by Ray Cluley
A couple of the other passengers were looking at Robert. He wondered how odd he must have looked, scrutinizing the conductor. One of them, a woman with braided hair who kept licking her lips like she was tasting the air, gave him a nod and then turned away. The other, a middle-aged man with a receding hairline and poorly fitted suit, chuckled to himself and said something to a companion Robert couldn’t see.
Maybe.
S
A dead baby, a tumoured brain, or glistening things both fat and pale; the night, the swamp, or the in-between; anything and everything was in that jar, it only depended on who was looking.
Robert loved Ray Bradbury.
Fiction is where we find our fiends, that’s what Robert knew. And none of that unconscious or subconscious rubbish; we knew what we were doing when we created such things. We put them in stories to be told around campfires, and later we put them in books, lots of them in lots of books, and that way people would know. Robert’s greatest weapon was his library card. At least, it used to be. Recently he wasn’t so sure. Monsters wore hockey masks, gloves with blades, something white-faced with a stretched open-jaw. Now, at his age, he was thankful that they sparkled, was glad to fight noseless foes with a curious grasp of Latin and a name that shouldn’t be spoken. Diluted devils. Paper scarecrows. Easy.
Robert read a few paragraphs, enough to relax, and then he only pretended to read. With most books these days that was okay because these days most people only pretended to write, but it didn’t seem fair to Bradbury. So he slotted his ticket between the pages as a bookmark. That was how he noticed he’d only been sold a single.
“There’s been a mistake,” he said, leaning out into the aisle for the conductor’s attention. He held up his ticket. “Excuse me? I asked for a return.”
The conductor faced him, said “Ticket,” and continued up the train.
Robert began to stand. It was the conductor, hidden in plain sight. A purloined letter no one else could read. A ghost no one else could see. Robert reached down for his case but the teenager beside him put a clammy hand on his.
“There’s no coming back from where we’re going,” it said. “The line terminates with us.”
S
The way the young man kept wiping at the window as he spoke told Robert he needed the condensation. He realized now that the wetness of the man’s t-shirt came not from sweat but from the skin beneath that leaked moisture as much as it craved it. He had probably been sitting in the seat with the damp patch earlier. His voice was thick and bubbly, his words like gas escaping marshland.
“Found what you’re looking for?”
Robert didn’t know if the creature was referring to itself, or to the fact that Robert was carefully rummaging in his briefcase.
“As soon as you find your stake or silver bullet or whatever,” —it burped, and a thick fluid rose and fell in its throat— “you’ll need something else, and then something else, and something else. Look.”
The teenager that wasn’t a teenager pointed carelessly at other seats in the carriage. Everybody was looking at Robert. No, everything was looking at Robert. There was a woman with a sabre-toothed smile. There was a man who shimmered when he moved, fading into the upholstery, and beside him a boy with a lap that writhed. A woman with a skin of stitches and scraps of shroud or bridal gown. And others. Lots of others. An old man knitting at a furious pace. It looked like wool, but the line descended to somewhere unseen, a bulge around the midriff that could have been a sack of something silky.
A fox with bright green eyes, green like go, padded down the aisle, pausing to nod its snout at Robert and to sniff briefly at the seat it had given him. A green-eyed monster jealous of nothing Robert had to offer. With a sweep of tail it was gone, brushing past a pale man in a suit dark as night, a man who stood and moved forward, a blur of ink in clothes made of what you see with your eyes closed.
“Hello Robert,” the man said, with a voice from under the bed. With a whisper from outside the window.
“Hello Robert,” said something that hurt to look at, something that lived in uninvented corners.
“Hello Robert” and “Hello Robert,” “Hello Robert.” Words from fur and from fangs, words grunted, squealed, howled, growled, and gibbered. Their collective breath was one of blood and bile and burial soil, chewed worms and rotten fungus.
The pale man in tailored gloom came towards Robert. Each soft step on the well-worn carpet was the sound a promise makes as it breaks. “You found us all,” it said with a mouthful of ash.
“Alright,” said Robert. “Okay.”
He closed his briefcase and then his eyes. Would it be teeth or claws he felt opening his throat? Would he be torn by spiny talons, falling away in fleshy pieces, or would they drink his spinal fluid, liquefy his bones, let him leak his last in a poison-swollen agony?
“None of those things,” said a tiny man above him. He was nestled in amongst the luggage in the overhead carry space. He closed his eyes at Robert and a new one opened in his forehead. It was a colour Robert had never seen before. “We’re not going to kill you.”
He knew that these things lied: he knew that these things told the truth.
Maybe they would possess him.
“Maybe we already do.”
One of them had tried back in ’82. Lingering at the station platform, it had decorated many trains with human colours, leaping and splashing. It had pushed Robert from inside, but he’d pushed it right back. A tug o’ war he wasn’t sure he’d won.
“She had been playful, full of fun,” said the little man-thing, wriggling into a more comfortable position, “she liked to run and skip and jump. Run from you, or so she tried, but you knew what to do, and so she died.”
“I don’t like poetry.”
“Not true,” said the man, “you do. You do. Coleridge, Keats, and Rossetti too.”
“What are you—”
“‘One had a cat’s face, one whisked a tail, one tramped at a rat’s pace, one crawled like a snail.’”
“How do you—”
“‘Barking, mewing, hissing, mocking, tore her gown and soiled her stocking.’”
“Shut up!”
The little man closed his eye and opened his others, opened more, opened all of them. “I. See. You.”
Robert lunged up from his seat. He didn’t bring a weapon out from his briefcase; he intended to use the case itself to mash the tiny little bastard into paste.
Several hundred hands seemed to grab him. Claws tore his jacket, hooks ripped it, long multi-knuckled fingers folded around his arm, something ropey and wet snared his waist, and a hand of bone forced him back, forced him down. Something cloven kicked him, something slimy whipped him, and something that wasn’t there, something that was only air, held him in his seat. His briefcase was taken by something in yellow sleeves. The cuffs spewed things that crawled and fluttered and they scuttled across Robert’s lap.
“Sit,” they told him. As the train hurtled into the darkening night, the carriage he was in seemed to writhe and pulsate with things that shouldn’t be but were. Things he knew.
The monsters have changed, said the tiny man without speaking. Look.
The newspaper before him fluttered open, pages turned by invisible hands. He saw wars and child porn and riots and terror and rapes and murders and tumours that couldn’t be cured.
“And look.”
A story had been circled with blotty blue biro. It told of a body discovered on a railway embankment, found by rail-workers carrying out emergency repairs. Police were treating the death as suspicious. It didn’t mention why, but Robert thought maybe it was because the woman’s wounds had been sown with salt. He’d hoped to rely on the city’s urban scavengers after that but even they weren’t desperate enough to feast from such remains.
“You
don’t need to worry,” said the boy beside him. He was wet with a substance thicker than sweat, now. Part of his lap had burst and his t-shirt had dispersed into rotten patches of cotton that clung to a withered chest.
Robert covered his eyes with his fists—
He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.
—then brought them down on the chair in front. He did it again. And again. Again-again-again.
“You’re not helping.”
The words fell upon Robert like bee-stings. “Where are you taking me?”
“Carcosa.”
“Innsmouth.”
“The House of Pain.”
Robert shook his head.
“Into the closet.”
“Under the stairs.”
“Endsville, old hoss. Where all rail service terminates.”
But where was that?
“Somewhere over the fucking rainbow,” said the little man amongst the luggage, “my pretty.” It smiled with bloody teeth.
“Where the wild things are,” Robert muttered. His breath fogged the air in the carriage. It was getting cold.
“Where we’re going isn’t important. Do you know who we are?”
Robert saw many he could give names to. Others he knew only by type.
“You’re the monsters.”
“That’s what we are. Do you know who?”
He knew what they wanted to tell him. They would quote Nietzsche, talk about struggling with monsters or staring into the abyss. One of them might mention different sides of the same coin, or something like that.
“Do you know who you are?”
They were definitely going to give him Nietzsche.
“We know who you are. We all do.”
Robert sighed. “I am legend, am I?” It was meant to be dry, a wry comment to die by, but a laugh built inside and he bellowed with it, he cackled, and he wiped away tears that had already been there.
Monsters change, but you don’t want to.
“You do like the pretty ones.”
. . . and still insists he sees the ghosts.
Robert thought he might be sick. The train rocked, side to side, and the things on board swayed with it, more used to its movement than he was. It lurched with brief bursts of speed, like a serpent lunging for prey, and sometimes it seemed to plunge, as if they were hurtling down somewhere deep and endless.
“You’re coming with us.”
It was a pointless thing to say because Robert already knew. Most of the others thought so too and turned away, sitting back down, coiling into their seats, gathering themselves into cocoons. Forgetting him. For now.
Beside him the seat was vacant. The cushion was damp and squelched at his touch. He wiped his hand on his trousers and stared out at the October country. He didn’t see it. Instead he focussed on the reflection he saw in the glass. For now it was his, whatever may lie beneath. He hoped it didn’t change into anything else.
What are you looking at?
The faint image of himself was fading from the glass. “Nothing,” said Robert. He said it until it was true, and all there was to see was darkness.
I Have Heard
the Mermaids Singing
I have a fragment of poetry in my mind, looping like a snippet of song, when I go to meet Eliot at the mission. Maybe it’s because of his name, maybe it’s because of the stories, but it resonates so appropriately with everything that I can’t help but think it’s something more. Maybe not God, but something neat and ordered in the universe telling me this is all as it should be, me being here.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. That’s the bit that has lodged in my mind, but it’s the following line that I exhale with the last of my cigarette smoke.
“I do not think that they will sing to me.”
I’m looking out onto a sea that is darker than the night sky above it, standing on a stretch of beach that says shush with each gentle wave that washes it clean. My clothes are stuck to my skin even now. There are two seasons here; wet and dry. Both seasons are hot seasons.
I sigh, like the waves, and flick my cigarette butt to the sand, then stoop to pick it up again; such casual littering isn’t like me, even at home, and this certainly isn’t home. This is Nicaragua, about six thousand miles from home.
This is the Miskito Coast.
S
The people here fish for lobsters. Eliot doesn’t call them lobsters, though. He calls them gold.
“Red gold,” he says. “And this is a gold rush.”
I nod. I’m on my third cigarette but I’ll stop now that Eliot has joined me on the sand.
“And do you know what else is red, my friend? Blood. Blood is red, and here it clots thick and starves the brain and that is too dear a cost.”
He’s lost me a little with the metaphors, but I know that he is talking about decompression sickness. The bends.
Eliot says something too fast and too Spanish for me to understand, but the tone is clear enough, and the palms-out shrug he directs at the busy people around us tells me even more about his frustration.
It’s early in the morning or late at night, and my jetlag isn’t helping me decide either way. I’m probably supposed to be tired, but I’m not. It isn’t all jetlag. Some of it is being somewhere new, and some of it is all the strong Central American coffee, but most of it comes from Eliot. He talks with such passion, such earnest concern for his fellow man, that he keeps me more alert than any coffee in the world.
“Look,” he says, pointing out to sea. The lights of the lobster boats bob up and down like fallen stars afloat on the ocean, their glow diffused by the night (or morning) mist. It would be a beautiful sight if I didn’t know what it meant, although the sounding of the horns goes a long way towards ruining it too. Around us, entire families shove cayucas through the sand and into the surf. The dugout boats roll across chopped lengths of palm tree until, with enthusiastic cries of “Wop, wop!” the men launch themselves into their cayucas and paddle out to the waiting boats whilst their wives and children watch from the shore.
“Look,” Eliot says again. He points, first to one boat, then another, shaking his head. “Not all of the children stay to watch.”
He’s right. Boys, maybe ten or eleven years old, are paddling out there with their fathers and brothers. Some cry out with joy and excitement as if they are at play, whilst others are all too serious and business-like in their manner, older in their minds than in their bodies. They are the men of the family, earning money the only way they know how.
Eliot has read my piece about the sweatshops. He thinks he can only persuade me to write a story if there’s a child angle. It would make for a more striking article, but he should know that my being here means I’m already persuaded. Besides, I would write his story if only because he asked. He was there for my mother right to the end; well, right until her condition twisted the appreciation out of her, bending her into a bitter bitch with everyone but me. I owed him something for that.
Here, Eliot is a missionary. Back home he had been a priest. He looks better as a missionary. The white cotton trousers and open shirt go well with his part-Spanish features. A gold crucifix replaces the medallion his hairy chest suggests he should wear, but he has the dark oiled hair that is according to stereotype. Knowing his age, I know he must dye his hair.
“Shall we have some breakfast?” I ask him, taking a gamble with the time.
He sighs, but the sound is quickly lost beneath the slap of the waves and the way the wind flutters the edges of our clothes. Behind us, the village huts glimmer in faint candlelight, waiting for the dawn. If people are stirring for breakfast, they are doing it quietly. Perhaps they have gone back to bed.
Eliot kicks idly at one of the palm logs on the bea
ch. He scuffs up sand in a half-hearted attempt to bury it.
“Yes,” he says eventually. “Let us have some breakfast.”
S
There is a picture of Christ on one of Eliot’s walls, but I’m only taking Eliot’s word for it. “He’s there somewhere,” he’d said when I asked. I find myself playing an odd version of Where’s Wally, looking for the long-haired bearded son of God amongst all the other photographs while Eliot roots around in the tiny fridge. I hear only the tinkle-clink of bottles, so it’s no surprise when he apologizes and says, “I only have beer. Beer for breakfast?” He laughs, briefly.
Beer for breakfast is fine by me. It doesn’t feel like breakfast time anyway.
I discover a picture I did not expect to find. Nestled between a photograph of a tiny grinning Miskito boy, and one of a man in a wheelchair who nevertheless smiles for the camera, is a photograph of my mother. She is able to sit up in bed, and there’s even some warmth in her eyes and lopsided smile. Her hand is at her necklace, but I don’t know if she draws strength from the cross or from the fact that Eliot gave it to her. I remember taking the photograph. Maybe she hides the cross from me, knowing how I raged against God back then.
The bottle Eliot hands me is cool and wet. I use it to point at the picture. “I didn’t know you had that.”
Eliot nods and drinks. “She had always wanted to come to Nicaragua. She gave that to me when she knew her time was coming. She knew about my collection.” He uses his beer to turn a small circle in the air, indicating the walls around us, and I realize all the people there are dead.