For Rye

by Gavin Gardiner

  She drove the spade.

  The wet ground succumbed as she’d expected. Her tool met quicksand-like dirt, swallowing the steel. Lightning lit an audience of stone. Thunder rumbled over wailing wind. Her soaked coat weighed heavy, pulling her to the earth. The thin, pale blue cotton of her gown became a second skin, sealed with rain to her feeble body. She thrust the spade into sodden mud, her grunts barely audible through the screaming storm. The tower, her childhood friend, gazed down disapprovingly. She glared back at it. What would you have me do? The clock face stared, a vast eye wide in disbelief.

  She felt the spade’s quality in its weight; he’d made sure this replica was extra sturdy and robust, reinforced for your corpse-digging pleasure. Still, the child-sized tool was making her task long and arduous, like tunnelling with a toothpick, and she eventually went to search the base chamber of the clock tower for a more effective implement. Sure enough, a full-sized shovel sat propped against the wall. She ran a finger along its edge, finding it to be almost razor sharp. This thing was brand new and prepped for the task at hand. She had a feeling she knew who’d left it here.

  Returning to the site of her work, she found the mound of dirt by her side to grow with a greater pace under the influence of the new shovel. The pit deepened around her.

  Hours passed. The pile, turned to mud by the pummelling rain, began slithering back into the hole. She threw her aching arms into the mound and pushed it back, screaming. She tried to shove aside the panic of her hair constantly coming undone from its mass of clips, running her hands over it, smearing it down with rain after every thrust so the water would keep it in place. Thunder bellowed far off in a world from which every plunge of the shovel was a step away. Her first step had been long ago on a road not far from here. Now, one plunge at a time, she would take her final steps.

  She thrust.

  The mound grew large, the pit deep.

  She wiped away the hair.

  Keep digging, the inscription on the boy’s spade had read.

  Thrust.

  Keep digging.

  Wipe.

  Now he was the worm, she the excavator. The walls of mud rose around her.

  Show yourself, worm.

  The moon drifted as the night wore on. Renata worked frantically in the deepening grave. Her blade began to blunt, blisters burst on her hands, cramp cracked in her arms, but still the shovel-loads of mud flew out of the pit. She was a woman possessed. The light at the end of the tunnel was somewhere in this grave.

  Then, with the first distant hints of dawn, she struck something hard.

  Vibrations rang up the shovel and through her arms, stopping her dead. Mahogany peered through a letterbox in the mud where the steel had made contact. The rain fell around the tiny window and worked the dirt back over as if trying to cover up a dirty secret. She fell to her knees and scraped the mud with the edge of the shovel. Steel grated against wood until the dark coffin lay bare before her.

  It was small.

  She dropped the shovel and began scratching at the walls of dirt until two small footholds formed on either side of the box, allowing her to step off the lid. She stood over the coffin, legs and arms akimbo as if mid-star jump, looking down at her treasure chest. Feet still anchored on either side, she bent over and curled her fingers around the lid, feeling for a gap in its edges. She sliced her long fingernails through the embedded dirt until the rim of the lid made itself known. She tugged at the mahogany, eyes clenched against the driving rain.

  Nothing.

  She heaved again, desperately ignoring the agony of her torn hands and, worse, the hair hanging over her face, but the lid didn’t move. Whether by the passing of decades or a deliberate effort before burial, the wood was sealed. She threw the shovel from the pit and reached out for the smaller spade, lightning exploding over her chasm, rain pouring down its walls in black waterfalls. She wedged the steel of the child-sized implement under the rim and began working the lid.

  The coffin creaked in protest until its cover finally snapped free. She raised the panel, groaning at its weight as she straightened her legs and leant it against the rear wall of the pit. She stood with her back to the open box, eyes closed, panting for breath, running her bloody hands over her hair again and again and again. Lightning flickered, a lightbulb expiring, then a dying growl of thunder from across the fields as the rain calmed. The storm stepped back.

  Then the smell hit her.

  She sprayed vomit over the upturned panel, steadying herself against the glutinous walls. The stench was somehow physical, making itself known even as she held her breath, tangling around her like a net. She spat the taste from her mouth. It was time.

  She turned around.

  Its hands lay clasped. Dinky shoes pointed to the sky. The suit was in superb condition. A box of liquefied human would have yielded no answers. Luckily, this was something else.

  Two pots of black fluid marked hollow, bubbling eye sockets. In place of a nose was a tunnel boring through the centre of its face. Gleaming baby teeth, cleaned to a shine by the rain, huddled behind what used to be seven-year-old lips. Poking out from the tiny open mouth was undertaker’s thread, dancing in the wind, its mouth-shutting duties now as expired as the lips they once bound.

  And still, after all these years, those damned red curls.

  Renata spotted something wriggling behind its curtain of teeth and dropped the spade. It clattered against steel. She looked down and saw it lying on top of another small spade, also red, also child-sized. She peered down at the engraving on its face:

  To our dearest Noah: keep digging.

  It was him. Her eyes passed from its desiccated hands to the tiny mouth. There was more she needed to see.

  Noah looked almost mummified, skin tight and leathered. Millbury Peak’s frosty seasons had no doubt played a part in the cadaver’s relative preservation, the cold earth having prevented the liquefying she’d half-anticipated. The skull itself, despite the ruined lips and mouth, still held in near perfect form. This was to be the fruit of her labours.

  She knelt, knees planted on either side of the blank vessel that had been her brother. The rain, now calmed to a steady drizzle, had rinsed off a little of Noah’s hair, as well as some of the scum encrusted upon the skull, but not enough.

  It had to be cleaned completely.

  She held out her trembling hands and reached for her brother’s face, his head propped up on a small cushion. The rain renewed its efforts, prompting an eye socket to overflow and weep its thick treacle lazily down into the almost-smiling mouth. The leathery, stiff face looked up at her, empty eyes pleading as they had that fateful night.

  The crispy curls snapped in her fingers as she began crudely massaging its dried-out hair, the smooth scalp eventually lying bare beneath her hands. She switched relentlessly from gnawing on her lips to gritting her teeth. Gnawing on lips, gritting her teeth. Back and forth, to and fro. Gnawing, gritting. Gritting, gnawing.

  Her fingers, still tangled with a few strands, continued kneading the scum-laden skull until bony white finally emerged through the film of decomposition. She peered closer through the low light at intricate streaks of pink across the pale scalp.

  She worked the skull harder, further revealing the pastiche of plastic, rosy-coloured blotches. Running a scum-coated finger over the patterns, she discerned a world map of white oceans and pink landmasses, the very blueprint of the boy’s end. She reached for the spade, not the replica but the spade, and lined its blade against the plastic markings in the bone.

  It fit.

  The embalmer had done a fine job. Noah’s skull had been patched up and smoothed to perfection. With his curls, there would have been no evidence of the cranial trauma the seven-year-old had suffered. Tonight, the repair job was horrendously visible. She went round the hardened plastic stuffing with the spade head, lining it up to each crack. This had indeed been the instrument of his demise.

  Quentin had spoken the truth.

  Lightn
ing flashed, but this time in her head.

  Pain seared, the usual pain, except it didn’t die. She threw her hands to the sides of her head against rain-plastered hair, teeth clamped. Distantly, she realised this was the end. A brain aneurysm perhaps, or some kind of seizure. Images began falling through the rain.

  She looked to the sky, clasping her head through the blinding light of agony.

  Through the storm she saw the boy in the road. She felt the accelerator underfoot as her fists tightened around the wheel, then an impact against the bonnet, the yellow raincoat disappearing over the roof. She felt the car skid to a halt, and, in the immensity of the tempest, saw the twisted shape of her brother flat on the gravel. She saw the spade slicing down upon the boy; the red steel before her appear to melt as moonlit, jet-black blood trickled from its blade, covering her hands like tar; the child lying in the middle of the road, dead. She battered her fists against the walls of the pit and screamed into the merciless sky as razors tore through her brain, and with it the memory of that night.

  She felt.

  She remembered.

  The pain subsided.

  She fell back, her mud-coated gown ripping as she landed. The creature’s legs snapped like twigs under her weight. She stared into the black. It was no longer a dream, nor a fantasy engineered by some psychopath to push her over the edge. It was as real as the smell of death in this abyss, the grave of the brother she’d butchered.

  It flooded back, the memories of that ruinous night unfolding like time-lapsed flowers in bloom: the blood splattered yellow raincoat; collapsing next to Noah’s body under the car’s tail lights; looking up at her weeping father; then, finally, the white walls of the institution, where her lips had formed those same words over and over, year after year.

  Horror Highway, Horror Highway, Horror Highway…

  And now he’d won. He’d compelled her into unbarring the gates of her psyche, then let the truth do its work. He’d get the inspiration for his story, and be loved for it.

  The doors were unlocked, the floodgates opened. In this pit of death, huddled with the monstrous remains of her baby brother, the truth finally found her.

  20

  A stinging chill hit Renata as she stepped into the house, out of the storm still tearing across the dawn sky. Onto her tattered gown she wiped the blood and scum from her ruined hands, then smeared her hair back. Not a strand out of place. She went to the lounge.

  The atmosphere was heavy. Tension pulled the room tight, a narrowing vacuum. Thomas still sat in his armchair, embers glowing faintly in the lifeless grate before him. Had that abhorrent collage of smells subsided, or were her senses just numbed? The brown paste had completed its journey down her father’s leg, and was now sunk into the carpet by his feet – but that was irrelevant; inconsequential, just like every other detail. She could do without smell, without sight, or touch, or taste, or any of it. All that mattered were the memories, now so clear, so true.

  She went to him.

  A quilt lay over the old man’s lap. His hollowed cheeks puffed clouds to the sound of teeth chattering in time with his tapping finger. She pulled Noah’s spade from under her dripping coat.

  ‘Come to finish your dirty work?’ he said.

  Renata stared at him, her hand tightening around the handle. He cocked his head then pulled off the quilt. The pulverised dog lay draped over his lap. He ran a shivering hand over its tangled coat, cranial matter gathering between his fingers as they jittered through Samson’s caved-in skull.

  ‘You going to put down your own father, like a dog?’ The steel trembled in her hand. ‘That your plan, whore? We both know you have it in you.’

  Her glare tore into his unseeing eyes. She raised the spade. He swept the smashed hound from his lap then clenched the arms of the chair, his ragged nails digging into frayed fabric.

  ‘DO IT.’

  The spade remained poised above her once again. A burst of lightning flashed across her pale blue gown. Her body tightened, face trembling with manic intensity. The pattering of rain punctuated the silence. The scene froze.

  She laid it on his lap.

  His eyebrows twitched. Bony hands groped the object. Blank eyes swam in their sockets like fish in their bowls. He ran his fingers over the handle, then the head, then its inscription. His tremors quickened.

  ‘Beast,’ he breathed. ‘In the girl the beast lives.’

  She knelt at his feet. ‘You knew where he was,’ she said.

  ‘He was taken from us,’ spat Thomas, ‘by you.’

  ‘You did much to protect me, Father,’ Renata said, rubbing her wrist. ‘What I did…you kept it quiet, sent me away. But it was too little too late. By then you’d already made me what I am.’ She took his hand. ‘The truth is, you were only ever protecting yourself. You turned your only daughter into a monster, and in doing so, you killed your son.’

  He wrenched her close. ‘My only mistake,’ he said, ‘was holding back on your beatings. My Noah was more than you could ever have been. More than your heathen mother, too.’ Her grip on his hand tightened. ‘Yes,’ he sneered, ‘he was so much more than that battered, bruised harlot.’ His hollow eyes penetrated her flesh. His leathered lips smiled. ‘She got what she deserved. I told you, this family is forsaken. The fire that claimed her is coming for you, too. For the Wakefields, flames are reserved. Forsaken is our blood…as were the years your mother suffered at my hands once you were gone. Believe me, child, when I say the wench lived her final years precisely as you knew her…’ He yanked her into his rotting breath. ‘…bruised and battered.’

  Her eyes narrowed.

  ‘Tell me you see, child.’

  She pounced.

  Renata’s torn hands clamped around the old man’s throat, constricting with the strength of a boa’s death grip. The skin of his neck was loose, seemingly disconnected from the withered muscles beneath. His hands flew to her wrists, tightening so feebly she could barely discern whether they clawed in protest or merely held on through the inevitable.

  The man wheezed his last, agonised words.

  ‘And the…great drah-drah…’

  His ragged fingernail began tapping and scraping an elaborate sequence against her wrist as her fingers interlocked around the yellowed clerical collar. He choked his final sermon in agonal fits as she crushed his neck.

  ‘…drah-dragon was…thrown down…that ancient serpent, who is…is…’ His blind eyes rolled back in their sockets. ‘…called the Devil and…and Satan…’

  She shook his limp body by the throat, his head flopping idly. ‘You did this!’ she yelled. ‘You brought this on us!’

  ‘…the…the deceiver of…the…world…’

  Blood coughed onto her cheek. The vice of her grip tightened.

  ‘…and he…Say-Say-Satan…’

  Tightened.

  ‘…was thrown down to the…’

  There was a snap.

  The skeletal frame jerked. Renata released the broken neck, its head slumping back into the chair.

  Thomas’s eyes groggily opened. ‘The hex…hexa—’

  The old man’s words turned to gargles. A delicate line of blood traced the wrinkled trenches of his chin as fierce spasms shook his body. She reached forward and squeezed her thumb and forefinger over his nose, the palm of her other hand pressing firmly over his mouth. ‘This was you, it was all you,’ she said, then whispered in his ear, ‘Tell me you see.’

  The time between spasms stretched. The tapping and scratching of his finger against her wrist slowed. Gradually the jolts became fewer, finally diminishing into mere twitches. There was one final, weak tap, before his hand dropped limply into his lap. The rain’s pattering ceased. Thomas Wakefield’s passing was marked by a silence of absolute solidity.

  Then, without warning, the wave rose within Renata. It was warm, as if the dead logs of the fire were reborn inside her. It was all-encompassing.

  It was the wave of inspiration.

  Words bubbled
within her. What words? She did not yet know. They were there, this she knew, and that was enough. Words buried, waiting to be exhumed, just like the worm she’d unearthed – but magnificent.

  So magnificent.

  She placed her hands on either side of her father’s face and pulled him close.

  ‘Father, I forgive you.’

  21

  She stood before the lifeless fireplace, rope in hand. The painting towered above the mantelpiece. Faces screamed through the spiralling flood, some succumbing to the oceanic claws, others fighting for higher ground. She imagined the waves as fire, reaching to claim its victims. For the Wakefields, flames are reserved, the corpse in the chair still seemed to moan. Forsaken is our blood.

  Her hand tightened around the noose.

  It was time.

  Renata looked to the stained ceiling and saw no anchorage for the rope. Her search of the rest of the house for beams had yielded no results. There was a decrepit attic, but its rotting ceiling was too low. Door handles? No, she didn’t want to do it that way. She needed height. She could let nothing go wrong.

  She thought of the clock tower, but frowned at the image of tainting her childhood friend. Finally she decided she would head back out into the dawn, the storm finally abated, and cross the fields to the trees beyond where a tall oak would facilitate her end.

  She took one last look at the stiff shape of her father. Holding up her own long nails for comparison, she glanced at his talons still dug into the arms of the chair. She curled her fingers and stabbed her palms. Like daughter like dad.

  Renata turned to walk towards the door, then stopped at the bookcase which had once housed her mother’s romance novels. It was these shelves that had birthed her love of reading, with countless nights spent sneaking downstairs to secretly pick a book once the shouting had subsided. Then, one morning, she’d found the bookcase empty, the black and blue of her mother’s smiling face renewed. She’d never seen the books again, never knew where they’d ended up, but she knew their removal had been the work of her father, his disapproval of that ungodly smut finally having had its way. Her father’s religious texts, discoloured and caked in dust, now occupied the shelves on either side of a packed folder, the words Quentin script scrawled down its spine.