In Times Of Want

by Marie O'Regan

  Alex raised her eyes, and the sorrow they held broke Mark’s heart. “Blood calls to blood, Mark. My flesh knows the truth even if I don’t want to.” She gazed back at it, and groaned. “That’s my mother – and I was ripped from her womb even as the flames took her flesh.”

  The ground shuddered, cracks appearing in the floor – snaking their way towards them. “See?” She tried to smile. “Even the earth knows she doesn’t belong here. But she won’t go without me.”

  “A-Alex, no,” Mark stammered, “you can’t go with her. You can’t!” He touched her face, traced its contours with his fingers. “What will I do without you?”

  “We can’t think of that,” she said, her voice breaking. “I can’t. Mark, she’ll destroy everything she comes across if I don’t go to her.”

  Mark was crying now, knowing she was right. He watched, helpless, as Alex rose and faced the thing that had birthed her with its dying breath. She paused for just a moment, smiled at him, and stepped forward.

  The thing stopped screaming. It leaned forward until its face was nearly touching Alex’s, and sniffed. Its face grew quizzical, and drew closer still, touched Alex’s cheek with its own, whimpering as it recognised its child – and enfolded Alex in its embrace.

  Alex moaned as it encircled her, fetid breath making her gag. Slowly, she brought up the arm she’d kept concealed behind her, not wanting to make the thing curious.

  There was a scream that shook the building to its core as Alex brought her arm forward, plunging the shard of bone she’d hidden into the creature’s chest.

  Mark cringed, holding his arms over his head even as he tried to see what had happened. Blue light poured from the creature, light that sobbed and moaned and had a voice. Voices, Mark corrected – the souls it had devoured even as it stole flesh and bone to make itself whole were free now, seeking a peace that wouldn’t be found here.

  The creature itself was fading, the light that had signified its presence fading, gaps appearing in its frame. It clung to Alex, unwilling to let her go, even as the grave reclaimed it.

  Alex was in its grip still, crying in pain as the creature dug its fingers into her shoulders, opening gashes as it did so. Blood poured down her chest, and the scars burned brighter still.

  Mark watched as her flesh burned, even as her mother’s had so long ago – and tried to picture her as she had been, before they’d arrived at this Godforsaken place. He watched his lover cry and struggle, knew that she’d never escape. She was too broken. Crying, he picked up a piece of glass – the base and stem of a wine glass, he thought, broken earlier – and walked towards Alex.

  The creature hissed as he approached, but Mark sensed it lacked the strength to do him much harm. Alex smiled, nodded, and he thought he saw her mouth one word. “Please.” With a cry, he drew his arm back, then plunged the glass deep into the creature’s chest, watching as Alex slumped in her mother’s arms, unconscious now; saw the creature wail in disbelief before it imploded – blue light collapsing, leaving a heap of bones and ash on the ground... around Alex’s body, ravaged by her mother’s fire, every bit of strength spent.

  Dawn broke late, the first rays of the sun lighting Mark’s progress as he dug a grave in the monastery’s forecourt. The building blazed behind him, greasy smoke roiling into the sky. He grunted with each stroke of the shovel, dirt streaking his bare torso as he sweated and strained.

  Finally, the hole was deep enough. Turning, Mark picked up what looked like a bale of black wool, then dumped it into the grave. An arm escaped, and he leaned down, covering the limp and bloody mess gently before standing up once more. He stared up at the sky, mouthing a prayer. This time there was no answer; this time it was

  done.

  World Without End

  It was the same dream every night without fail, had been for weeks now. She was sitting up in a bed grown huge, as she herself had – so big she felt as if she filled the world, as if she was the world.

  Her body fell away beneath her like the slopes of some vast mountain. She could just make out her hands, far off in the distance – islands in the midnight pool of her room. The walls of her room were lost in the darkness.

  And then it came. A familiar sensation filled her mouth, causing her to clap her hands over it as if for protection – a tingling, burning sensation that rapidly increased and spread until it felt as if her whole body were on fire.

  It was happening again. She could feel her teeth start to wobble, ever so slightly; the motion becoming gradually more pronounced. Her teeth tottered, one by one, rocking in their fleshy beds – eager to be free. One by one they began to fall, crashing and rebounding off the outcrops of her body; her breasts, her drawn-up knees.

  Her vast hands flew after them like flapping wings before returning to her bleeding mouth; fingers gently cupping it in a desperate effort to prevent further loss. The lost teeth shone far below, huge monoliths on the coastline that had been her top sheet, once upon a time. She began to cry.

  Tears poured down her massive face, dividing into streams and rivulets, creating tributary after tributary – running freely down the channels of her nightgown – down to the vast ocean of her coverlet far below, lapping at her legs like the rising tide.

  She stayed like that for what seemed like ages; keening and rocking. Her cries became the wind, howling across the moonlit landscape; until she was caught up in a tornado that span her back down into insignificance, her room her own once more. She fell back, exhausted, onto her sweaty sheets, and let the darkness cradle her fall into oblivion. Her last waking thought was a prayer, Let there be no more dreams tonight. She wasn’t even sure who she was praying to, but prayed that no more dreams would disturb her that night. She wasn’t sure she could stand it.

  At the breakfast table next morning she sat quietly, subdued, worrying at her teeth with her tongue. All still there, just a dream after all. She played with her scrambled eggs, trying to delay the act of chewing as long as possible. Her mother noticed, and asked if she had a tooth-ache. Would she like her to make an appointment to see the dentist? She was quick to reassure her. The last thing she wanted was someone poking around in her mouth.

  On the way to school, she hardly noticed her own surroundings. They seemed less real to her than the previous night’s dream. She knew there were probably all sorts of fears exposed by her dream – fear of failure, of not being the best – of being exposed. Exposed as the seething mass of teenage insecurities she really was, rather than the confident, popular girl her family assumed her to be. She had friends, of course, but she wasn’t on any mythical ‘A’ list, no matter how much she wished she was. There were plenty of parties she wasn’t invited to. The day passed quietly, without incident – the more so as a result of her own reticence, even greater than usual. Her parents, noticing how introspective she was becoming, tried to coax her out of it – to draw her into their own seemingly banal round of concerns and anecdotes: the weather, where they should go on holiday this year, who was having an affair with their secretary, and did their wife know?

  She played the game, and they were satisfied. Normality resumed, at least for them.

  Life went on. Her days were a steady round of school, homework, and the usual teenage concerns – such as whether Gary from up the road was interested in her or her friend Louise. Louise maintained it was her, but then she would, wouldn’t she? She knew that was wrong – had seen the way Gary looked at Louise.

  Life went its usual humdrum way, at least on the surface; and yet underneath it all there lay the quality of a dream sequence from some old movie – just a series of images careering from one to the next, getting nowhere. Her dream was still waiting, lurking beneath the thin veil that separated sleep from waking, teasing her, making her more nervous by the day.

  Monday. Almost a whole week since the last time she’d had the dream. Her mood had begun to lift as her night terrors receded further into the distance; reality crowding in to take its place. When she had climbed the st
airs to bed tonight, she had been almost cheerful. She could see an end to the nightmare, it was almost behind her.

  She should have known better.

  In order to put it behind her, she had to confront it first.

  Almost midnight, and she was woken by a wind – no gentle zephyr, this – whipping through her bedroom. Funny. She couldn’t remember having left her bedroom window open. It wasn’t something she usually did. Too easy for bugs of all descriptions to get in if the window was open. Bugs, however, were the least of her worries tonight. She sat up, shuddering, a sigh of negation dying stillborn in her throat.

  It had happened again, as she had known, deep down, it must.

  Her bedroom walls were disappearing, melting into the nothingness beyond; the wind rushing uninterrupted now to surround her. Stars loomed, pinpricks in the wall of darkness that fell like a curtain, heavy and velvet soft.

  The wind almost seemed to carry the sound of sorrow; a high-pitched keening seemed to hover just behind each gust; barely audible. She felt it echo deep within, and was afraid. It was setting up some sort of resonance deep inside, she could feel it; layer upon layer creating a ripple effect. It felt as if it was jarring every atom loose, till she thought she could stand it no more and would just fly apart.

  The familiar buzzing sensation was beginning in her mouth. Her gums started to leak crimson tears, and she prepared to watch her teeth fall once more, forming new land masses in the vastness of her room. She moaned, both in pain and resignation, even pleasure. Her body found it strangely enticing in spite of the pain. The paradox caused a perverse delight to caper, barely acknowledged, behind her fear.

  The dream unfolded as before, with one difference. It seemed to her, this time, that she could hear echo upon echo – her cries repeated a dozen times or more. Layer upon layer of sound, reverberating both deep within her and all around, so that it seemed as if she were filled with it, resonating as with the pealing of church bells. A strange church, this.

  She woke then, shaking, though for a few seconds her room didn’t quite seem as it should. It, too, held echoes, as if others were imposed upon it; echoes of other selves.

  Footsteps were pounding down the hall, then her bedroom door was flung wide. Light flooded in, and her room was hers once more, familiar in its singularity. She felt safe, at last.

  Then she was in her mother’s arms, soothed once more, falling back into sleep with almost ruthless speed. She could hear a storm raging outside her window as she drifted off, but it was too remote to bother her. She barely registered the fact that one of her teeth was missing.

  She was brushing her teeth in the bathroom the next morning when that fact finally registered. Her eyes widened comically in the bathroom mirror as her tongue probed the sponginess of the empty socket. She looked like a fish. Fleeting images from her dream raced through her mind, but were quickly discounted. It must have been bad, that’s all – some infection, maybe. Her mother agreed, and quickly made an appointment to see the dentist, to check and see if further action were needed. No mention was made of her dreams, but she’d heard her parents talking about her, whether she should “see someone.” She resolved to keep her dreams to herself from now on.

  The dentist concurred; there must have been some infection present. He gave her a course of antibiotics, “purely precautionary,” he called it, and scheduled a check up in a couple of weeks. She was relieved, but couldn’t bring herself to entirely believe him.

  The daily round continued unabated and yet, she thought, there were rumblings. She was aware of a growing sense of unease – as if she were caught in the eye of a storm. She could see signs that things were in turmoil, and that they were all related. Her mother drew her attention to an article in the newspaper that evening. “ISLAND RISES FROM SEA IN VOLCANIC ERUPTION.” Apparently some uninhabited island in the South Seas had been devastated when a seemingly dormant volcano had erupted savagely. In the aftermath of the eruption, massive tidal waves presaged the rising of another island, a little less than a mile away.

  All this had happened the previous night. Hurricanes, tidal waves, everywhere. Devastation to echo the turmoil she had felt inside.

  On the news, that night and every night, experts discussed it until they were blue in the face, blaming it all on the ozone layer, global warming, pollution – anything else they could think of.

  But they didn’t really know, did they. No one did. In her heart, she knew it was nothing to do with any of those things. She could feel the real cause; the maelstrom that presaged a new beginning – or maybe it was the end.

  And it was getting stronger, coming closer.

  Her family and friends, once so close to her, were gradually becoming strangers; her growing sense of isolation shunting them further and further away, to the periphery of her consciousness. Her mind was fully occupied with the strangeness she felt growing inside her. They didn’t know her any more, and on some deep level, they didn’t really want to. They were too afraid. She’d caused storms, somehow she knew that – although no one would believe her, were she to tell. If the dreams kept escalating, what else could she cause? She had to believe the dreams would pass, tell herself it was her imagination.

  So she carried on – a solitary island marooned in a sea of uncertainty, sinking further by the hour.

  Thursday – almost a full month since the last dream. Her terror had levelled off to an almost manageable level, the culmination she had sensed coming seemed far away, at least for now. Thinking the worst over, she relaxed her guard, not realising what lay within had been waiting for just that; eager for release.

  The dance began.

  Shaking. The walls were shaking. She awoke with a cry, certain the world was coming apart all around her. It had happened again. The walls of her room were fading, becoming inconsequential, the stuff of dreams – once more she dwarfed the surrounding landscape that logic told her should be there, even though she couldn’t see it. She reached up and touched the moon. Grown vast beyond imagination, she cried out in fear – and the earth shook. Groaning beneath her weight, it began to crack and sunder.

  She wasn’t alone in her agony. Her cries were echoed again and again, it seemed the universe itself reverberated to their sound.

  The burning sensation in her mouth grew, and as she opened her mouth to scream the first tooth fell. No dream this time. She watched in silent horror as it dropped, down and down, crashing into the depths so far beneath; the exact distance unfathomable. A faint splash, just a suggestion of sound, as it finally fell into the ocean her coverlet had been.

  Another, then another, she could feel still more wobbling, becoming loose in their sockets – could tasted the blood welling up in their place, salty as the tears falling in torrents down her cheeks into the unseen valleys below.

  Once more that juddering sensation ripped through her; making her feel as if she were coming apart at the seams. Every cell in her body seemed to be vibrating – a commotion that was growing by the second. She realised with a start that the feeling was no longer just inside her, if it ever had been. It was everywhere. Without even feeling it, she had shrunk back to normal size – at least she thought so; or maybe it was just that the others, containing and/or contained by her, had become more visible to her battered senses – and now it felt as if the house were slap bang in the middle of an earthquake. She held onto the bed, feeling it rocking manically from side to side; harder and harder, trying to pitch her off, in a last ditch attempt to return to normality. What had once been inanimate now animated beyond measure, and desperate to return that gift.

  She clung to the mattress, wailing loudly for help.

  No one came.

  Her crying spiralled up and up, a formless wail that was almost beyond sound.

  The wind keened around her, in her – a thousand voices in a discordant harmony, all crying of loss, and death, or both.

  The world splintered around her.

  To an outsider, if there had been any left, it w
ould have looked something like a television picture breaking up, becoming grainy – as if the aerial had developed a fault. She appeared to shimmer for a moment, then distort.

  Then she exploded.

  She seemed to fly apart into an infinite number of pieces, worlds without end, as if she herself was the nucleus of one cell – life from death repeated to the nth degree; world without end, amen.

  Someone To Watch Over You

  Emily glanced over her shoulder again, hoping to find nothing – but her shadow was still there, keeping pace. She sped up, annoyed to find that the increased tempo of the tap-tap of her heels was making her feel worse, not better – the fact that they’d picked up a gruffer echo was something she tried to ignore. She was only a few feet from the stairs leading down to the exit now; and she cursed her penchant for sitting at the front of the train – all it had done was leave her with further to go to get to safety.

  The lights in the waiting room went out, and she moaned – thank God she was at the stairs now. What on earth had possessed her to wait till the last train home when she knew damn well how dark it got on the platform at this time of night? East Finchley was a beautiful station, but it was also the first station going northwards that wasn’t underground – and when the staff switched the waiting room lights off, it got dark quickly.

  She heard her pursuer’s breathing quicken and grow ragged as he started to run, and she launched herself at the stairs with little thought of how hard it would be to keep her balance at that speed. She clattered downwards, praying someone would hear her and come to investigate – but no one did. Towards the bottom she tripped, and felt herself grasped by strong arms – her rescuer stood her up and moved on before she had a chance to register who it was; her only impression was of strength and the cloying smell of tobacco smoke.