Spinetinglers Anthology 2008

by Nolene-Patricia Dougan

  By seven, it was getting dark.

  “Better get back, else Mum’ll kill us,” said David, picking up the ball. “Thanks for the game, mate.” His own hand disappeared, as he shook the goalkeeper’s. “We’'ll have to do this again, maybe even just you and squirt here, save me having to look after him.”

  “Yeah, maybe.” For a moment, the goalkeeper frowned and rubbed something at the back of his head.

  An awkward silence held for a few seconds, then, we watched him stride off, in the opposite direction to the alleyway and our road.

  “Strange lad,” muttered my brother.

  By the time we got home, I was so preoccupied with warding off the familiar dread of a Sunday evening before school that I’d forgotten all about the giant teenager.

  And then, on a dreary, never-ending afternoon at school, he reappeared.

  It was P.E. To be more precise, a private football match, involving all the popular and the tough kids, passing only to their mates.

  I was freezing to death on the right wing, hoping the ball didn’t find its way to me, so I’d end up making a fool of myself. Once again, his voice appeared first.

  “What’re you doing?”

  He startled me so much that I nearly cricked my neck. He was still kitted out in that ragged shirt, baggy shorts, and massive boots. I was unnerved, yet I was pleased to see a face other than the sneering ones belonging to the school’s “in-crowd.”

  “You’re wasted out here. You should be in the middle of the action.”

  He gestured toward a melee in the centre circle. Trevor Stevens, six feet three, with bright-red hair that no one dared to take the mickey out of, controlled the ball with his hand, before miss kicking it to his cohort, Lanky Holmes. The teacher, as usual, turned a blind eye. Look at them. They've got none of your flair. Can’t pass the ball straight.”

  Stevens thundered off with the ball vaguely at his feet. With only the terrified goalkeeper to beat, he stopped and stood there with his arms folded.

  “Unfit, too. Look at him, he can hardly breathe.” Looking up at Bob, I realised that a tiny smile had been etched into his pale features.

  With a bellow designed to scare the goalie further, Stevens belted the ball with his size twelve so clumsily that it almost went for a throw-in.

  Bob laughed. At least, I think that's what it was. It was a dry, sad sound, like a bird scraping its beak along a branch. He was almost smiling again, but not in his eyes. Can't shoot to save his life, either.”

  He leaned forward and said quietly, “If that was you, you'd have buried it.” His near-smile had vanished, and I noticed the dent. It began at the top of his head and furrowed down to the edge of his close-cropped hair. Staring at it and listening to his voice — a whisper like the winter breeze rustling dead leaves, as you look forward to Christmas and no school for ages – I kept thinking, over and over, that I wanted my hair cut like his, a proper haircut, not like the stupid, girlie haircut Mum insisted on giving me. I refused to think about the dent, and what could possibly have caused it.

  “Do yourself a favour, don't waste your life away. You’ve got real talent and you should use it. I had a chance and I... lost it.” His voice was no longer a whisper. “Get over there, show ’em what you can do.” He slapped my shoulder and, although I think he nearly broke it, I was so terrified, what this strange, over-sized teenager might do if I ignored him, that I sprinted over to where the ball had bobbled to a halt.

  I flicked it up and started running toward the opposite goal, to the one Stevens had feebly missed.

  “What do you think you’re doing, squirt?” he yelled at me, as he galloped over. His use of the word “squirt” held more menace than my brother’s ever could, but I kept running. I got to the edge of the area and passed to one of the cool boys on my team. He was so startled that he did a one-two with me. I chipped the ball into the far corner of the goal. The “whoosh” of the net catching it was the most sublime thing I’d known in two years of secondary school.

  I soaked up the stunned silence.

  I looked for Bob, but he was already gone.

  That day proved to be a catalyst. I scored four more goals, and no one could get near me. It was fear that had driven me at first, at some unspoken threat in Bob’s words to me. But then, it was replaced by confidence, as high as it ever was, kicking the ball around with my brother on the back field.

  Memories speed up now, of trophies piling up on bedroom shelves, of scoring goal after goal for better and better teams. Of the girl I always liked but had never dared speak to until football had given me a voice. She said she’d always liked me but was afraid to say. Would you believe it? And here we are, happily married and heading toward forty.

  Me unconscious on a sports hall floor... There's that light again...

  “Come on, squirt, one more shot.”

  A shape materialises around the voice. There stands Bob the Goalie, in his green shirt, and with that dent more prominent than ever.

  Something touches my foot. I looked down to see a football. The brown panels look hand-stitched. Here goes. I can feel my legs and feet now...

  Head to right knee, right knee to left foot, flick the ball backward, and hit it with the full force of my right foot...

  Bob leaps, and the ball sails past his dinner-plate hands.

  “Nice one.” He composes himself and walks over. I’m five feet ten now, but he still towers over me, so he leans forward. “You never got to be as famous as Kevin Keegan, but at least you gave it a go. At least, you had a chance and tried to take it.”

  I’m a shy twelve-year-old again. I try to talk, but it's more of a squeak.

  “It isn’t time yet,” he mutters.

  He turns around and walks off for the last time.

  Somehow, I manage to shout his name.

  He stops and turns round.

  “How did you get that dent?”

  He almost smiles. “That’s a long story. No time now. Here’s a clue – my name’s Bob Bowers. I used to play for...”

  I don’t catch the rest, because his voice fades into blackness with the rest of him.

  The blackness dissolves into colour. The colour dissolves into shapes.

  My throat is beginning to hurt again, as the shapes become faces, looking down at me.

  “What’s that? He said something.”

  An elderly man’s face comes closer. “What was that, son?”

  I try again. “Bob Bowers.”

  The man pushes his glasses up his nose and chuckles. “Well, what a coincidence. I remember that name. He was famous donkey’s years ago, youngest first division goalkeeper ever. He was hurt playing football, just like you, but you're much luckier. Didn’t just get a ball kicked in his throat.”

  I can feel arms pulling me up.

  “Oh no. Damned crossbar collapsed on his head. Killed him cold.”

  I black out again.

  Undying

  by Tanya Murray

  Rackham was dead. He had been dead, he guessed, for about five minutes now. Ten, since the thick walls of the alembic exploded, turning the heavy conical flask into a grenade of copper shrapnel and scalding fluid.

  A slow count to six hundred comprising five undignified minutes spent in the actual chore of dying: thrashing and jerking, gasping and shivering as he bled out from a severed femoral artery; and the five minutes since then, spent being just, well, dead.

  He marvelled at his composure, in view of the circumstances. Composure, not stillness. The stillness came easy now. In fact, it really didn’t require any effort at all.

  Fragments from the blast must have done something to his spine, he supposed, because in the immediate aftermath – ten minutes, a lifetime ago – after the white-out blindness had ebbed, and the ringing in his ears subsided to merely intolerable, as his battered brain slowly pieced together the surprising news that he was not, in fact, dead already, but merely dying... That was when he realised he could feel nothing below the waist.
>
  He had awoken slumped, like a discarded rag doll in one corner of the cellar, opposite the stairs, wedged behind the still-intact half of the heavy oak lab bench.

  The overhead lights had been taken out in the blast, but enough October morning sunlight filtered through the storm windows for him to surmise that the rapidly growing, shiny patch of slickness in which he lay was his own blood.

  He had wasted some of his five minutes dying, attempting, with spastic imprecision from his pinned semi prone position beneath the bench, to guide his fist into the ragged hole in his numb groin, to stem the painless warm, oily spurting that his fingers felt there. Useless, of course.

  Soon, the numbness below his waist was echoed by a different, colder numbness above.

  He found he was panting for breath. The edges of his vision grew fuzzy, colours leaching away. His arms felt clumsy, too heavy to lift. He was tired now. He let his arms sink to the floor, felt the cooling stickiness of his own blood on the back of his hands. He sighed.

  No point in calling out. No one would come. It was why he had bought this place, the failed farmstead, deep in the back woods, somewhere quiet, a long way from neighbours, where he could play with dead things, undisturbed.

  Finding the old graveyard had been a bonus; finding The Book in the last grave he robbed... Well, that had been the clincher. It was almost as if it had meant to be.

  If he had been a religious man, he might have offered up a prayer of thanks then. After so many years of searching, to just have the answer land in his lap like that...

  But, Rackham prayed to no gods, known or unknown. He wasn’t even superstitious. An impartial observer might consider this strange, given his particular interests. Yet, he considered himself a true student of natural philosophy, a scientist. Others disagreed. They called him different names:

  Satanist. Sorcerer. Madman.

  This was because they saw only what he had done, sometimes to people they cared about. They did not know why he had done that to them.

  That his chosen field was labelled magic by the ignorant was their problem, not his. If pressed to name it himself, he would simply call it, accurately, the Occult, as in hidden. No more, no less.

  After all, there had been a time when magic and science were one natural philosophy, when Dr. John Dee, the foremost applied mathematician of his age, could turn from his navigational calculations for the British Navy to read the future in a Mayan scrying stone; and Francis Bacon could argue for technocracy, while trying to turn lead into gold. Science and magic, two sides of the same coin.

  Only relatively recently in the span of human time had science arrogantly claimed for itself dominion over all.

  But, one did not have to believe in gods or demons to realise that there were energies in the Universe as yet unexplained by science, and maybe rules for working with them, too. Consider, for instance, the life force, what the ancient Sanskrit texts called vril.

  Rackham had.

  From the time of his first murder, he was fascinated by it. What was it that passed at the moment of death, transforming the animate to mere meat? It was clear that it was not simply a matter of electricity. The tiny, measurable charges in every living cell were a sign, not a signifier. As the rotting began, chemical and electrical reactions still occurred, and life – many forms of life, in fact – went on, even in dead flesh. Only the organising principal was lost.

  And, if this organising principal –- this Vril, Chi, Reiki, Orgone energy, it had many names –could be isolated? Well, then, it might be possible to live a very long time indeed, perhaps, forever.

  So, he had approached this idea, as he approached all other things, rationally, objectively. He had certain strengths in addressing the problem. He knew that he was not like other people in many ways, some useful, some... potentially problematic, legally speaking.

  “Psychopath,” that was another name he had been called.

  He knew that one of the reasons they called him that, one of the chief ways he differed, was that he really, truly, did not fear anything. Not that he was reckless – far from it. Everything Rackham did, he did carefully. After all, it would not do for the sheep to see the wolf among them. But, it did mean that he had no fear of death. In truth, death itself merely bored him.

  Rackham, on the other hand, was intensely interested in Rackham, and, it followed from this, that Rackham was intensely interested in Rackham’s continued existence.

  And so, some years ago, with typical care and planning, Rackham, the wolf, had gone among the flock, to cemeteries and to nurseries, and his experiments in life and death had begun.

  Nothing worked.

  An ordinary man would have given up in frustration.

  But Rackham, no ordinary man, taking time out from his studies here and there to collect a pay check from this gang boss or that jilted wife, merely for doing what he enjoyed most anyway, applied his formidable intellect to another aspect of the problem, and kept at it.

  He studied the Key of Solomon, became expert on the hidden meanings within all the Houses of the Sephiroth, read the Tibetan Book of the Dead in the original Brahmi script; even acquired one of the three authenticated Papyri of Ani, the Egyptian Hymn to Osiris.

  The Books of Shadows, the magical diaries, the library of Grimoire he assembled would have been the envy of any occultist, had they known of it.

  He became adept at many things, and proved to his own satisfaction that certain conjunctions of words and symbols, mental states and objects could, indeed, channel and direct energies unknown to Science.

  Some of these arts made his paid freelance activities immeasurably easier. Then, there came a time when he could, if he had wished it, have achieved great earthly riches and power. But, to what end?

  The nagging thought of there one day being a world without Rackham in it drove Rackham on. There was a story he told himself, when distraction beckoned too ardently.

  Once, he had been hired to meet a young gambler. The man, being not fearless, but reckless, had bluffed his way to a fortune. He should have quit then, but didn’t.

  Things changed. The young man’s debts had grown as fast as his luck had run out – faster. Then, Rackham happened to him.

  After dropping body parts and chum off the back of a game fishing boat, two miles out from Key West, Rackham had wiped the blood off the thick end of an arm to read the tattoo on the young man’s bicep.

  A black and a red heart, and a scroll beneath: “Live forever or die in the attempt,” it said.

  Rackham grinned – rare for him.

  “Half right.”

  The arm followed the rest of the young man into the boat’s pink wake.

  Unlike the gambler, Rackham didn’t do anything by halves.

  But, now?

  Now, Rackham was still dead in the cellar, and still, despite this significant impediment, thinking.

  His head, in the final agony, had come to rest on his chest, eyes open. This posture gave him a fixed view of the lower half of his body and a patch of cellar floor.

  He had wondered briefly if he, the great expert of death, witness to the passing of so many others, had misread the signs.

  Was this merely paralysis, the damage below the waist spreading above? But, no. There was no rise and fall in his chest. There was a stillness in his heart. No movement anywhere, at least, not from him.

  The first flies had arrived, almost as his last twitches subsided, drawn at first to the heady smells of fresh blood and torn flesh in his groin. The egg-laying began almost immediately. His eyes, the soft parts of his nostrils, and his mouth were next.

  The patch of light from the cellar window tracked across the floor, faded, returned. He lost count how often.

  It was the alembic, of course. Or, rather, its contents. A dreadful irony, after all, the years of seeking.

  Rackham pondered coolly: if the text of the graveyard book had been correct; if the process had finished correctly; if he had lived to drink the distillate; who, or wha
t might he be now?

  The distillate.

  He must have ingested some of it, albeit in a somewhat unorthodox fashion, punched into his guts, along with shards of shattered copper, killing him and saving him all at once.

  An unmeasured, incomplete dose. How long could it last?

  He found himself wondering if there would be any side effects. He then realised the absurdity of this thought.

  Time passed.

  The processes of corruption ran their course. Adipocere turned body fat to foetid margarine, as hydrogen released from his decaying bowel bubbled through his tissues.

  His corpse broke wind, his gut swelled like an expectant mother’s and burst. The maggots itched abominably, hatched, fed, then flew away. Then the rats came.

  The scientist in him noted things. In this death, there was no sleep. No release in dreams. Just an agonising wait every night, listening to the rats feed.

  Below the waist, he still felt nothing. Above? A symphony of pain, as filthy, squealing animals tore at him.

  A normal man would have sought refuge in insanity then, and Rackham tried. But, perhaps because he was not normal, this option was denied him.

  Roughly one week into his afterlife, another odd fact emerged.

  Both eyes, so delicate, so soft, had gone quickly, of course, colonised by the flies, drawn out in jellied shreds by the rats, the fluid within trickling like thick, salty tears, down the ruined muscle and stripped flesh of his cheeks. And, for a while, there had been only darkness.

  But now, his vision had come back.

  Slowly at first, he could see only a mere greying of the dark over many days and nights. It was okay. He was growing used to waiting. And, Rackham permitted himself an unfamiliar emotion – hope.

  Perhaps he had, after all, ingested enough of the stuff to somehow regenerate, albeit slowly.

  But then, his newly restored vision, fixed as before, cleared and showed him, with pin-sharp clarity, the progression of the decay in his lower body, and he knew. There would be no resurrection.

  Judging by the track of sun and shade across the cellar floor, it took something like a year, he guessed, for his body to become completely skeletonised.