‘I’ll do whatever you want. Don’t hurt me anymore. Please. Leave Eileen alone. She doesn’t see them. She doesn’t know…please…’
‘This isn’t all about you, Bill. Never was. Not where the man’s concerned. He’s got long plans, see? He sees fucking long.’
‘Please, just let Eileen go.’
‘She’s already gone. Went in the night. Couldn’t take it.’ And the man was smiling. Smiling and showing all those fat teeth, it seemed like, and Bill was angry. Good and fucking angry.
But he was tied down and although he knew, just knew, that the man didn’t carry a knife or a gun or anything like that, he was also sure that this man didn’t need weapons.
But if Eileen was dead already? He couldn’t…couldn’t believe it.
‘If I…’ he started, but then he wondered.
Did it matter if he lived or died?
He couldn’t follow through on the thought, because right then the man punched him on the side of his head. Hard enough to ring his bell, but not put him out again. He shook his head while he groaned, the room swimming.
Was he losing blood, too? He thought maybe he was. But he wouldn’t look down. No way. He couldn’t see what had happened to his toes. But then he was going to have to be brave, wasn’t he? Because Eileen was gone.
Because he was thinking hard all the time, and right at the top of those thoughts racing around his brain was one simple phrase, like the circle in his head, but this time it felt good and he didn’t want to break it.
I don’t want to die, the mantra ran.
A scream came from next door, and he jumped, because he wasn’t expecting it. The wide man laughed.
‘Just fucking with you! Ha. Your face! Fucking picture. She’s fine.’
He cocked his head, listening to the scream.
‘Maybe not fine, but you know…still kicking.’
Bill thought maybe he was dead, or asleep, or having some kind of freak out, so he looked down.
It wasn’t a freak out. All the toes bar the big one on his right foot had been bitten down to horrible stumps.
It wasn’t a dream.
God help me, he thought, crying again, hating himself for crying. He knew he was going to die, and the Yik and all the rest of those things, they didn’t matter anymore. He knew they never did. It was all about the man.
The man. The man, always about him. It wasn’t that Bill was important. He couldn’t fool himself into that. But Marlin wanted him and he was stuck in his land now, the land of the other side, the other side of the wall, where he lived.
*
XV.
It wasn’t a dream. No dream was ever like this. Not even during his most acute episode had things ever been this bad.
Could they get any worse?
Was there any chance it could get better?
He couldn’t fool himself. The crazy man was eating him. All the things he was afraid of the bugs doing to him, and they were just crawling around. It was this man that was the threat. Wasn’t anything to do with the circle. He wasn’t having an episode. This hadn’t anything to do with stress.
The man’s phone rung. He picked up and moved back into the shadows in the corner and listened. Grunted.
He hung up and loomed over Bill.
‘I have to go out for a minute,’ he said, and for some stupid reason Bill’s heart leapt, because it was a chance, a half chance. But then hope could be a sneaky bastard.
‘You …well…doesn’t matter what you do, really. Do what you like. You aren’t going anywhere. Scream all you want. Nobody’s coming. Just me, coming back. Believe that?’
Bill nodded, careful not to let his hope show in his eyes. Defeat. Despair. That was all he wanted the man to see.
A Yik fell from the man’s face and landed on Bill’s chest. He barely flinched.
‘Well, be a good boy, then,’ said the man and turned to go.
Before he reached the stairs, he turned back.
‘Just one thing,’ he said. ‘One thing to think about while I’m gone.’
Bill felt terror then, because he imagined the wide man stepping across the room and eating more of him.
But he just asked a question, and that was somehow worse.
‘How deep, Bill? Think on that.’
‘What? I don’t...’ understand, he wanted to say, but the wide man was gone. No big fanfare, just heavy footfalls, receding down the narrow old stairs, and the front door slamming.
Bill waited.
He waited longer, wondering how long he’d have to wait to be sure. Wondering if he’d wait too long, and the man would come back, and he’d miss his chance.
Wondering if the man had really gone, or if this was just another sick game.
But the mantra, I don’t want to die. I want to live. I want to live.
It ran through his head. He couldn’t die. Not here.
And not because Eileen was still alive, but because he wanted life. He never knew how much until right then, bound, his toes eaten, his face bloodied.
He wanted to live, so he strained and wriggled and heaved as hard as he could. He cried because it hurt. He wanted to shout, to give himself one last push, one almighty effort, like a muscleman pushing a bar laden with weights toward the sky. The cry of a man who wouldn’t give up.
He bit down instead, so hard a tooth cracked, and then something gave in his shoulder with a horrible crunch, like he’d just managed to break his own bones.
Thing was, he had, but now he could get his arms out of the bonds.
He laughed, but slapped his hand over his mouth, because the man had only gone next door.
Eileen.
Suddenly he understood the urgency. He could run, hide, maybe. Fight, get a knife, hit the guy with it, maybe get lucky. But it wasn’t about him, not anymore.
He was broken, because he pushed himself to his feet and didn’t scream when he landed on his mangled foot, didn’t scream when he crushed a Hatheth under his heel.
Something was different, if only while he did what he needed to do. And for a moment, he felt the hand of God, his Eye, looking down on him, and God help him if that Eye didn’t burn, didn’t look like a lake of fire.
His shoulder burned, his nose and the whole of his face, and his foot…Jesus, he thought, looking down at his foot. He didn’t know how he was walking, but more than that, how he was walking across a carpet of the Hatheth, crunching them underfoot, and not screaming. The hand and the Eye of God. He had made his gaze and his loving caress, like Eileen always said he would.
It felt like he was in the heart of the storm, and that was precisely what insanity was, and sometimes, it was just the right place to be.
His foot hit the first riser, his bad foot, and he did scream and tumbled, crashing, down the stairs.
*
XVI.
Bill Hunter had never hurt himself badly in his thirty years of life. He didn’t know how seriously he’d injured his shoulder. He couldn’t tell if it was broken, but when he hit the wall at the foot of the stairs he thought it was for sure.
He cracked his toes and blood started to pour out on the carpet. Thank God it was carpet, or he’d slip and break his arse, too.
He turned and looked over his shoulder, but the low beasts hadn’t followed him down the stairs. He could have cried again, but this time he was angry, just plain angry, and somehow the anger was keeping the fear at bay.
Fear of them, and fear of the wide man’s return.
He didn’t know how long he had. He dragged himself up, his right arm pretty much useless, and stumbled into the kitchen.
He pulled out the drawer, tipping the whole thing to the floor in his haste. Then he collapsed onto his knees and rummaged through, until he found the biggest knife he could.
It was a bastard getting back up again, but he did it, just like he managed to steel himself to walk out into the cold light of day and across the fence to Eileen’s and kill the men that had tortured them, or die trying. He pushed
onto the door, though, and it wouldn’t budge. In his anger he didn’t try twice, think maybe the man had locked him in, but smashed the knife into the glass above the bottom panel.
The knife bounced back and didn’t even make a mark. When he looked more closely, he saw what he took for a fine winter day wasn’t anything of the sort. It didn’t move as he did. Someone had painted his windows with an exact replica of his views.
He stared for a moment, dumb, unmoving. Forgetting Eileen and low beasts and torturers, with a cold chill deeper than anything he’d ever known settling in.
He checked the other windows. All the windows.
Then he dropped the knife and sat at the table with his head in his hands, because then he knew he really was fucking nuts.
Unmoving, unchanging, scenes on all the glass. Just paint, and not even onto glass, because they weren’t windows at all, but brick.
His whole house was surrounded by walls.
*
XVII.
In the year up until the end of his first life, before he broke, Bill’s condition steadily worsened. He never did end up in a room with white leather pads on the walls, but he did end up with a court order sectioning him and a nice enough single room in a bungalow with a key pad on the door.
It was in the year building up to his short residential stay that he first saw the man.
The man, the Marlin, came to him through the walls.
The Marlin lived in all the walls, and no matter where Bill went, whether it was the school room, or the bathroom, or the staff room, there were always, always, walls.
It was that year that the man started to run Bill’s life, and the same year that Bill refused to follow orders anymore.
And God, that was hard, because you don’t refuse the man and get off easy, and the man was the only one that mattered. The low beasts had a king, and Marlin was his name.
*
XVIII.
To start with, Marlin mainly got angry when Bill spoke about him. Then, later, he was angry when Bill even thought about him. But toward the end, toward Bill’s breaking, he was very angry, because that was when Bill began to write about him.
Bill wrote on his walls at home. He wrote about Marlin in the margins in his students’ homework.
Bill found out just how angry the man could be during one break time in class when the wall shattered. Brick flew across the room, crashed through the big second floor window. A shard of brick opened a gash across Bill’s forehead.
He ducked down and covered himself with his arms as brick fell through the red brick dust cloud.
Marlin stepped through the wall.
‘You tell them,’ he said, in some kind of voice that was feral and erudite and made the two things one, ‘And I’ll have them eat you all. Every inch of you…you, your students, all the teachers. I’ll fucking teach you, Bill. I’ll teach you,’ he said, leaning that horrible long face of his right into Bill, so far in that Bill could feel his warm stinking breath on his eyeballs. ‘I’ll teach you the meaning of fucking discretion,’ he said.
Bill had no choice but to sit still, biting down hard, while the Hatheth and the Yik and the Krama crawled over him, and when break time was over and Marlin was gone, trying not to scream while the low beasts slithered and slid and clattered and clamoured among his students, everyone of them ignorant of the horrors in their midst.
‘Reading, today,’ he said. ‘Chapters 3 through 8,’ he said, and that was all he said for the whole lesson, because he had to bite down and bite down hard.
Somehow, he made it through fifty minutes without screaming.
At the end Marlin came back in.
The Marlin nodded.
Said nothing, then both the man and the low beasts were gone.
*
XIX.
Bill didn’t write about Marlin for a month. Didn’t think about them. Whenever Marlin came he put him in a circle, like a fairy ring, he imagined it, to stop the wicked elves breaking through.
He bought an iron horseshoe and wore that on a leather strap beneath his shirt for a while, but it was heavy and rubbed the seven he’d etched into his chest, so he didn’t wear it all the time.
When a drug addict goes back to his smack, he hits it hard. An alcoholic doesn’t fall off the wagon on a single shot of malt, but on a bottle of cheap shit whiskey from the corner shop.
Insane people don’t do things by halves, either. If you don’t break all the way, you’re not insane.
Bill was on the way to breaking, perhaps snapping, after that hard month, when he began writing in the margins, again, writing on the walls in his apartment, trying to keep Marlin away, stop him breaking through.
‘Marlin can’t get through here. Seven.’
After everything he wrote seven. He gave all his students 7 out of 10, because seven protected him.
But really, it didn’t work. Never does.
That was when he snapped all the way. The cracks in the wall came earlier, back when he’d been a student and the head first came out of the television, but the real cracks appeared when he began on seven and he shattered when he was caught breaking into the school and stealing his students’ papers.
*
XX.
Bill smashed the window to the staff room with his fist, in which he held an iron horseshoe.
On his chest a seven carved with a compass, to hide himself from Marlin.
He cleared the window sill of glass and boosted himself up and over. The keys to the locked cabinets were in his front left pocket, because Marlin was right handed and if he snuck up behind him he wouldn’t be able to get them.
But he didn’t want to use the key, in case Marlin heard him. Marlin could break through walls, come out of doors. The power of Earth was making him stronger. But seven could hide you from him and iron could keep him back.
Bill crawled across the glass, keeping low so Marlin wouldn’t see him, trying to be quiet.
‘Shh,’ he told himself. ‘Silent, silent, seven and seven and seven and seven...’
Over and over, he spoke the magic number while the glass cut his palms and his knees.
He couldn’t get a good swing hidden on the floor, so he stood, eyes closed so he could listen.
‘Careful sevens,’ he said, and punched at the locked cabinet with his horseshoe clutched in his fist like a forked jaw against the evil eye, his talisman and his ward both.
The lock broke and the files tumbled to the floor.
There was a file in cabinet in which he knew he’d written about Marlin. He didn’t remember what he’d written, and Marlin didn’t know, but he needed to get it, and get it fast, because the Hatheth were in his mind. Marlin would know, soon, maybe, 7 and IRON couldn’t stop the Hatheth, couldn’t stop the elf king, the Marlin man with his long sight and his long plans and his long, elegant body like a sword.
He mashed the horseshoe at the papers, like an eraser, mashing and tearing the papers until there was nothing left but shreds.
The alarm was pounding in his ears, but he didn’t hear it. He heard the footsteps though, and Marlin was behind him.
‘Smash it, William. Smash it. I’ll have them eat you. I swear it.’
Bill turned and roared at him. Marlin’s head nearly touched the ceiling, but iron would burn him, hurt him.
He lashed out with the iron, hitting out, again and again, but Marlin just backed away, and then he caught Bill’s arm. He was unbelievably thin, but strong enough to wrench Bill’s arm behind his back.
Marlin was sneaky, though, and tricked Bill into thinking the policeman wrestling with him wasn’t a policeman, and when he snarled and swung it was the policeman who fought him, not Marlin. He took the horseshoe away, and then another policeman came and between the two of them they restrained Bill while he screamed and raved and ranted and bled from his chest through his shirt as the scabs over seven broke.
Bill spent two months in hospital after that, and Bill that was died. A new Bill was born. One with ang
er caged, ruled by fear. A man sitting with just one toe on his right foot and a broken shoulder in a room surrounded by walls.
But he still had the scar of 7 on his chest and an older 7 on his arm, and he laughed a little while the answer came to him, there at his kitchen table. Of course the answer was seven.
*
XXI.
Darkness was a way off. Still around five o’clock. Bedtime was seven. Winter or Summer, didn’t matter. His father put him to bed at seven and seven was the good time. It was the bad time, too, because seven was when he got up. Winter or Summer.
Five o’clock, now, and winter, and it was dark outside while Bill sat at the kitchen table.
Even though the vista was just a painting on brick, darkness still fell and real or not Bill could feel it coming.
He carved a seven on his right arm, his left hand working fine. He carved a seven on his left, right over the old scar tissue, though his right shoulder was broken and making his hand work was hard.
The good seven and the bad, working together, because it was dark now and he was thinking about Marlin, and Marlin wouldn’t be happy.
He didn’t think the wide man was coming back. He was just a Hatheth a Krama a YIK a fucking Yik.
But time for thinking about the low beasts was over. He needed to break down the walls quickly now, through to Eileen’s, because she was screaming again.
*
XXII.
All of Bill’s garden tools were outside. He had a sledgehammer out there. He might be able to break through the wall with that, but then his right arm didn’t work and he couldn’t get to the sledgehammer anyway.
He couldn’t see a way through the wall, but then there was a hole in the wall already, wasn’t there?
He just needed to push, to squeeze, but it wasn’t any different to breaking his bonds on the bed and pulling himself to his feet. He needed to make himself smaller.
The Walls of Madness (A Horror Suspense Novella) Page 4