by Неизвестный
A day turned into a week. Weeks into months. I managed to adopt his level of silence and my mind began to overload with thoughts for the first time. Whisky infused nights by the roaring open fire made me note the literature my secret idol read. It was of an obvious nature; ‘The Church of Satan’, ‘Worship and Sacrifice’, the peculiar list spread across the substantial bookcases that towered up to the ceiling. But the nature of his interest only intrigued myself further into the workings of his genius mind. I wanted to create as he created. I wanted to possess the knowledge he possessed. And that night I would.
***
Dusk was setting in and through the amber twilight a young teenage woman with a childish looking back pack, stood back looking at the monstrous house that stood before her. “This must be it”, she reassured herself, after an hours hitchhike and a merciful much longer walk into the shadows that tormented her sense of direction. Her name was Anne and she had all the time in the world to explore and try to make her dreams come true of having money and using her naïve mind to act for a living.
She was suddenly greeted by Michael at the door for her audition. Led into the hollow dimly lit room for a casual interview into her acting abilities and aspirations. She did the majority of the talking while Michael gazed intensely into her face and poured another murky drink into her short whisky glass. He asked her to join him in inhaling some golden smoke; it was only her that was participating though. He then switched the cameras on. Put the noose round her neck. Gently removed the stool from under her and watched her vacant smile and giggles turn in to a panicked losing struggle. He stared in to the lenses for a few minutes then the silence emerged again. Only this time the heavy breath of two onlookers filled the room above as they peered through the gaps in the ceiling. They were the participating audience.
***
I knew the way Michael acted when Sunday night crept up every week. He was agitated, and secretive, but more so than usual. He would wait every week for a young women coming and as Samara sat beside me on the large crisp white bed she spoke what I was playing over in my mind but with a surprisingly humorous tone. “Have you noticed what your Uncle keeps doing Flynn? I mean really noticed?” She said, as a girl, no older than twenty with her long hair blowing in the night breeze could just about be seen. “Do you think these visitors are actually prostitutes?!” she laughed directly at me keeping her green forceful stare on mine, to see if she could unearth a reaction.
“I know exactly what you mean” I replied moving away from her intensity, the grin leaving my face. “I’ve just never seen any of them leave. Seriously.”
So that night we remained in our spacious yet draughty attic conversion and lifted the maroon rug covering the floor. Through the creaky withered floorboards we had our conveniently spacey view.
And the rest was history so to speak. The girl was naïve enough to get completely wasted. Then to simplify it; She was hung while Michael filmed it.
We raced to the outside of the house and waited for the sliding sound of the glass doors to open as they usually did at this time and then slam shut. We backed ourselves up on the stony wall covered in shadows, and a coldness that wasn’t caused by the impending night crept on our skin. Michael made his entrance first, with a bulky baggage being dragged on to the slab of concrete next to him. He journeyed up the ethereal path that led to the stagnant swamplands. His figure becoming distant. Yet his present being very much felt by us as we bowed our head at his exit as if we were mourners. Moonlight soon caught our sight and the white ghostliness of it hovered in the night air. The Angel of Death was awaiting its gift.
***
The two figures raced towards the room where the cold spirit of a women moments ago existed. They grappled at the film reels with tattered writing scribed on the side; knocking several on to the hollow floor. Every noise seeming exasperated, the clattering cutting the atmosphere like a knife. The chalky smoke burned all the way down the wick shutting out any remaining tiny mellow light and drowning the room in darkness. And without any warning Michael swung open the door, and knowingly faced the intruders. He sat down with the narrow beam of light accentuating their expressions and they followed, awaiting the first few words out of his mouth as if he was their teacher and they were being studious of his teachings. And with a slightly subdued tone and simple facts placed on the table, he began to unearth his knowledge on the intrigued couple that felt allured by his views and power over less than deserving human beings. Michael shook his nephew’s hand as they retired for the night, and he noticed dark vitae christened his hand. The reality of the situation sat with everyone involved but the enthrallment took control.
At the breakfast bar in the morning faced with intense sunlight and citrus orange juice, the couple continued as usual until the doorbell rang unusually early causing frowns to be exchanged. Michael was first to the door and warmly invited the police officer in to his sitting room. His voice could be heard as echoes telling how a women’s body had been found not far from here. Each individuals’ heartbeat skipped a beat but knowingly knew they were the greater force existing here. Their arrogance exceeded. The body of a drug user had been found hanging in the forest and post mortems suggested suicide as it was a derelict area, vulnerable to this activity. The officer made his apologies, hurried his enquiries then left. But this wasn’t the case; as the sinister creatures that lived within these quarters knew all very well.
***
As we stepped out of the shiny black limousine, the hurried flash and snaps of the paparazzi blinded and paralysed Samara and I on the carpet. Faces surrounded us like a sea as we were stranded on an island seconds away from our warped paradise, her forceful grip leading me to the direction in which we were heading. I admired her ability to graciously accept the praise of becoming the infamous horror actress in my trilogy of recently released blockbusters. I had finally captured the essence of a true horror masterpiece. The emerald of her dress mesmerising against the backdrop of the night and not one individual was resistant from being captivated by her presence .
As we were seated and the lights dimmed down, I could feel the adrenaline pumping through my veins. The pure shock of the audiences’ shortened breaths and uttering’s, filling me with thrill and vigilance. It felt like second nature to remain eerily calm. Only the dimly lit faces on the screen and darkened settings concealed the real victim, splashing them with blackness and hiding the secret. The secret of their real inexorable doom that fuelled our black obsessive passion of success.
And so as I retire I will leave you with the imparted knowledge I have acquired. We were never caught. Nobody, no police department have the man power to catch individuals who leave no trace to be caught and the intellect to charm and reassure those who cross our path. So never stop looking around; it could be your partner who buries these secrets, or the intense intellect who may tomorrow engage you in a chat room conversation. A breed of people as eternal as vampires, only darker and more powerful.
***
That night couldn’t have been predicted. A new door opened, leaving the one I surfaced from tightly shut, and emerged in a deeper ebony than could ever be imagined by an untainted mind. I crossed over to the abyss, a fete that could’ve happened to anyone. To read this is to unveil a breed of people that exist. Not in fantasy. Not in fiction. But in your life. A breed of people as eternal as vampires, only darker and more powerful. This is how my story begins.
The Esprit Kid
By Ella Mai
I’d seen various glimpses of her throughout the lengthy years I had tallied and totalled up living on the East Heath. Mainly these sightings, for me were through the window of the Esprit’s family car: Those times when we had met on the narrow track in some inconvenient clash of journey and had passed by each other at hearse pace.
Her twig like frame was almost hidden from me amongst reflections of trees on the glass windows. But, I could bind these memorial snapshots of her together in a ragged flick-book of her stilted i
mage, ageing gradually over the years along with the rest of us.
I’d never heard her be called anything else but the Esprit’s kid.
The Esprit family lived on the other side of the heath to us in the bigger houses. The times their name twitched on the tongues of my family were in the idle kitchen chitchat before dinner. We would hear somebody’s sketched report of having passed by them again in their car or having spotted them walking like stalked scarecrows across the heath, in the distance always, never close enough to speak.
Our mother would always purse her lips disdainfully at their mention and then lift the casserole dish from the oven with a swift exorcism of all but a delicious smell that dismissed any lingering thoughts of the Esprits. That was not the kind of discussion to be mixing with dinner.
We would sit round that wooden kitchen table every night and eat our fill, which warmed the blood and settled the mind such that we stopped caring to think about much else, save the comfortable haze of fullness that lay like a veil over us all.
But every so often this oozing normality lifted for a moment and I felt the unwelcome sensation that something was incubating here and prickling under everybody’s skin. Something reflecting and refracting. Something that we couldn’t say. Something about the Esprits and that kid of theirs.
My life on the heath had passed with the quietly respectable, acceptable woes of life. And I was numb with the whole thing.
Now, it was February again, the excitement of Christmas dragging far behind and the taunting of a new spring that never quite arrives in time. A restlessness had descended upon me that I couldn’t seem to shake, no doubt induced further by this weightless month.
The only consolation of February is the rare snatches of pristine clarity in winter sky on bright mornings, as I walked the heath with dogs whom I felt no great bond with except this shared desire to leave the house.
Today there was a biting wind so I headed over to the meagre shelter the winter bare woods might offer me. The brilliance of the morning had subsided and the sky was back to the sickly grey that heralds the near arrival of snow. I’d not been walking more than half an hour when I stopped to take in the steely air, as if the very smell of this could help to make some sense of my seasonal disorientation.
Then I noticed the Esprit kid standing off the path.
The bare branches around her were knocking together like dry, old bones in the breeze. She wore white linen trousers covered in mud. Her shoulders were hunched up in a black coat wrapped tightly about her, and her hands gripped each sleeve, as if she were holding on to her own mortal existence.
Only her long hair was free, hanging loosely down her back, and I noticed something of beauty in her.
The sound of the wind through the branches became distant as her stillness seemed to emanate towards me and hold me there until I was no longer sure how much time had passed.
Then the dogs came crashing towards me and she jerked her head up to look for the noise. Her face was stricken, set like a mask, somehow bleached as an over exposed photograph might look. She surveyed me with washed out eyes and then turned away as if I was anybody passing by on a busy street. But I was not going to pass by. I moved a little closer with a stranger’s half smile of recognition.
“Hi I’m Jack, You’re the Esprit kid aren’t you?”
She turned towards me and then flinched back as if it caused her great pain to stand face to face. In my head I was concocting various explanations for the peculiarity of her demeanour. Perhaps she was foreign and couldn’t understand. Or maybe she was backward in some way and couldn’t speak. My mind rallying for answers, beating out logic and she proved me all wrong when she spoke,
“I don’t much go outside.” Her voice was as weary as the starved winter soil.
“No, me neither, it was just this morning that I…”
She covered her ears with gripped white fists, “Stop! … You’re slicing right through me with your words. Doesn’t your mouth ever turn to wood so you can’t move it for wanting to and your words turn to dust before you can speak them? Do you have to talk to me? ”
Her arms flinched out in front of her as if holding up some un-sturdy barrier between us that was in a sorry state of disrepair. I stood uncomfortably, thinking that maybe, yes, I did have to talk. But I didn’t, I just stood there, silenced. And she shuffled away from me as if I was encroaching upon her but I hadn’t moved a jolt. I raised my eyebrows at her, in reply and she flinched away again with a look of helplessness.
“Why are you out here?” I asked tentatively.
She answered in a decidedly cracked, broken tone, reminiscent of the dead wood branches underfoot, she spoke more to the trees than to me,”
I just like the numbness of the cold…” she paused, “I like how it creeps through me like some secret white mist. A thief with a white ice shadow, Clandestine, Stealing away some treasure of mine that I know nothing about. One day they’ll get to keep it all for themselves.”
She smiled a tiny smile.
“Do they normally give it back?” I asked, humouring her bizarre analogies.
“Don’t you think it’s nice just to lose yourself and not have to worry about feeling it being there all the time?”
She spoke the last words with a grainy sadness, like she was crying but had stretched the cry out into long thin lines, chords of melancholy stretching out into the weighted eternity of her existence that she appeared to be feeling.
I thought with a degree of annoyance, that she hadn’t answered my question. I could have left her there. Left her to clutch at her own self on those dead branches like some ungainly spirit of winter waiting hopelessly for the thaw despite the imminent arrival of yet more snow.
But I didn’t leave. I felt a hungry fascination for this girl. An unnecessary yet pronounced degree of involvement. Maybe it was a kind of love or maybe it was more her tragedy that I craved, as a delicious means to explain my own chronic discontent. I stayed standing there, breathing in the parched environment and noticed that some of my own numbness was fading, that I had a sense of an answer that I couldn’t put into any kind of format, but it was there, incubating, in utero. After a time she dropped down to a cross-legged position on the floor. And I took a step closer.
“You’re ruining those white trousers,” I said sensibly.
She looked round fiercely and I saw a flicker behind those washed out eyes like the striking of a damp match that couldn’t quite light but flared up for a yellow split glitch in time then spun back into silence like nervous laughter. And she said in a spliced biting way.
“What does it matter? If I had a diamond ball gown I’d rip it to shreds”
“Why would you do that?”
It began to snow in woolly clots, falling around us. And the picture of her became fuzzy. But I heard her voice cut through,
“Because you cannot ever appreciate the real value of something beautiful until after its ultimate destruction.”
She stood up shakily and motioned to her mud soaked ankles. And I looked a little closer and choked on my frozen breath, for what I saw through that flurry of white was not just the mud clutched round her feet but also the dark reddish brown of dried blood stains and the flowering rouge of fresh wet bleeding beneath that, diffusing into thin red ribbons amongst the snowflakes that settled at her feet then into the hungry, sleeping earth below.
And as I watched her drop down onto those dead wood branches I had the sensation of the snow having entered the interior of my head as the scene in front of me patched out in glacial starfish blotches, then the white noise of an un-tuned television and I slumped to the ground myself in a faint.
And so we fell together on the iced crystalline covers beneath us, mine a blanched shock of white and hers as red as bitten cherries.
I came around. Numb to the core. It took me some time to get to my feet. Her body lay before me, blue and snow dusted like icing sugar.
But over there in the trees... Yes! It was her stan
ding! A faint silvery, shadow of her looked at me and smiling said “Shhhhhhh!” with a finger to her lips.
I tried to answer but my mouth was like solid wood such that I couldn’t move it for wanting to. And my words just turned to dust before I could say them.
So I just stood there picturing that last image of her and gradually I felt the numbness leaving. And the gravely needles and pins come, a bath of iron filings.
On that final page to my flipbook, the trees were not reflections on glass that hid her from me, it was she who was the reflection, of a girl we had never known, but had all the same reflected upon, with some sense of an answer.
Incubating.
In Utero.
The Chair
By Jeff Jones
He crept along the dark hallway, the only sound the rhythmic ticking of a clock somewhere in the dark. His left knee banged into a hidden piece of furniture and it was all he could do to stop himself from screaming at the sharp pain. He froze. Had he been heard? Was his intrusion about to be discovered? Long seconds passed and his heavy breathing kept time with the ticking clock.
Satisfied that the house occupant hadn’t been disturbed by his carelessness, he inched towards what he knew to be the girl’s bedroom. His left hand glided along the wall as he went, its smooth, cold surface, strangely reassuring in the dark.
The curtain behind him suddenly billowed, as a gust of wind probed the inner sanctum of the house, courtesy of the window he had prised open to gain entry. His eagerness was making him sloppy. Still, it was too late now.
His left hand dropped from the wall and reached out to grasp the brass door knob, but a sudden chiming from behind him, stopped him dead in his tracks.