Dead Souls
Page 29
He reached the end of the supermarket aisle and turned right, heading for the refrigerator section and the frozen pre-packed meals for one. Just as he emerged into the main shopping area, he caught a glimpse of the tail end of something yellow and fluttering as it disappeared past the edge of a free-standing stack of cereal boxes.
Brett’s heart raced; his good leg went rigid. Surely all he’d seen was the hem of some housewife’s yellow dress, or the trailing hood of a child’s parka. Nothing more. Nothing out of the ordinary.
The wire basket in his hand clattered against his stick as he hobbled around the corner. He peered along the suddenly telescoping perspective of the aisle: it was empty but for some stocky pensioner struggling gamely with a bargain-sized sack of basmati rice. The old geezer’s sweater was a pale shade of mustard: not quite yellow, but close enough to ease Brett’s frayed nerves and put to rest his stirring terror.
At the cash register, a pockmarked young man listening to music through tiny headphones served him reluctantly, as if he’d rather be somewhere else. The kid’s eyes were heavy-lidded, as if he needed far more sleep than he actually got, and as he passed Brett’s purchases through the barcode-scanner he inspected them with a look of distaste on his slack features.
Restless and none too impressed with the shop-boy’s dismissive attitude, Brett turned his head and looked around the store for a distraction. It was a small place located on a quiet corner of town, with untidily packed rows of cheap produce leaning from slanted shelves in aisles that were too narrow for comfort. A sudden patch of yellow moved quickly between aisle ends, appearing and disappearing like something viewed from a bad angle.
Brett glared at the boy, silently urging him to hurry up and register his purchases.
When he looked back at the small shopping area, he eventually saw the swathe of misplaced colour pressed up against the glass lid of one of the big horizontal freezer units, an unnaturally elongated face leering at him from a bed of frozen peas and broccoli.
“No,” he said, fingers clenching around the handle of his stick. “Get away from me!”
The boy paused in his scanning, and stared at Brett. His hand strayed to the security button located beneath the till and a nervous twitch jerked at the corner of his mouth.
Brett back-pedalled furiously, his eyes roaming the open spaces, then the shelves and nooks and crannies where anything might easily hide. Where was it now? A hand fell on his shoulder from behind, and Brett struggled to free himself from its grip, raising his arm in a defensive gesture.
“Sir? Can I help?” said a distant voice.
When he turned, the security guard’s face looked puzzled for a moment before Brett landed the punch, snapping the man’s nose in a clean horizontal break. The guard went down heavily and Brett hurried to the automatic sliding doors. Once outside on the busy street, he crossed the road and headed home, leaving his provisions behind. It didn’t matter: he had not paid for them. Everything had happened in such a rush that he’d acted purely out of instinct.
Alone in his house, sitting by the window and watching the quiet suburban street, Brett felt the Fear descending upon him; the cold, unstoppable terror that gripped a man during battle. The thing in yellow had followed him here, stalking him out of the desert and onto a military plane, where it sat on the wing and waited for landing; hanging on his coattails like a voodoo curse from a paperback thriller, then waiting, waiting for its chance to strike.
Everything had seemed so uncomplicated in the dry desert heat: the choices one made during warfare were black and white, straight down the middle. Fight or flight: kill or be killed: stay or go.
The memories, however, were not so simple…
****
The old man must have had something to do with it. Brett had discovered him there, squatting in a shallow excavation beneath shattered concrete foundations, lighting votive candles and arranging edible offerings on a cracked stone plinth altar that held a dusty glass bottle filled with some kind of yellow vapour. The old man wore dirty yellow robes, and one side of his face looked like molten plastic. Wounds caused by a fire, or perhaps the result of another botched allied assault. The flesh below his eyes had run like liquid before setting in an abstract pattern. The old man glanced up at Brett from his kneeling position at the altar, edging in front of the bottle and hiding it from view, and when he pulled the large dagger out of the folds of his robes Brett was so afraid, so out of it, that he opened fire without even thinking about the possible consequences.
****
The old man’s head fragmented into jagged chunks and blood misted like a fine powdery residue: it still happened now, in Brett’s mind. It happened all the time, like a film stuck on a loop. That crimson mist was like a stain on his life, a discoloration, a tattoo on his soul. It settled slowly, like discoloured water vapour, coating the altar and the shattered remains of the bottle.
That was the exact moment when the roaring choir of gunfire struck up outside the shrine entrance. The men were under attack, and all that Brett could think to do was run. Just as he turned and headed for the exit, he saw a flash of muddy yellow stirring in a corner; then he was moving, fast and low, panic taking control of his tired body.
****
Brett sat at the window rocking like a senile old man, his eyes not straying from the street outside, his hands gripping the arms of the chair on which he sat perched, back held ramrod straight. Remembering.
****
When the rapid gunfire became the sound of the world and his men started dropping like flies, Brett panicked and ran out into the ruined village they’d discovered during what was supposed to be a routine patrol through a depopulated zone somewhere to the west of Baghdad. His feet sent up puffs of dust and his legs ached from the God-knew-how-many days they’d spent marching deep into hostile territory; his eyes scanned for snipers and other hidden assassins.
The outpost must have been empty for years, and ancient ruins poked up like abandoned grave markers through the pale crust of sand. Brett remembered reading somewhere that the ancient Mesopotamian city of Babylon had possibly stood somewhere near this site, but lately there were rumours of pockets of resistance in the nearby hills and dunes — guerrilla cells who were willing to fight to the death.
Blood. Screams. The wind-whip of bullets tracing through the dead air and the unforgettable sound of grown men screaming. So he ran for open ground, praying to find safer cover, perhaps even an elevated vantage point from which to take stock of the situation. But all he’d done was run into a minefield, and when his legs were blown from under him, he took to the air like an Olympic diver from a high board.
****
He sat weeping in the chair, seeing it all play out behind his eyes. He could never stop remembering; never turn off the movie. An endless repetition of cowardice.
****
Fleeing out into the open desert that surrounded the village, leaping a low barbed wire fence. Not even realising that he had strayed into a minefield until the explosion rang in his ears and he felt suddenly and shockingly elevated, as if the hand of God hand swooped down out of the sky to scoop him up.
Sprawled in the sticky-sand mess of his own pooling blood, feeling nothing, not even the pain. Ears ringing like he was in a church on Christmas day, eyes running with tears and blinking from the grit of displaced sand. A vague yellow shape approaching across the dunes, eating up the distance, flitting ever nearer. A figure, but seen through the prickly haze of settling sand and eyes that were loosened in their sockets by the force of the unexpected blast.
Then the figure was upon him, lowering over his body like a scabrous angel. Long nicotine-yellow hands, rail-thin arms; a narrow cadaverous face as yellow as the head of a sunflower. Sad amber eyes. Black gaping mouth. Leaning over him, moving closer to the mangled ruin of his injured leg. A sense of great hunger. Then: feeding. Eating.
Darkness. Huge yellow wings flapping in the long night of his mind, and then…
***
*
He’d woken on a stretcher in the back of a speeding military Humvee, phasing in and out of consciousness as the vehicle headed back to a safe US military compound. Everything was choppy after that, like small pieces of an unstable picture rather than entire experiences. He only managed to communicate properly when he was back in the UK, after being sewn together and patched up by an already exhausted army medical crew out in the field.
His right leg was ruined, the left one merely crippled, and he was informed that he would spend the rest of his life walking with the aid of a stick. The psychologists had done all they could, so they sent him home to rot. It could have been a lot worse: some of his friends had not returned at all from the Middle East; others had left entire pieces of themselves over there in the hot desert, body parts left behind to take root and flower like strange foreign plants. Most of the time Brett considered himself lucky. The rest of the time he thought of himself as finished.
By the time morning came he had slept little, dozing only fitfully and in an upright position. His back and neck ached; his leg throbbed like distant explosions. He lurched awake to inspect the empty street for quick snatches of yellow, but saw nothing of his phantom pursuer.
He pushed himself to his feet and went to the bathroom. Struggling to balance on the one good leg while he urinated, Brett watched as splashes of yellow soon decorated the white toilet seat. A strange panicked terror gripped him as he washed away the stains, and he hurried from the house to pay a visit that he had put off for too long already.
He caught a bus at the end of the street; the journey took a little over an hour, but he didn’t mind. Once-familiar streets blurred past the bus window, but all Brett could see around him was a vast ocean of yellow.
****
Pausing outside the front door, Brett took a quiet moment to summon his strength. He knew now that he was a coward — his actions during combat proved this beyond any doubt. It was all he could do not to turn back and go to ground in the first pub he saw, whittling away his remaining self-esteem in a pint glass.
A pale face appeared briefly at a ground floor window: it was her, peering out to see who stood at the door. Brett smiled, but the expression felt like a protective mask. Cathy’s mournful, tight-lipped face, framed by an aura of jet-black hair, ducked away behind the curtains.
Half a minute later the door opened.
“What do you want, Brett?” said Thomas, his face stern, arms loose at his sides, ready to strike.
“I want to speak to my wife. To see my daughter.”
The sound of a baby crying drifted through the open front door, and Brett felt his good leg buckle under the strain of confronting all that he had lost.
“They don’t want to see you, mate. Not ever again.” Thomas’ tone softened at the sound of baby Carrie’s baleful weeping; he was finally attempting to be human, to show some compassion. It was the least an old friend could do.
“I need to see them. To tell them...” but he didn’t know what he wanted to say. How could he? Everything felt so confusing, so strange. Lemon-yellow wallpaper hung on the corridor walls behind Thomas; his shirt beneath the cardigan was the colour of butter. Brett closed his eyes, squeezing them shut as hard as he could, but the darkness behind them held a subtle yellow hue.
“Just go, Brett. Leave them in peace. Haven’t you caused them enough pain? Seeing your face all over the newspapers...hearing about what you did on the television. It almost killed them. You’re a fucking coward. You’re nothing but yellow.”
Brett turned away, almost smiling at his rival’s choice of insult. He hobbled along the path to the steel gate at the front of the three-storey townhouse, feeling his entire life speed up to pass him by.
A decision was made; a bridge burned. He didn’t look back, but he hoped at least that Cathy watched from the window, Carrie cradled in her arms, and perhaps shedding a quiet tear for all they’d once shared. His dead leg ached, the pain nothing more than a phantom of the agonies he’d once known.
Deciding on a sadistic impulse to walk home, Brett felt hunted by the yellow shadow of his cowardice. He could remember nothing of what they claimed he had done, but of course he’d read the official report. Had even been told the details during his dishonourable discharge from the armed forces.
What Brett remembered most was the horror in yellow: its saliva-dripping teeth and haunted eyes. But the platoon of US Marines that found him claimed that he was alone, gnawing on the bones of his flayed right leg and with dead men’s possessions spilling from the pockets of his bloodied fatigue jacket. They said that he had plundered corpses, and even taken valuable artefacts from the vandalised underground shrine before fleeing and leaving his men to die. Rumours of cannibalism persisted despite no official charges being brought.
Brett knew that the thing in yellow had placed the booty on his person; it was the carrion wind of cowardice, a ghoul that stole the coins from dead men’s eyes, and somehow Brett was marked out for this treatment. Perhaps because he’d murdered the strange Muslim priest and desecrated his secret place of worship; or perhaps because he’d run from battle, leaving his squad to be slaughtered. In reality, he was nothing but a lowly Sergeant, but the untimely death of his Colonel had meant that he had assumed command of the company until he could lead them back to the nearest allied position.
Brett had never been a natural leader of men. Nor had he possessed any of the assets necessary to guide them to safety. Even his rank of Sergeant was awarded out of nepotism, at the request of his late father, a man whose name was legendary in military circles. Brett was a buffoon, a danger to everyone around him. So they had done the only sensible thing, and sent him to war.
He limped along dirty back streets and quiet leafy avenues, hiding away from the world. As late afternoon stretched into early evening, and a deep shadow fell upon him, Brett felt the dreaded yellow presence nearing. He glimpsed its reflection in a cake shop window, and hovering in a doorway across the street. Heard its scrabbling bare feet in the mouth of an alley as he passed clumsily by. Sensed the hunger, the overpowering desire to finish what it had started in the boiling wasteland from which it had emerged.
In Islamic culture, didn’t the colour yellow symbolise air? He knew for certain that Muslim brides wore yellow robes. In the rest of the world it represented the colour of treachery and cowardice, of age, pestilence and decay. In some western religious paintings, the pale horse of death was also depicted in a watery, pusillanimous variant of yellow.
But no malefic jinn or vengeful ghost of Islam stalked him; this was something older than faith or tradition, more secret than organised religion. It was a sensation, a whisper of an act. A cold yellow thing born from somewhere deep inside his own psychology — a sharpened facet of his own damaged soul beaten into cantankerous life.
When Brett finally arrived home twilight was falling; long shadows scraped the ground like fingers and doors and windows were sensibly locked up against the slowly encroaching night. His body ached; the atrophied muscles were no longer accustomed to so much exercise. Knowing that he should sleep, Brett instead took out the kit bag festooned with a military crest that lay hidden under his bed. He unlocked the clasp and took out the folded uniform, laying it out on the bed. When he handled the gun he felt stronger than he had in months.
Then he whispered a prayer to whatever might be listening.
****
Once he’d managed to dress himself, he stood before a full-length mirror. He looked the part: like a real soldier, despite his discharge, despite his reputation being in tatters. Straightening his hat and flattening his collar, Brett stepped awkwardly back towards the bed and hefted the firearm. It was an old pre-2000 military issue SA80 assault rifle, small and trim and easy to smuggle aboard a plane in a bag supposedly checked and sealed by military police. Brett could never understand why the weapon was almost universally vilified; he had always been fond of the design, and he found its accuracy a comfort.
Brett ejected th
e magazine. A full clip: 30 rounds. Enough to last him quite some time if he picked his shots carefully; and he would have to do just that, because he remembered from folklore that a ghoul must be struck only once — a second blow would invest it with new life rather than killing it.
Darkness descended like cascading black waters beyond the bedroom windows, and Sergeant Brett Jones did his best to march out of the room and into the upstairs study. The room provided an excellent view of the front street, and the main road beyond. It was ideal for a siege situation.
The thing in yellow appeared as a smudge in the distance, flapping closer as he watched, billowing in the restless air. Within minutes it stood in the road outside his house, one wasted arm held straight up and out in a mock salute.
By the time he raised the gun and took a bead on it, the figure was gone. But he knew it would be back. It would never leave him: it was his personal phantom, and no amount of belated valour could ever release him from its subtle grasp. Its eyes were the colour of swamp gas, or sickly sodium light; and when it smiled its teeth were a leprous yellow, too, sitting in ruinous gums. He had seen its zombie face in the lifeless countenance of every soldier shot in the back by a hidden sniper or vaporised by a suicide bomber; every General who sat behind a desk at a distant command post while his troops dropped like flies on the front line; each single squaddie shredded by an assassin’s blade on a lonely street long after curfew.