Dead Souls

by Campbell, Ramsey; Warren, Kaaron; Finch, Paul; McMahon, Gary; Hood, Robert; Stone, Michael; Mark S. Deniz

  “Oh, yes,” she says discouragingly. “Calling to say goodbye?”

  “That is what I understand you wanted me to do.”

  “Did I? Paul’s home, but he’s in bed resting. I’ll tell him you rang.”

  “Perhaps,” I suggest after mouthing a prayer, “I could say goodbye to Mary.”

  “She isn’t here. She’s at a friend’s, watching videos.”

  My prayer is answered. I need not wait until tomorrow, when Mary will be at college. Nevertheless Penelope’s tone is too defiant for me to allow it to pass unreproved. “On a Sunday?” I rebuke her.

  “She’s been working hard all day helping me to get the house ready for her father.”

  “Working on the Sabbath is a poor excuse for self indulgence,” I declare, and am abruptly overwhelmed by the panic I experienced on Mary’s behalf at the hospital. “Besides, when I last saw her she hardly looked fit for work.”

  “I suppose you think that’s funny.”

  “I assure you I am not smiling.”

  “Do you ever?” Penelope says, and with a sudden weariness which I suspect is counterfeit “This sort of conversation’s why I’m glad Paul’s in bed. I don’t want you upsetting him, or Mary either.”

  “I fail to see how one can upset somebody by enquiring after their health.”

  “You know perfectly well what I mean. Or if you don’t I’ll tell you, because I’m proud of her. She’s become a lot more responsible since she nearly lost her father. When you saw her she’d just given a pint of blood.”

  I shudder so violently that I almost kick my case away, and my knees scrape together. Even worse than the revelation is my sense that I ought to have known — that only my fears on Mary’s behalf had prevented me from realising the Undead were already battening on her. I sway against the wall, and the oracle names my home again. “It sounds as if it’s time to go,” Penelope says in my ear.

  If there is one thing the Father of Lies can be trusted sooner or later to do, it is to contradict himself. The attempt to lure me home has rebounded on my enemies. I hang up the receiver as a response to her and, snatching my case, leave the station at a run.

  My brother’s house is hidden among the terraces opposite the factories. As I stride up the street which leads to it, my shadow lengthens ahead of me. I will not allow myself to feel that it is leading me into darkness; rather am I forcing it onwards between windows black as the pit or flickering with light from screens around which pallid faces cluster. Some of the faces rise as though from feeding and gaze dead eyed at me. Each step I take brings me closer to a black panic which, it appears, I can fend off only by outrunning it. I force myself to slow down and intone the psalms until their rhythm imparts discipline to my walk.

  My brother lives in our parents’ old house. It, and the square of which it is a part, seemed like a haven to me until I began to perceive the errors of my life. Now I see it is an unhallowed sepulchre concealed deep in a monstrous graveyard. I unlatch the gate and venture past the willow into the garden, where the cloying scent of flowers cannot disguise the tell tale smell of turned earth. I have taken out my largest cross, and I hammer with it on the front door.

  In a moment my brother’s voice, feeble when it should be mute, calls out “Who’s that, love?”

  “I’ll see. You rest,” Penelope says beyond the door. At once it is flung open, and her frown multiplies at the sight of me. “I thought you—”

  “Is Mary home yet?”

  “No, I told you—”

  I need hear no more. I raise the cross above my head. If I had any doubts, the fear which immediately fills her eyes would show me what she is. I bring the cross down with all my force, and one arm of it strikes her left temple, which splinters and begins to leak. A second blow shatters her throat as she attempts to cry out. She is already falling to her knees like a slaughtered beast, making obeisance too late, and I slam the door as I step into the hall. I am raising the cross to deliver a final blow when her eyes go out, and she topples over backwards, still kneeling, so that I hear her knees creak and then snap like pistol shots. If she were alive I am sure she would scream.

  I stoop to wipe the bloodied cross on her breast, and then I hear the voice of my dead brother. “Penelope? Penelope?”

  The sound infects me with terror, but also rekindles my wrath. As I straighten my back I repeat the Twenty third Psalm aloud. I have just reached the foot of the stairs when my brother’s walking corpse gropes out of his room and advances to the banister on legs that should no longer move. Grotesquely, it is wearing pyjamas instead of a shroud. “Thomas, what are you—?” it says in a voice like a wind in a churchyard, and its eyes focus, though they must be rotting from within, on what is left of Paul’s wife. “My God, what’s happened to — Thomas, what have you —”

  I am not interrupting. Its brain must be rotting too, and able to recall only fragments of living speech. The thing is no longer my brother, although I may be right to have heard a plea when it took His name in vain? “God help you, Paul, if you can understand me. I’ll save you,” I cry, and spring up the stairs.

  The suffused remains of its eyes turn to me as if they can hardly focus. I hope it will welcome the end, or else I expect it to recoil before the advance of the cross in my hand. The Adversary has clouded my thoughts, so that I am unprepared when the face of the thing that was once my brother darkens as though all the blood it has consumed is rushing to its brain, and it flies at me, snarling like a wild beast, seeking whom it may devour.

  My case is open. I drop it beside me on the stair and snatch out the flask of holy water. I barely have time to unscrew the cap when the Undead thing is upon me. I retreat a step and dash holy water into its eyes. It staggers, moaning, and falls on its back on the stairs. Before it can recover I seize my blade from the case and plunge the point deep between the thing’s ribs.

  The stolen blood gushes high as though grateful for release. I lean all my weight on the blade, and feel it penetrate the stair beneath as the Undead corpse writhes like an impaled insect, fluttering its hands. When at last it ceases moving I withdraw the blade and hammer the stake in its place, hearing ribs splinter.

  The foul but necessary work is not yet done. I unbutton the thing’s jacket and, cutting open the flesh beneath the lower ribs, widen the incision with my hands. By digging with the blade I am able to lay bare the kidneys. One is slightly smaller, and my instincts tell me this belongs to the victim of the Undead. I hack it free and prise it out of its raw nest and pray over it before wrapping it in the bag which contained the potatoes. I place the bag in my case and trudge downstairs, bearing the cross before me.

  I am almost at the front door when I catch sight of the directory beside the telephone. I leave my gory fingerprints on the page that lists Blood. Long before the prints can be identified my task will be done. The key to a mortice lock protrudes from a keyhole inside the front door, and I lock the door behind me as I leave, then I break off the shaft of the key in the lock. Now Mary must seek help with entering the house, and I pray she will not be the first to see how my brother and his wife have been redeemed. I should like to be with her when she sees them, but there is still much to do. In the morning I shall ask the greengrocer where I can buy a pretty cross to have sent to my niece.

  My shadow follows me out of the dead terraces and turns ahead of me. It leads me past the station and uphill to the church. It seems to me that the shadow is my own black soul, urging me to redeem it with further good works. For the moment the churchyard is silent; the Undead must be elsewhere. I make my way swiftly to the Beynon grave and, withdrawing the cross from the mound, place the stolen organ in the hole before covering it with the cross and with earth.

  Now I shall keep watch here until the morning. I could go now and destroy the house of vampirism, but I mean to strike down those who administer this iniquity. Whatsoever soul it shall be that eateth any manner of blood, even that soul shall be cut off. The victims such as Mary I shall spare
, and the town of the Undead shall rise up against me, nor shall I escape. Let my exploit and my martyrdom act as a sign to the righteous, that they may destroy the false healers, the vampires whose uniforms mock sanctity, the halls of intensive care which are factories of mutilation. I am not alone. Our time has come.

  ****

  the ringing sound of death on the water tank

  Stephanie Campisi

  The driveway to the Platts’ farmhouse is narrow and crunchy, and the haggard wire fences that line the paddocks sag and sigh, a loose garrote. They are too close to the sides of our car, which is old and wheezing, and has deep cracks from the sun in its light brown vinyl upholstery. Stuffing oozes out from my seat like guts, and I try to stick it back in, but it doesn’t want to go, like when you get a paper cut and the skin separates like a zip.

  The driveway is less of a driveway and more of an avenue, and it stretches far behind us and far ahead of us like a dusty piece of string. Gum trees stretch overhead, on their tiptoes like ballerinas en pointe, but they are not elegant. Their branches are twisted and writhing like old crones, and their bark is peeling off in dark brown sections like snakeskin. They interlock in a leafy roof, making me think of what it might be like inside a church, particularly as the farmhouse up ahead juts steeple-like out of a hill.

  It takes a long time to drive up to that house, but we are going very slowly, avoiding potholes and blue-tongued lizards that look like patchy clay riddled with fingernails. I think I could probably run down to the main road in maybe five minutes, although very few cars pass down that way, so I would have to make sure there was somewhere to hide. You have to think of these things when you visit the Platts.

  When we reach the house, Simon is waiting for us, with his stocky Jack Russell straining against its red harness. Simon keeps it reined in tight, the skin around his fingers spotted with white from the effort, and the dog tugs so hard it spins around. The dog has a saddle of brown fur, and a tail tipped with white that stands up like a paintbrush or a flag. My mother smiles, and I smile, too, but only because we have talked about this in the car.

  My mother says that Simon is fragile, like an egg, but I think that he is cracked, or rotten.

  She unclasps the dog’s harness, and the dog leaps up against her legs, scrabbling at her knees and leaving a trail of flower-like paw prints down her trousers. She leans forward to take my hand, her eyes avoiding Simon’s, focused instead on the faded pink and grey of the dozens of galahs that are gathered around a damp hollow in the ground, preening and puffing out their bearded jowls and bobbing their mohawked heads. They seem so insipid, like pale clothes stained by darker ones, but maybe it is the light, which makes everything against the dark red earth seem only half there. Her attention on the birds, who barely resemble their fairy-floss, Technicolor-vibrant relatives in the city, she ends up groping air, as Simon is already pulling me along to the corrugated tin shed that houses the tractor, the header, and two old, green cars that scare me because their bonnets and grilles and lights and the metal tusks that once held their license plates seem to all merge together to make a face.

  Simon pulls down a rust-rotten oil can with a spout riddled with holes like a doily from splintery shelf, and he tips it so that a few drops fall on to one of the cars, where they sit, shimmering like a rolled-up ball of snail muck. He sticks out two of his fingers, the way that smokers do, and he rubs the oil into the chipped paint, so that the smeary rainbow of the fluid mixes with the grit of dust until there are sticky, muddy bits, and smooth, shining areas resembling stretched-out tears.

  “But look what else,” he says, and he leaps over a metal bar and some coiled chain that sits there with the malevolent quiet of a king brown. His shoes, scuffed runners with frayed, filthy laces full of burrs and bindi-eye that and have no labels, crunch over the crisp autumnal leaves eddied in by a willy-willy. He stomps on the leaves, gouges the toes of his shoes into them and shreds them. They make a sound of old newspaper tearing.

  “Over here”, he says, as he lifts a piece of ragged blue tarp, fringed at the edges like a plastic fern. Red dust like shattered bricks, and thicker sandy granules, trickle down the slope he has created like it is an hourglass. “Here. Birds. Chicks.”

  They look feral, deformed, the way baby birds look: their thickly-lidded eyes freeze-dried peas, and their down wispy old-man hair. Their beaks are stretched gramophone mouths, or bursting succulent flowers: the brightest red ringed with yellow. Their crops dance up and down, minute corn cobs, as they scream at us. Simon picks one up, cradling its pathetic form, cupping his hands around it, blocking out all light save for a tiny sliver from the gap between his thumbs. He puts his eye up to the crescent moon-shaped space, and peers in at the chick, which shivers in his grip, a quick sound, the fanning of a deck of cards.

  The remaining two chicks writhe over each other, groping blindly at each other with dwarf-like wing-stubs and wobbling heads.

  “You should put it back,” I say, watching as Simon presses his thumbs together so that no light shines through. “You’ll scare it.”

  “I can’t put it back. It’s got my smell now. Its mother won’t want it.”

  He steps over the metal bar, swinging one leg wide and grazing the tarp with the side of his ratty shoe. The air is crisp and has a sharp clean edge, even with the obese sun that swelters in the sky, but Simon steps out onto the dusty track, with its kerb of flattened spiny feathers of wheat and fallen pine cones leaking sticky blood. There is a wind, a low, cold wind, that seems to sing as it flees like a fugitive down from the pigsty at the end of the paddock closest to us.

  I lift up the two tiny birds still huddling beneath the tarp, and nestle them into the folded lip of the bottom of my shirt with a few peeling bits of straw and some shit-covered clumps of grain. The birds wriggle against me like fish, like my baby brother against the swollen and yellow freckly flesh—like an overripe mango — of my mother’s belly, only days before she lay crying on the cold bathroom tiles, the ones I pretended were a Scrabble board, her fingers red as though she had been painting.

  I clutch at my little birds, feel them burring about in the dark space I have made for them, and I smile a little as I think about saving them, and how I will hide them in the bedroom where I will be staying, with its two beds pointing at each other and with their blue floofy covers that have not changed since the eldest Platt son moved out of home. His name is still on the door, painted on a felt flag with crumbling thick paint. There are also two thumb-tacks stuck in the wood, and it’s impossible to prise them out.

  I stumble over a fallen branch from one of the few oak trees that can be found on the farm: they exist only in a small section between farmhouse and the tractor shed, but their leaves, gummy, spiny dog hairs, are everywhere. This is the only dark place on the farm, even in autumn, when the trees are going bald, their rain-spattered pates looking oily like hairless men. The white-painted wire fence of the farmhouse can be seen at certain points, but mostly the dirt is deep and loose and thick beneath my feet, and it sticks to my dew-damp legs where my jeans have ridden up. There are white rocks clustered about like giant mushrooms or pulled teeth beneath a pillow of pine needles and fallen plumage from cockatoos and the two plump frilly-knickered chooks that dart about here hiding from the hawks that swing by overhead. Old bottles and tins, lined up according size and likeness, lay together in a clearing, reminding me of the tombs in the cemetery half an hour out of town. They are encrusted with sap and mud, and some of them are broken, with vicious edges like tiaras of glass.

  Beyond them, back out in the rust-red open with its rough stubble of scraggly weeds and native grasses, the rain water tank, bleached and with peeling paint from sunburn, teeters on the stiletto points of its scaffolding. Simon stands near it, scuffing a foot around in half-circles, the same way my mother folds in cake mixture, and I see that he is teasing the taut, rusted maw of a rabbit trap, whose plate is the only thing about it polished enough to catch the light. The ground aro
und it is stained, even darker than everywhere else. There are soft piles of fur trimming the claws of the trap, an old-fashioned stole, the sort my great grandmother would have worn.

  “Lots of times”, Simon says, “they don’t die straight away. Usually their leg just gets snapped, like foxes. And Dad comes out in the morning to kill them — he just snaps their necks like that. Sometimes he goes out in the ute. And sometimes their heads just come off in your hands, if you pull too hard. And their spine just looks like a long white straw. But they’re pests. I don’t think we should waste good man hours putting them out of their misery.”

  And he draws apart his hands, which have been pressed together against the chick as though in prayer, and very slowly he draws back his right arm, and throws the bird against the tin ribs of the water tank, so hard that the tendon of his elbow clicks over the bone.

  The bird slaps into the side of the tank, making a tiny burst of applause; then falls on to the wooden platform at the base of the tank, which is high above me, and looks like a raft.

  There is a sound in the air, a humming, a ringing, a sound that pounds through your chest and then needles its way up to your eardrums, where it holds on, tenacious and cruel and desperate. And I think I can hear a crying, too, an arrhythmic sobbing that jabs at me worse than that terrible sound, and then I realise that it’s me, and with the tiny birds pouring over each other in my shirt like congealing liquid, I run back to the farmhouse, dirt spiralling out behind me in a dusty parachute.

  ****

  For lunch we have sauce and cheese sandwiches on fat white bread. The cheese is that sort that when you put it in the oven, it bubbles and shrinks like hot tar, or like chip packets over a fire.

  We eat at the breakfast bar, which is used for every meal, not just breakfast. There are fly-flecked bunches of fake grapes hanging from the walls and sitting in baskets. They have lurid leaves that are similar to the plastic green wall of grass you get with sushi. Some of their ends are squished in like wasting dates from where we used to stand beneath them on our tiptoes and strain to grasp the bottom grape, squeezing it so that you could feel the slippery fabric of its insides grazing over itself.