shivering through my hands as I raised them to my face.

  I pressed my fingers to my eyes; the magic part of me. Brilliant white light sparked and danced across my eyelids; pale white faces snared in that light.

  When I pulled my fingers away their ghosts stayed with me; Aimee and Chaz burning brightest.

  'I'm going to kill you,' I hissed then, grabbing a hold of that anger with both fists, thrusting it at him. I had this cold flashburn image of me using my bare fists to pummel Crohak to death with the savage force of my fists flying over and over, driving hard into his face, cracking his face, breaking him. . .

  And the bastard laughed at me. He laughed at me. That damned sarcastic laugh. Down here it was a hideous avian sound that seemed to fill this under-crypt with unpleasant echoes and flapping wings.

  'Such hatred,' the Bird Man said, raising his own hands with deceptive grace. And as he laughed that laugh again his fingers fluttered and, like some horror from a deep-seated nightmare, began to detach from his hands. It was dizzying and impossible, but within the merest fraction of a heartbeat the muscle had separated itself from bone and parted to become these scraps of fleshy birds, blood and so much more glistening on the bodies of that foul carrion as it swarmed around the Bird Man's head. Their flesh mimicked wings perfectly, tiny indentations of feathers coated with a slick gloss and so detailed. And talons. 'Such hatred. . .' he said again, making a tight gesture with his bones that sent his carrion at me.

  Something inside me snapped then, confronted by another sign of madness. These things flying at me. Loosing the anger to simply rage, I went for him. Swept out of the shadow and threw myself at Crohak,
my arms flailing at the swarming things as they buzzed and massed around my head, their pulpy, bloody bodies touched and fused with my skin wherever they touched. They went for my eyes. For my nose. My mouth, Anywhere they could get into me. I span wildly, desperately trying to claw them off my face, but they were like leeches, drawing blood out of me where they sank into my skin. Bleeding me. Patches of skin burned where they ate into it. I peeled one of the things off my cheek before it could eat into my eye, the acid of its blood scorching my hand as I clenched my fist around it until it burst. I dropped it but two more had replaced it before the thing hit the dirt, sinking into the soft skin of my cheek with a sound like butter melting in a hot pan. Then they were on my eyes. I felt sickness clutch at my stomach walls as my guts threatened to spill. The tiny fleshy monstrosities fashioned from the Bird Man's fingers were bloating and guzzling my blood like a flock of miniature maggot-vampires feeding for their master. They wormed their way up my nostrils, the tiny indentations of the wings like barbs as they burned into the sensitive flesh and stuck there. I couldn't breath and because of the barbs I couldn't dislodge the blood suckling parasites. The sheer intensity of the pains they opened, each one so acute, so tiny, so disorientating, I thought I was going to die, that this was it, the end song. The feeding frenzy was sordid and unquenchable; fire. But it was an end, and that was what I had been looking for all this time, wasn't it? An end.

  I opened my mouth to scream, let my last breath have some purpose, but it was just like opening the gate for more of them to pour in and tear up my throat consuming the scream before it made a sound.

  I fell to my knees, hands clutching at my throat.

  Crohak didn't move. Didn't call the things back.

  When blackness swam up to swallow me he was the last thing I saw. That hair, that face, those eyes. . .