by Неизвестный
The couple, arms wrapped around each other, headed up the road to their house, pitch dark in the absence of any streetlights.
All the better for the man with the knife.
Anticipation was building, and as he always did he waited until the second the man’s hand slid the key into the lock, presumably thinking all the while about doing exactly the same to his wife who looked so sexually dazed that she could drop to her knees any second. The man with the knife timed it perfectly, opening the car door as the key turned, pushing it wide as the front door opened.
He had worked out exactly how many seconds it would take him to get to their front door before it closed, exactly how long it would take him to beat them into submission and make sure that nobody would disturb his work and his pleasure.
The seconds slowed in his mind as he lifted one leg out of the car, then the other, matching them near perfectly to the steps the couple began to take into their home. As the husband stepped over the threshold the man with the knife was out of the car, pushing the door shut and feeling his heart beat faster. The start of things was only seconds away as the wife, her hand firmly on her husband’s crotch and stroking what she found there, followed him inside.
The man with the knife began to run, ticking off the time in his brain, seeing a kind of mental hourglass for his window of opportunity. He built up speed, covering ground quickly – he always kept in shape, and made sure he regularly timed his sprint speed across distances precisely measured and calculated.
In no time at all now, he would be enjoying their blood and pain. His heart raced in his ears, the dizziness of excitement overtaking him. He could almost taste their deaths now.
The wife started to swing the door closed almost in slow motion as the man with the knife reached full pelt and hit the pathway up to their front door.
That was as far as he got.
Something huge, unseen, swatted him back, and he flew maybe fifteen or twenty feet through the air. As he crashed into the plants and loose masonry at the side of the unfinished road, the front door of the house clicked shut and he was denied his prize.
Excitement instantly transformed into pure seething rage, and the man with the knife drew his weapon, prepared to cut down and bleed whoever it was who had interrupted his ritual.
There would be absolutely no mercy.
Ignoring the pain the impact had caused him, the man with the knife clambered to his feet, holding his blade out in front of him as though it was his eyes and ears, primed to detect his target.
At first there was nothing. Just empty darkness and a house stubbornly closed to him, its unknowing occupants safe as they already tore each other’s clothes off and succumbed to passion. Then as the man with the knife saw with better eyes, the night seemed to have shape. Nothing solid at first, a shimmer of an outline that gained more and more substance as it approached, slowly and deliberately.
There was no fear from the man with the knife, only curiosity. The ground seemed to be opening up into footprints, melted into the oily tarmac, and with each one the outline of their owner began to become firmer, more defined. As it did, the sounds of life all around began to fade to nothing.
Slowly, features and shapes began to form. There was a huge body, eight or nine feet high and many feet wide, with arms that bore huge viciously hooked claws reaching out from the torso. As the man with knife watched, almost forgetting his weapon, the body moved closer on legs that bent backward like an animal, ending with the same evilly curved talons, scorching the ground as they touched it.
There was no sound as the shape that manifested in front of him approached.
Then he saw those burning eyes, red and orange and yellow all at once, the centre of the sun focussed into hideous slits that carved their way through his eyes into his brain. Around them a head, the head of a beast. A vast maw filled with rows of impossibly sharp teeth, and out from the sides of the unnatural skull two huge curved horns, like those a ram but so much bigger, so much worse to behold.
The head of the beast came down to within a foot of the man with the knife as he dropped to his knees, and foetid breath washed over his face as the beast finally became solid. It was like every demon, every gargoyle, every Biblical terror made incarnate in this painfully normal, unlit side road, defying superstition or religion with fact. The man with the knife could see the teeth in their black moorings, the throat that seemed to go on forever, eyes that he tried to look away from but which were even now burning away his own sight.
The man dropped the knife with a hollow clatter, and held up his hands, tears starting to run down his face.
Tears of warped joy.
“It’s you,” he wept, his voice ringing in his own ears but utterly muted outside of them. “It’s you, isn’t it? I knew it. I fucking knew you wouldn’t ignore me. You’ve seen things I’ve done, haven’t you?”
The vast horned head seemed to regard him for a second in his posture of supplication, acidic smoke belching out of ragged skulllike nostrils.
Heat poured off the beast as the man knelt before it.
“Talk to me,” he shouted silently. “Am I doing it right? Is it what you want? Fucking TALK TO ME.”
A deep ripping growl spewed up from the darkest bowel of the beast’s gut, not audible anywhere but inside. It invaded the man with the knife, made him feel sick in his body and his head at the same time. One of the hands, made out of ebon claws and black flesh that wasn’t flesh at all, grasped the side of the man with the knife’s head, and he felt the points of the talons dig into his skull, reaching into the intangible matter of his mind.
His body stiffened and juddered as though in an electric chair as his eyes finally dissolved and burst under the heat of that burning gaze. He gave in to the images that swam chaotically before his internal eye. The other hand of the beast grabbed him, the vast claws dwarfing the human head, and lifted the man with the knife right off the ground as the viscous gel that remained of his eyeballs dripped down his cheeks into his open mouth.
The beast opened its vast jaws and roared, opening up the gates of the inferno and showing the man with the knife the reality of the things he had so wished for and craved. The claws dug deeper, and the man saw in his brain a new vista, a place of pain and horror from which he would never be released.
Finally, the man with the knife realised the truth in the terrible sound of the beast.
***
It was weeks before Maurice was able to guide the police to where he had found the body and seen the strange black figure. The doctors said his eyes had been burned to a crisp, never to work again, but Maurice knew his route so well that he took the police to the very spot the first day he was able to walk. Things were clearer with his new medication as well. Throughout that day and the ones that followed police dug up the field and found corpse after corpse, couple after couple, plastic bag after plastic bag.
The strangest was the one Maurice himself had found, the most recent, the one in the shallow grave by the oak tree where Maurice’s rusty old bike still leaned. The grave of Bradley and Hermione Shaw.
There the police had found only one body, the gutted corpse of a woman whose body, ravaged by insects and maggots, still spoke of the horror she had endured in the last seconds of her life. But it was what they had found with her that the police or the scientists would never really understand.
A whole human skin, an empty, fleshy sack bereft of blood or bones or organs, burst outwards from the inside in a way that nothing would ever explain.
It looked for all the world like a chrysalis.
And elsewhere, in an anonymous third floor apartment in a grey concrete block of flats, in the centre of a sealed room – perfectly chilled to the temperature of a meat locker – that nobody would find for a long, long time, hung a headless limbless torso suspended by hooks and pierced by tubes that fed unending streams of blood to silver cylinders.
In its chest was carved the ragged visage of the man with the knife, his liple
ss mouth parted in an abomination of a smile.
Night Train to Holland
by Emlyn Boyle
“Eva!”
Glancing about the Berlin Ostbahnhof train station, Marie Schienberg seized her daughter’s left hand; the seven-year old protesting as she was half-dragged away from a confectionary stall. Narrowing his bespectacled eyes at the pair, the stall vendor looked towards four SS officers arguing further back on the platform. “Now what did I say before we left?” whispered Marie as she slowed pace to a fast walk.
“Don’t dawdle.... Sorry, Mama,” said Eva sulking, her pigtails swaying from side to side.
Marie forced a smile. “It’s all right, princess... just please be more careful.”
Nodding to a rather threadbare rag doll she gripped in her right hand – a tattered book tucked under her right shoulder, Eva smiled on stopping outside a last train carriage before wooden freight cars, engine steam swirling about like fog. Letting her daughter skip up the carriage steps first, Marie then took a last nervous – and slightly tearful – look around before hauling up a brown suitcase.
***
Both Schienbergs moved down the narrow carriage corridor as wisps of steam teased left-sided windows, the right-sided compartments filled with faces half-hidden behind newspaper, peering out windows or looking back with barely contained ha-ha-we-got-here-first smirks. Blowing a raspberry at one particularly smug-looking woman, Eva suddenly bolted ahead, her groaning mother giving chase. Reaching the end of the carriage, Marie found her daughter staring into the last compartment. “What’s the matter with you Eva? Are you trying...”
“Grandpapa,” murmured Eva, her breath misting the compartment door glass.
“OH JUST STOP IT!” said Marie, her hazel eyes starting to glisten.
“BUT IT IS! Just look, Mama!”
Sighing in defeat, Marie peered into the compartment and nearly dropped her suitcase. Lowering his newspaper, an elderly gentleman in a black pinstriped suit and trilby hat raised one bushy eyebrow at the Schienbergs – his white moustache enhancing an already stern frown. A shrill whistle, then shouts breaking her spell, Marie spun around and through the now shifting window view saw four SS officers racing towards the moving train. “Oh please God, no,” she said before facing the compartment again.
With Eva waving one rag doll hand through the partly open door, the old gentleman’s moustache stretched in a smile before he looked to Marie. “Well?” he said in English, “Come freely, fräuleins!”
“Thankyou,” said Marie in English, and then nudged Eva ahead of her – both Schienbergs quickly settling on red velvet. Tipping the trilby, the old gentleman resumed his reading, the window view ever shifting shape and colour as the train sped up – the sound of steamed-powered axles grinding the air. Still tense however, it was another ten minutes and the eventual sight of blurred countryside before Marie finally rested her head against white lace. Cowardly swine didn’t make it, she thought; so wanting to laugh on picturing the SS officers’ furious faces, but merely smiling with relief that they had so easily let her and her daughter slip by. Tossing rag doll up and catching it again, a giggling Eva turned to her mother. “So everything’s going to be all right now, Mama?”
“It’s all going to be just fine princess... and sorry for shouting before,” whispered Marie in German. Kissing Eva’s forehead, she followed her daughter’s stare back towards their fellow passenger. “Um, thank you again, sir. I’m so sorry about –”
“Nonsense,” said the old gentleman, lowering newspaper again – his refined accent almost certainly British. “And no, do pardon my own hesitation. I just usually prefer privacy, especially when travelling... though I am never averse to female company!”
Blushing slightly, Marie stood up to wedge her suitcase in the overhead baggage carrier – Eva using the moment to lean forward. “You look like my Grandpapa, sir!” said the girl to old gentleman. “Are you his angel?”
“EVA!” said Marie sitting down again, her face now red from sheer embarrassment. “I’m so sorry again, sir, but she thinks you... y-you resemble my late father.”
The old gentleman smiled at Eva. “No little princess, I am no angel,” he said in perfect German before returning to English, “But what do you think Fräu... ?”
“Hemmerlin,” said Marie, frowning at the lie, “Well, I... w-well, you do resemble him slightly, about the nose and jaw perhaps? But –”
“Then what harm is done? On the contrary dear lady, I feel quite honoured!”
“Oh... well thank you Herr –”
“Hawkins,” said the old gentleman, his pale-blue eyes creasing. “Arthur Hawkins.”
Marie pondered the floor a moment. “Marie Hemmerlin,” she said, extending an open right hand, “And very pleased to make your acquaintance, Herr Hawkins!”
Herr Hawkins extending a wizened left hand, Marie shook it gently and then shivered before sliding the slightly open window shut completely. A rail-thin and somewhat hunchbacked woman appearing with a food tray, both Schienbergs soon enjoyed hot tea and vegetable sandwiches whilst their fellow passenger contented himself with the ever-darkening window view. Finishing her sandwich with a burp and puckish smile, Eva then placed a tattered book in her mother’s lap. “Mama, can you read me some more Monte Cristo?”
Sighing at first, Marie smiled. “Yes, all right princess... but where did we stop?”
“After the old priest helps Edmond Dantès escape from prison?”
“Oh yes of course... well, just let me just find the page first!”
Eventually finding the correct page, the older Schienberg began quietly reading to younger, Eva nestling against her mother’s shoulder. The child’s wide eyes soon narrowed however, her eyelids drooping shut before tiny snores filled the compartment. Peering over newspaper to smile briefly, Herr Hawkins returned to his own reading, Marie lay The Count of Monte Cristo aside to watch the September dusk blur on by. Yes, she thought, yawning and twirling a white streak in her otherwise dark hair, the journey to Rotterdam would be long, but at least they had passed the first hurdle of fleeing Berlin – travelling by night to lessen any chance of detection. Though reaching the ship, and after that the sanctuary of England... well, that was another matter entirely. But even if Eva alone made it, then all would be worth –
“WAKE UP FRÄULEIN!”
Her sagging eyelids flew open to see a uniformed figure looming overhead. Marie gasped – a plump ticket inspector just rolling his own tired eyes. “Your tickets fräulein?” he said wearily.
“Oh yes... y-yes of course,” said Marie, fumbling in right coat pocket to produce two brown paper slips. “Here you are!”
Punching twin holes per ticket and handing them back, the ticket inspector tapped four red wall lamps one by one – only three slowly flickering to life. “My apologies ladies and gentleman,” he said, taking Herr Hawkins’ ticket, “But this old girl’s on her last legs you see... and probably facing the junkyard soon enough.”
Sighing as he handed Hawkins back a punched ticket, the ticket inspector left to squeeze his way back up the carriage. Rubbing her eyes open fully, Marie really for the first time noticed the headline ‘GERMANY MARCHES ON POLISH MENACE’ opposite. She sighed to herself, Hawkins instantly poking his sharp nose over newspaper. “Is everything alright Fräu Hemmerlin?” he asked.
“Oh yes, Herr Hawkins. I’m just... just tired from rushing for the train, that’s all.”
“Well I always know my timetables,” said Hawkins, smiling and then laying newspaper aside, “But please dear lady, what is the matter really?”
Brushing one sleeve across her eyes, Marie knew her haggard face obviously spoke volumes. “W-well Herr Hawkins –”
“Oh please, do call me Arthur!”
Marie giggled like a schoolgirl. “Well Arthur... it’s just knowing those Nazi scum will invade Poland! They destroy everything around them, so God help the – ”
“Yes, yes... I am constantly in tune with events. An
d you and dear Eva are Jewish?”
“Y-y-yes,” said Marie tensing at first before anger quickly overwhelmed her, “On my father’s side, though they still made us wear those awful yellow badges! For heaven’s sakes, Papa was a general at the Somme! He fought for the Fatherland!”
“Ah, a brave soldier then... yes, I too fought for my country.”
“Oh Arthur, then you know the hardships both sides faced! Ernst Schienberg received the Iron Cross for bravery! He... h-he didn’t deserve to... to.”
Suddenly bursting into tears, Marie was quickly offered a silken handkerchief. “My apologies Marie,” said Hawkins shaking head, “I did not wish to upset you....”
Simply dabbing her eyes so not to wake Eva, Marie managed a faint smile. “No Arthur, it’s... it’s always good to have someone to confide in. I feel alone so much of the time now...”
Frowning as he took his handkerchief back, Hawkins smiled. “Then please, do go on my dear Fräu!”
With Eva murmuring something in her sleep, Marie smiled at the rag doll. “My f... Papa had his own jewellery business in the centre of Berlin, while my sister Helga and I both worked as teachers at a nearby school. Our dear mother had passed on in thirty-one, but I was engaged to my childhood friend Wilhelm... Eva’s father, and Helga was already happily married. And it was all so, so perfect... ’til they appeared.”
Thumping velvet, Marie then blinked back fresh tears before continuing. “There were only a few incidents at first, a few brown-shirted idiots yelling in small marches... but then it got much worse... vandalism, b-beatings in the streets. And then some of our own neighbours joined in, calling my family every foul name under the sun! Even some of my pupils... t-the children spat at me like I was some fiend from the pit!”
Hawkins shook his head. “Utter nonsense of course... but there is more?”
“Less than a year ago,” said Marie, pausing to take a deep breath, “They struck in the night... smashing, looting and burning everything. My father ran out onto the street to stop them destroying his store, but they... t-they smashed his jaw with a rifle, then began kicking...”