by Adam Nevill
There was a moat twenty feet below. It must have once kept the apes inside their pen or provided recreation. It now brimmed with a thick soup of dirty rainwater, upon which bobbed a carpet of dead leaves, the mulch of ages, and woody flotsam. One portion of the surface had been disturbed. A circle of expanding ripples had stirred to lap greasily against the greening cement banks on either side of the moat. Whatever had just submerged did not resurface.
Beyond the moat stood a half-rotten tree house and two large and rusticated stone figures of apes. To Jason, they appeared like the crude effigies of imbecilic gods, forgotten and left behind in a polluted grotto.
A rich and bestial spore – sulphurous, fresh, nitrate-rich, reaching brain-deep and in danger of turning his stomach – assailed Jason from each side of the path.
‘Electra!’ he roared in fear as much as anger, though his voice sounded feeble and broken among the damp trees. If he wasn’t mistaken the air was now much warmer, and odiferous with the scent of a wet forest floor.
A response seemed to come from high up. A horrible cry that whoop-whoop-whooped before croaking into what could have been demented laughter. Another descendent of escaped apes, he hoped. But what could they have found to eat in here?
Jason was closer to the summit now, about halfway up in fact, and had a better view of what awaited up there. A series of domed cement roofs, like a miniature Sydney Opera House, poked between two large oaks. Perhaps this was one of the stylistic features to which Gerald had attributed historical value.
The head of a dirty penguin statue was also visible. The chipped stone beak was open beneath the blank and indifferent sky. The cement bird was forever poised to call out a lament of solitude and imprisonment, a shriek from the accursed place in which it had been abandoned.
Jason’s imagination began to chatter like a frightened monkey in flood water.
He walked on for a while. On the very summit, part of a red-tiled roof became visible. Directly below that, where the tops of the trees parted, Electra walked into view. She was not alone. She was talking to at least three other people. Women, Jason thought, and all wearing dark clothing. But against a background of discoloured cement, the faces of her companions appeared especially pale.
They all turned and looked down at him. Electra waved enthusiastically. Her friends remained still and were content to stare.
At a trot, Jason rounded a walled paddock for giraffes, now filled with broken bricks and masonry. Tapir, capybara and Barbary sheep had once paced back and forth here, but their fiefdoms had long been given over to choking bracken, blackberry vines and long grasses.
Hobbling past on blistered feet, he intuited an atmosphere pregnant with apprehension, or perhaps one even tense with animosity because he was intruding upon a territory in which he was unwelcome. Ridiculous to feel this way, or so he tried to persuade himself. A few wild descendants of the original apes had given him a turn. That was all. Once he reached Electra he’d make her explain the strange cries. But what could she offer as an explanation of what had slipped into that oily moat about the orang-utan enclosure?
Steeling himself not to look beyond the iron bars he rushed past, so as not to allow the rubbish-strewn and increasingly smelly dereliction to affect him, Jason finally arrived, out of breath and wet through with perspiration, at the place he had last seen Electra.
Once again, he found himself alone and overlooking a lagoon of miserly proportions: a dirty cement cavity, cramped with dead verdure, where sea lions had once glided before being forced to make a turn. Impossibly, despite four decades of dereliction, the stagnant concrete bowl still issued the scent of decaying marine life.
On the opposite side of the broad paved area was the domed concrete structure he had seen from below, the painted roof designed to resemble ice and snow. It had once housed penguins. The only flightless bird remaining was the worn, sad and peeling stone creation he’d seen above the treetops. From this angle, age and weathering had made its one visible eye mad with what looked like panic.
The doors to what was called the Arctic Arena were long gone, but the stench that wafted from out of the darkness overrode Jason’s curiosity to see beyond the aperture.
When he called out for Electra again, three times, his cries incited a repetitive scrape of what sounded like the raking of dry leaves from inside the Arctic Arena. Whatever was disturbing the most recent leaf fall was not, he was sure, his date.
Having now burned right through his patience, and any reasonable and reliable sense of where he was, he ruled out retracing his steps or following random paths. The area below and around him felt neither stable nor safe.
His breathing was ragged, his thoughts hapless. His clothes were sopping and his throat was salted with a terrible thirst. When he tried to push on to locate his date at the very summit, he tripped over his feet twice.
Up. Some deep and rarely used instinct told him she would be up there, waiting at the top. He continued upwards.
He found Electra at the summit.
She sat at one of a score of metal picnic tables arranged outside a boarded-up restaurant with a red roof. She looked preoccupied, if not bored again, like she did at work. Her lovely pink lips had been freshly glossed and were parted as she gazed at the one-storey reptile house on the far side of the outdoor dining area. She’d crossed her legs and allowed the hem of her skirt to slither back to a pair of golden stocking tops, each welt impressed with short suspender clips.
Her companions were nowhere in sight.
Jason could not readily find the will to speak. Had his thoughts been unlocked from the stupefied paralysis brought on by his fatigue and fear, he would not have been sure what he might say to her about his experience below.
More than the sudden presence of Electra, it was the air temperature that brought him to a halt. A withering heat smouldered through the whitish vapours above him and sank upon the dining area.
He stripped his overcoat from his shoulders and arms. Sweat clouded his shirt and jeans. The heat of his body might actually have steamed into the thick atmosphere. He couldn’t be certain.
‘You took your time,’ Electra said with a cruel smile.
‘Where . . . the others?’ Jason blinked the sweat out of his eyes and looked at the sky. There was no sun.
‘You want to know why it was done?’
‘Sorry?’
‘I’ll show you the way.’
‘What?’
Electra screamed out, ‘We’re ready!’
Behind the closed metal doors of the reptile house, something began to thump and thrash against the walls, the ceiling and the floor. The sounds suggested an impressive weight and size. The occupant then made a circular swishing sound in what might have been sand. The metal doors shook within their frames.
Jason fell as much as turned to the bench where Electra sat, but pulled up short when the girl stood and raised the hemline of her tight skirt to her waist. What would have been a shocking though arousing exposure in other circumstances now struck Jason as crude and unpleasant. Electra’s hairless sex was barely concealed by her transparent black underwear, cut like shorts around her shapely buttocks and tummy. Her strong legs shimmered in nylon.
‘We’ve got to be like beasts to go with the others. Quick. Do it quickly,’ she said, and dropped her head back as if she were already in the throes of ecstasy, or suffering a fit.
Despite his revulsion, Jason’s penis thickened and unfurled like some insensible python, motivated only by scent and instinct.
The girl was offering herself, but whether it was to him or something else he wasn’t sure. Her eager anticipation of the imminent appearance of whatever coiled, writhed and butted against the metal doors of the reptile house made Jason whimper like a child. Electra’s moans were caused by her own fear, or arousal, or both.
Beneath the summit erupted a din of bestial shrieks, bellows and roars, as if the zoological gardens were full again and anticipating a long-overdue feeding time. The
treeline around the leaf-strewn picnic area began to thrash like a clash of arms in some ancient battle. Heat from an invisible sun beat Jason’s uncovered head more intensely and boiled his thoughts into higher spikes of panic and terror.
‘Come on. Let him into your heart. Into your heart,’ Electra said, as she lay back upon the picnic table and widened her thighs.
Jason fled for the mouth of the path that must lead down and away from the summit.
A much older female voice cried shrilly from behind the shuttered ice-cream counter of the derelict restaurant, ‘Lie down with the little black lamb!’
Jason tried to look in that direction but lost his balance and fell, cutting both knees and hands. The pain sobered him enough to get back to his feet.
The double doors of the reptile house were broken apart from within. They grated horribly across the paving. A great hot stench of rotten meat and chitin, belched like poison gas across the summit.
Two painfully thin women wearing dusty black gowns came through the opening and staggered across the paving. As they stumbled forward, they batted the sides of their heads as if to concuss the very horrors concealed within their skulls.
Electra thrust her sex higher into the air as if eager for penetration.
The two haggard female spectres fell to their knees and wept. Between them leaped a thick black form.
Propelled from the reptile house and into daylight, it uncoiled like a horrid tongue. A girth as thick as a soil pipe flopped heavily against the dirty ground. The thing’s head slapped the paving just short of Electra, a head covered in soiled bandages that were open and reddish at their ends. What Jason glimpsed of the form’s black hide appeared as sandy as that of a dead Leviathan found upon a beach at low tide.
Jason fled over the lip of the hill.
A great turnstile ground behind him, or somewhere within the low, hot clouds above. He bit through his tongue and kicked off both shoes.
Halfway down the hill, he climbed over the wall of a reeking enclosure once intended for brown bears, and then squashed himself deep inside the open cage at the rear of the pen. The occupant within, half-buried under the dead leaves, appeared even more frightened than he felt.
The Days of Our Lives
The ticking was much louder on the first floor. Soon after it began I heard Lois moving upstairs. Floorboards groaned as she progressed unsteadily through areas made murky by curtains not opened for a week. She must have come up inside our bedroom and staggered into the hall, passing herself along the walls with her thin hands. I hadn’t seen her for six days but could easily imagine her aspect and mood: the sinewy neck, the fierce grey eyes, a mouth already downcast, the lips atremble at grievances revived at the very moment of her return. But I also wondered if her eyes and nails were painted. She had beautiful eyelashes. I went and stood at the foot of the stairs and looked up.
Even on the unlit walls of the stairwell a long and spiky shadow was cast by her antics above. Though I could not see Lois, the air was moving violently, as were parts of her shadow, and I knew she was already batting the side of her face with her hands and then throwing her arms into the air above her scruffy grey head. As expected, she’d awoken furious.
The muttering began. It was too quiet for me to clearly hear all of what she was saying, but the voice was sharp, the words sibilant and almost spat out, so I could only assume she had awoken thinking of me. ‘I told you . . . how many times! . . . and you wouldn’t listen . . . for God’s sake . . . what is wrong with you? . . . why must you be so difficult? . . . all the time . . . you have been told . . . time after time . . .’
I’d hoped for a better mood. I had cleaned the house over two days, thoroughly but hurriedly, for when she next arose. I’d even washed the walls and ceilings, and had moved all of the furniture to sweep, dust and vacuum. I had brought no food indoors but loaves of cheap white bread, eggs, plain biscuits and baking materials that would never be used. I had scalded and boiled the house free of dirt and rid the building of its pleasures, with the exception of the television that she enjoyed, and the little ceramic radio in the kitchen that only picked up Radio Two from 1983. Ultimately, I had bleached our rented home of any overt signifier of joy, as well as those things she was not interested in, or anything that remained of myself, which I forgot about as soon as it was gone.
The last handful of books that intrigued me, anything of any colour or imagination that enabled me to pass this great expanse of time that burned my chest and internal organs as if my body was pressed against a hot radiator, I finally removed from the shelves yesterday and donated to charity shops along the seafront. Only the ancient knitting patterns, gardening books, antique baking encyclopaedias, religious pamphlets, old socialist diatribes, completely out-of-date versions of imperial history and indigestible things of that nature remained now. Faded spines, heavy paper smelling of unventilated rooms, leprous-spotted, migraine-inducing reminders of what, her time? Though Lois never looked at them, I’m pretty sure those books never had anything to do with me.
I retreated from the stairs and moved to the window of the living room. I opened the curtains for the first time in a week. Without any interest in the flowers, I looked down at the artificial iris in the green glass vase to distract my eyes from the small, square garden. Others had also come up since the ticking began, and I didn’t want to look at them. A mere glance out back had been sufficient, revealing the presence of a mostly rotten, brownish snake, one still writhing and showing its paler underbelly on the lawn beneath the washing line. Two wooden birds with ferocious eyes pecked at the snake. Inside the sideboard next to me, the little black warriors that we had bought from a charity shop began to beat their leather drums with their wooden hands.
On the patio and inside the old kennel that had not seen a dog in years I glimpsed the pale back of a young woman. I knew it was the girl with the bespectacled face that suited newsprint and a garish headline above a picture of a dismal, wet field beside an A road. I’d seen this young woman last week from a bus window and had looked away from her quickly, to feign interest in the plastic banner strung across the front of a pub. Too late, though, because Lois had been sitting beside me and had noticed my leering. She’d angrily ripped away the foil from a tube of Polo mints and I knew that girl by the side of the road was in deep trouble.
‘I saw you’ was all that Lois had said. She’d not even turned her head.
I wanted to say, ‘Saw what?’ but it would do me no good and I couldn’t speak for the terrible, cold remorse that seemed to fill my throat like a potato swallowed whole. But I could now see that the girl had been strangled with her own ivory-toned tights and stuffed inside the kennel in our garden. The incident must have been the cause of Lois’s distress and the reason why she’d withdrawn from me to lie down for a week.
But Lois was coming down the stairs now, on her front, and making the sound of a large cat coughing out fur because she was eager to confront me with the displeasures lingering from the last time she was around.
The ticking filled the living room, slipping inside my ears and inducing the smell of a linoleum floor in a preschool that I had attended in the 1970s. In my memory, a lollipop lady smiled as I crossed a road with a leather satchel banging against my side. I saw the faces of four children I’d not thought of in decades. For a moment I remembered all of their names, before forgetting them again.
Reflected upon the glass of the window, Lois’s tall, thin silhouette with the messy head swayed from side to side as she entered the living room. When she saw me she stopped moving and said, ‘You,’ in a voice exhausted by despair and panted out with disgust. And then she rushed in quickly and flared up behind me.
I flinched.
In the café on the pier I cut a small dry cake in half, a morsel that would have failed to satisfy a child. I carefully placed half of the cake on a saucer before Lois. One of her eyelids flickered as if in acknowledgement, but more from displeasure, as if I was trying to win her over and m
ake her grateful. What I could see of her eyes still expressed detachment, anger and a morbid loathing. Tense and uncomfortable, I continued to mess with the tea things.
We were the only customers. The sea beyond the windows was grey and the wind flapped the pennants and the plastic coverings on idle bumper cars. Our mugs held watery, unsweetened tea. I made sure that I did not enjoy mine.
Inside her crab-coloured vinyl handbag the ticking was almost idle, not so persistent; but far below the pier, in the water, I was distracted by a large, dark shape that might have been a cloud shadow. It appeared to flow beneath the water before disappearing under the pier, and for a moment I could smell the briny wet wood under the café and hear the slop of thick waves against the uprights.
A swift episode of vertigo followed and I remembered a Christmas tree standing on red and green carpet that reminded me of chameleons, and a lace cloth on a wooden coffee table with pointy legs like the fins on old American cars, and a wooden bowl of nuts and raisins, a glass of sherry, and a babysitter’s long shins in sheer, dark tights that had a wet sheen by the light of a gas fire. Legs that I couldn’t stop peeking at, even at that age, and I must have been around four years old. I’d tried to use the babysitter’s shiny legs as a bridge for a Matchbox car to pass under, so that I could get my face closer. The babysitter’s pale skin was freckled under her tights. And right up close her legs smelled of a woman’s underwear drawer and the material of her tights was just lots of little fabric squares that transformed into a smooth second skin as I moved my face away again. One thing then another thing. So many ways to see everything. One skin and then another skin. It had made me squirm and squirt.
Across the table, in the café on the pier, Lois smiled and her eyes glittered with amusement. ‘You’ll never learn,’ she said, and I knew that she wanted to hit me hard. I shivered in the draught that came under the door from off the windswept pier, and my old hands looked veiny and bluish upon the laminate table top.