by Various
‘Up. I’ll boost you and hold you steady, then I’ll go up when you’re done. Right?’
‘Yeah. Tha’s fine.’ He didn’t sound convinced.
The front room was through a closed door at the end. It was perfect. Like no one ever left. Pictures on the walls, a sofa with little flowery cushions and them lacy things nans shove over the arms to stop them getting dirty, and cabinets full of little ornaments. It hadn’t occurred to us there might be stuff in here. We knew they left the building quick, but not so quick they didn’t have time to take their shit with them. It was off, somehow. This was obviously some old dear’s flat, probably one tough as my nan and it’d take a fucking tank to separate her from her little china knick knacks. Why the fuck would this old dear leave all hers?
‘They fucking scarpered, innit?’ Jude said, and his voice was all shaky. He tried to hide it, make it gruff, but it was obvious.
‘And? Help me move the sofa.’
It was shoved against the sliding doors. Perhaps the old dear didn’t use the balcony, or maybe she’d tried to block the trickle of cold draught winding through the heat. It was like that ice water sensation I got in my gut when Jude agreed to walk home. It made me shiver. The doors was locked but easy to sort and I shoved them open, expecting to be straight up frozen in seconds. But the cold outside didn’t come in to the room. I stuck my arm out into the open air and watched the goosebumps climb to just above my elbow, and stop. Where my arm was still in the room they didn’t come. It left me wondering where in fuck that cold draught I felt had come from.
I don’t think Jude noticed any difference, but he’d gone straight out on the balcony, like he couldn’t stand to be in the room anymore and he was rubbing his arms, hopping from foot to foot.
‘C’mon, man, it’s fucking brass monkeys out here.’
I shrugged off my pack and pulled out the cans, big things, as long as my forearms. ‘Check these out. Fucking loads in these.’
‘I don’t care, man. I’m cold.’
‘So put your jacket on, ya twat.’
He flipped me the bird. ‘Get a move on.’
The balcony was about chest height, with a border of these ugly pattern-cut bricks to let daylight in, and they was all built one leading into the other, with a gap between maybe a metre and a bit wide. There was a metal rail on the edge. I boosted myself up and rammed my feet in, reaching to grab at the holes in them fancy bricks to steady myself and then straightening up. At my height, balanced like that, I could write my name nice and big, edging along to spray out each separate letter, but Jude was shorter. I looked down at him. It was pitch fucking black and I could barely see his face, but I knew what he was thinking before he even said it.
‘I ain’t climbing up there.’
‘Wanna sit on my shoulders?’
‘No fucking way!’ He jumped up and hung over the side of the balcony from his waist. ‘I’ll do mine here, I can reach far enough to make it pretty big. We can do ‘em at the same time and be out of here. Seriously, this place is shitting me right up.’
I weren’t about to argue. Reckon the size of the tag was more important to me anyway, and he was right, it was fucking creepy. ‘What colour you want first, then?’
‘Black.’
‘So hand us up the red, then.’
I grabbed the can and popped the cap off, watching it spin away it the dark. It occurred to me then that Trace hadn’t text like she normally would, but I didn’t say nothing to Jude, cos he’d want to be gone before we was done. Instead, I adjusted my feet and reached up. Now Jude, he wasn’t no artist, but I was off to study that shit and I didn’t want to half-arse my tag. It was meant to be a massive ‘fuck you’ to that shitty pile of bricks and it needed to be perfect, so I took my time.
When I finished the last letter of my name and handed down the red can to Jude, he was shivering something chronic, and his face didn’t look solid. It looked like it was blurring. I leaned down, squinting in the dark, trying to see proper, like. But he grabbed the can, shoved the black into my hand, and was over the side, spraying, before I could focus on him. I thought about calling his name and making him look up, but I didn’t. I’ve wished I had every single day since. I might have stopped in time. I might have saved us both.
Instead I went over each letter slowly, framing them in black. Big, fat letters, spelling out my name for the whole neighbourhood to see, and I felt real good about it right up until I finished spraying the last bit. Then I heard this noise from inside the old dear’s flat. It’s difficult to describe. Closest I can come is when you turn on the gas hob and click to light it, but it don’t work. So you hold the gas on and keep clicking, with that nasty smell filling up your nose until, out of nowhere, the gas lights. It was that noise. That thump of gas igniting. That’s the sound I heard, but louder. Loud as a fucking car crash. And then there was flames everywhere.
They blasted right through my legs. Heavy, stinking flames, so bright they hurt my eyes, and I almost let go because I genuinely thought my legs were on fire. I think I was screaming, too, but I couldn’t hear myself over the flames. They was roaring. This huge, huge sound that made my ears ache. Then I realised my legs didn’t feel hot at all. They was cold. Freezing cold. Shivering hard enough to crack my teeth, I took a look at them, expecting to see fucking matchsticks, but they was untouched. The flames weren’t real. I could see them, smell them, and feel the weight of them pressing at my jeans, but they didn’t exist.
I dropped the can and clung on tight to the bricks, pressing my cheek into them, begging for it to stop. I lost count of how many times I said sorry. I don’t even know what I was saying sorry for, but I couldn’t stop. Then I heard Ju’s voice. It was odd, because I couldn’t even hear myself properly over those flames. But I could hear him clear as day. He was yelling in this horrible fucking high voice, like a saw squealing on metal. I couldn’t make out a word of it proper, but something about it made me jump down onto the balcony and go running back in, flames blasting against my face.
It was like a tornado in there. A heavy boiling mass of flames, heatless, stinking and loud. I squinted through the glare, hunting for Jude, but he was gone. The stench made me cough. It was thick, and there was something sickly about it. Sorta like the waxy stuff on the walls, but stronger, it hit my throat right at the back and stuck there. I couldn’t see for shit anymore, my eyes covered in spots of light, but I hit a wall soon enough, just by walking forward, and felt my way to the door. To guide myself through the corridor, I had to use the walls and that gross waxy sweat smeared through my fingers, cold and greasy.
I followed Jude’s voice, it sounded close, but always too far away. Like it was echoing from somewhere, or as if every step I took pushed him the same distance away. I tried to find him, though, I promise I did, fighting through them flames, my eyes watering from the heat. Soaked in sweat and coughing, gagging on that stench. I looked in every room in that flat, went out to the corridor and ran up and down, to the stairs, but he was everywhere and nowhere and still screeching. I was sobbing as I called out for him.
‘Jude! Jude! Where are ya, mate? Tell me where! C’mon, mate, I’m looking for ya. I can’t find ya. JUDE!’
But he never answered.
I don’t remember when I stopped looking, but I could still hear him. He sounded so fucking scared. I stood in the middle of the hallway, outside the broken door, my feet in flames, and I fucking lost it.
‘Where’s my fucking friend you piece of shit! Give him back! You fucking tosser, you want to burn I’ll fucking do you like Ollie did them three on your right. I’ll burn you to the fucking ground!’
The flames and the screeching stopped. Like someone hit pause. They just disappeared. Then, on the wall in front of me, Jude’s face pushed out of the sticky yellow wax. His eyes was glass and mouth wide open and stuffed that yellow, greasy sweat. It was oozing out of him and dropping in thick splats to the floor, like he was full to brimming with it. I nearly gave myself a fucking embolism I screamed so
hard. Then he spoke. But it weren’t his voice, it was hundreds of voices, all talking at once, deep and droning and as distant-close as his screeching had been.
‘This name is wrong, this vessel is not hollow. We are suffocating.’
I tried to run, too scared to scream anymore, just wanting the hell out, but the floor was sticky and my feet wouldn’t move. I didn’t want to look down, but couldn’t stop myself. That yellow shit was piled about five inches deep on the lino, locked over my Nikes in these ugly looking waves. It looked more like wax than ever, but I knew how greasy it was. I had it all over my fingers. Remembering that, I got a bit panicked and tried to wipe it off on my jeans, but it wasn’t there anymore. This sighing noise came out of Jude’s mouth, it sounded like relief. Then the voices spoke again.
‘Hollow.’
My guts froze. My heart pumped so hard that each beat felt like a punch to the chest. I tried to scream. Tried to move. But there was nothing in me, and no place to go as the yellow began to push out of the walls all the way along the corridor, becoming vague shapes, like bodies, that dropped to the floor and crawled through the wax on the lino toward me. I could see them coming out from under the doors too, oozing out in thick sheets and forming to bodies. So many bodies. Hundreds of them, made from waxy, yellow grease.
They pushed through the wax on the floor toward me, slow, like it was painful, like it hurt them to move, and when they reached me, they grabbed hold of my legs and started to pull themselves up. I was fucking gone by then, screeching and yelling nonsense. I tried to tear them away, to push them off, but my hands just slid into the grease. It held them there, fast, and those bodies started to ooze up my arms.
I opened my mouth to scream, then, and the closest one, it’s curd-yellow hand half-way up my bicep, shot forward faster than I thought it could and rammed it’s head into my mouth, pouring in thick and rancid to the back of my throat. It tasted fucking horrendous, like ash and old, cold fat. I gagged over and over, but it kept moving, down my throat and into my gut where it sat heavy as a lump of concrete. More and more of it came in. I couldn’t close my mouth to stop it and I couldn’t stop gagging. I was screaming, too. I could hear it, muffled, beneath the relentless pressure in my throat and when it was all gone, heavy in my stomach, my scream burst out, loud, ragged and too high, like unspoken words. Like Jude.
I understood then that, although it had sounded like it, he hadn’t been talking at all. He’d been screaming for his life and I was screaming for mine, knowing there was no one to hear it. Another one, halfway up my chest, followed the first. As it forced its way down, muffling my screams, I saw the bodies were still coming out of the walls, out of everywhere, so many of them. Too many. They couldn’t possibly fit. But I didn’t even know how the first one got all the way in and, in that moment, I was afraid there’d be enough room for all of them.
Hollow. That’s all I could think. It repeated over and over in my head, like a stuck record. I was hollow, and Jude wasn’t and they was going to fill me up until there was nothing left of me inside anymore. Only them. I don’t know how long I stood there screaming, them things forcing themselves into me one by one, but I know it was too long. It seemed like forever. I blacked out more than once and I don’t think I ever stopped screaming. I’ve been screaming ever since, somewhere deep inside.
The next thing I remember is waking up face down in the corridor feeling hot, boiling, inside and out. I smelt it, too. My skin smelt of fire. Everything inside me burnt and ached, and felt tight. I pushed up onto my hands and knees and shoved two fingers down my throat, trying to throw those bodies up, but nothing came so I got up instead and stood there crying. Sobbing like a fucking baby, for me a little, but mostly for Jude. I didn’t look for him any more, I didn’t need to. He was inside, with all the others. I could feel him, and hear his voice. I could hear all of their voices whispering in my head.
‘Home.’ That’s all they were saying. ‘Home.’
And I knew what they meant, because they were me, and I was them. So I did as I was told. I went home, and I went to bed. It turns out Trace had reported us missing when she stopped being angry with Jude for not answering her calls and started being worried instead, so when I woke up it was to the police hauling me out of bed and putting me under arrest. Trace was outside with my mum, who wouldn’t look at me at all, but Trace did. She spat in my face and screamed at me. The police had searched for Jude, see, but couldn’t find him, and they thought I’d murdered him. They tried to make me confess.
But I couldn’t talk.
I’d open my mouth but only this sighing sound would come out. It wasn’t me, but they had no way of knowing that and it scared the shit out of them. In the end they brought in a court psychiatrist and he declared me unfit for prosecution. No one was happy with it, but there was nothing much they could do, so they put me in this secure unit for the mentally ill, a cosy prison with bars on the window and total lock down, for the crazies that can’t be prosecuted but can’t be let out.
I see a psych every two weeks here. I read my notes when he’s talking, so I know he thinks I killed Jude, too. He thinks I’m choosing not to talk, selective mutism. He’s wrong about that, but he’s right about murder, they all are. It wasn’t Jude’s idea to go in, see. It was mine. I saw The Romney there, crumbling against the slate sky like some horror videogame set piece and, you know, I just fucking had to go inside. If I could talk, I’d tell him that I should’ve fought back by leaving as I’d planned, but I let them get to me, pollute the good with the bad, and I made Jude be part of it, when he shouldn’t have been.
They were trapped, and they needed a vessel to escape, someone hollow. Jude was full. He didn’t want anything more. I did though. I was a hollow vessel, waiting to be filled. They needed me, not him, but I gave him to them because I was too selfish to go it alone. That’s what I’d tell my psych if I could talk. I’d tell him this, too. The ghosts of my city walk. They walk within me, and they own me. They won’t let me speak, but they talk to me all the time, in whispers. And they’re always burning. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I’ll smell myself burning, too.
On those nights I pull the window up as far as it can go and lie in bed with my mouth wide open, trying to scream.
The End
The Remover of Obstacles
James Brogden
The garage where Terry Grainger’s car was getting its MOT was a quarter of a mile from the station, and by the time he’d slogged it there on foot, a grey evening had fallen. It had been a long day and he was sweaty, tired, and irritable. This place had been recommended to him as being only five minutes away—and he was left with a long enough walk to reflect fully on the irony that, of course, this meant five minutes by car.
His mood was not improved when he saw, in the parking bays labelled, ‘For Collection’, an absence of anything resembling his car.
This was not to say that the walk itself hadn’t been enjoyable, in a weird sort of way. Terry quite liked industrial estates. There was something stripped back, bare and honest about these places—as if you were seeing the city’s true body, past the plucked and waxed flesh of suburbia to the oil-streaked skeleton beneath. True, it had been a relief to stretch his legs after enduring a day cramped in his office hutch, but he’d had to speed-walk in the midwinter chill to get here before they closed, getting hot and sticky in his thick coat, and all to find that his sodding car wasn’t even ready. Terry hurried to the garage office, muttering darkly to himself and hoping that someone was still there who he could tear a few strips off.
The girl behind the desk looked through the sheaf of forms in his file. She frowned, puzzled, and then smiled up at him. ‘You’re in luck, Mr Grainger,’ she said.
‘Could’ve fooled me,’ he scowled.
‘There have been one or two niggles but it looks like your inspection has been Priority Fast-Tracked, which means you’ll definitely get your car back by the end of the day.’
‘Well that’s s
omething, I suppose, but how am I meant to get home now?’
He sighed, looked around at the garage office with its plastic school chairs and posters of dancing spark plugs. A paraffin heater was blasting out enough heat to boil water within several yards, yet the office remained chilly beyond that. With a half-smile of hopelessness he added ‘I don’t suppose any chance I can talk to Nick about these ‘niggles’, whatever they are?’
‘Certainly, sir. I’ll just call him through from the workshop.’
Terry was taken aback. ‘Really? Just like that?’
‘Absolutely, sir. Just wait one moment.’
As owner and head mechanic of Nick Crewe Motors, the man himself had always been too busy, or unavailable, or on a call, or something else which prevented him from dealing with anybody so insignificant as an actual paying customer. To be granted access so suddenly and easily was like discovering that for years you’d been living next-door to the Pope without noticing. Plus, she’d called him ‘sir’. Twice.
Priority Fast-Tracked, was he? Good; finally something was going his way.
Crewe was a surprisingly small man—though Terry thought maybe that was an advantage if your job involved crawling around under vehicles all day—dressed in blue overalls and drying his hands on a paper towel. He took the inspection paperwork and sat down with Terry to talk him through it.
‘You got a couple of problems here, but the good thing is none of them’s serious. One of the cylinders was misfiring, just a wiring issue, and we got that sorted out fine. The other thing… ’ he sucked air between his teeth and grimaced apologetically.
‘Serious?’
‘Not as such. Tricky, though. It’s the exhaust: you got high carbon monoxide levels. Fixable, but a couple of the lads are off and I’ve got a backlog won’t clear much before Monday. So what I’ve done is, I’ve run your car over to a mate of mine—exhaust specialist, he is—and he promises to have it done by tonight.’