The Tapestry

by Wigmore, Paul

  But Walter noticed him..., oh he noticed him alright. Walter was a very old man who had worked way past his retirement age but had never had a problem with incontinence., but as soon as he saw ‘The Freak’ walking back into the canteen and look at him with those ruby red eyes, as if he hadn’t been dead and buried and feeding the worms months ago... all that changed.

  The warmth ran down his pants as he relieved himself out of sheer terror before he tried to alert the other men to the presence of the impossible standing right before them. His words only came out as garbled incomprehensible rubbish, as if one side of his mouth was paralysed. He tried to run but his legs turned to jelly and confusion was clouding his mind. Where would he run?, the only way out was past “The Freak” and he didn’t like the odds of his jellyfish legs getting past the rather healthy looking dead man, so he tried for a window along the wall behind him.

  He dropped the mop to the floor which had been the only thing keeping his frail body between him and the floor, and made his comical run for a window with his jellyfish legs. The noise of the mop alerted the card players who turned to see Walter forcibly thrown through the plate glass window by some invisible force, and then one of the men screamed two words which made absolutely no sense until they saw him themselves...”The Freak”. He stood there and just watched as they scrabbled to get out of their chairs and try to make sense of what they were seeing in front of them. All the while the same song was repeating itself in Gavin’s head.

  Ring-a-ring-a-roses

  A pocket full of posies

  a-tishoo., a-tishoo.

  We all fall down.

  He couldn’t seem to shake it and wasn’t sure that he wanted to; there was something about it that he seemed to connect with. He didn’t know why, he just liked it. Although he did find it strange that inside his head, it was if a million children were singing it to him, and it would not stop no matter what he did and he was glad.. it soothed him.

  ‘We all fall down’ he laughed as Walter landed outside the window breaking his neck but momentarily beforehand wishing he had retired at 65.

  Gavin could see That Phil wasn’t among the card players and didn’t want to alert him to his presence so that he could make a run for it so decided to deal with the rest of them as quietly as possible. Although he was loath to do so as it would be much less fun killing them and not hearing their cries for mercy, which he had acquired quite a taste for over the past few months.

  ‘Right boys, let’s play nice and quiet now, so’s not to upset the neighbours eh, he sneered before the bravest and dumbest of them came flying at him with a canteen chair which Gavin ripped from the mans hands as he dodged to the side ,and grabbed it from him on his way past. He then very deftly snapped one of the hollow metal legs from the chair and imbedded it through the mans neck before the second attacker had a chance to wish he had decided against picking up the fire extinguisher from the wall, and charging at what was ‘The Freak’ to bash him over the head with it. Only to stop right in front of Gavin with the extinguisher held high above his head, but he could not bring it down on ‘The Freaks’ head. Something was stopping him as he stood there, his face now so close to the awful... thing in front of him, he could hear a song in his head. He knew the song from his childhood, only this was the most beautiful version he had ever heard, like a million children singing in unison.

  Ring-a-ring-a-roses

  A pocket full of posies

  a-tishoo., a-tishoo.

  We all fall down.

  And they did, they all fell down as the fire extinguisher exploded and brought the roof of the canteen down onto the remaining four who had been trying to make a run for it as they saw what was in store for fire extinguisher guy.

  ‘So much for the stealth approach’ muttered Gavin as he walked out of the rubble totally unharmed or unmarked by the explosion. In fact it looked as if even the dust was too scared to settle on him, and he liked that...he liked that a lot, as he went on through to the warehouse singing what was now his favourite song.

  The warehouse was stacked high with pallets of boxes all waiting to be loaded on to trucks. The harsh fluorescent lighting stung his eyes as he searched the room. It was easy to hide in a room like this with its corridors of massive metal shelves loaded with pallets of boxes containing all sorts of stuff, from tv’s to novelty cuckoo clocks all waiting to be dispatched.

  Phil had heard the ruckus from the canteen and gone to investigate. When he saw Gavin somehow lift old Walter and throw him through a window he tried to make a run for it through one of the loading docks, only he realised he wasn’t going to make it as he heard the doors swing open behind him. He decided to hide at the back of a stack of unloaded pallets that had been piled on top of each other by the rear entrance. Phil wasn’t the sort to hide, in any normal circumstances he would have stood his ground and there aren’t many that would have knocked him down either. But he saw what that thing just did to Walter, and he remembered burning his house to the ground with him and his girlfriend inside.

  ‘Please lord, I know I did wrong, but I was misled by evil people.. I .. I thought I was doing your work. W... we took it too far, I know that now but please God save me’

  As he sat behind the pallets praying to a god that he had never prayed to before to save his sorry ass, the snot flowed freely from his nose and onto his hands which were clenched in front of his face.

  BOOM

  It took no more than a second for Gavin to locate the snivelling pile of shit in amongst all the boxes, his prayers and whimpering to his God for forgiveness gave him away. The shelves in front of him imploded at his wish. Boxes of underwear and light fittings erupted in front of him as the shelves made a path for him.

  ‘God’s not gonna help you now, in fact I don’t think he’s even listening to you anymore’

  BOOM

  The second set of shelves went up as he worked his way to the snivelling black bastard still cowering behind the pallets.

  Gavin took every single ounce of delight that he could from walking very slowly and purposefully towards the snivelling snotbag in the corner. As he walked closer to him, he would raise his hand and with a quick jerking movement some item such as a kettle or one of the strange cuckoo clocks would be launched towards the soon to be dead mans head. The intention was not to strike, although a few did anyway but... just for fun. Phil had nowhere to go, he had trapped himself behind the pallets and there was no clear means of escape.. at least not without actually moving towards what he no longer thought jokingly of as “The freak” but more like the reincarnation of every sin he had ever committed from when he was eight years old and was playing with his cousin Tiffany in the back garden of his uncle Desmonds house and made her show him her woowoo, otherwise he would say that she had anyway and then she would be in trouble... right up to the few petty burglaries he had committed when he was a teenager and then there was the cheating...Oh he had cheated on his first wife that many times he could no longer count. There were too many sins that he had committed but surely he was no more sinful than the rest of the world?

  Oh and of course he had also burnt alive a man for, well... for what? For being different was all that he could think before he felt the weight of his whole body shift and he was no longer trying to find a safe passage past the thing in Gavin’s body. Instead he was trying to figure out how he was rising above the pallets and now moving very slowly through the air above the monster that had his hand outstretched towards him. As he looked down towards the monster he saw a flash of deep purple in the eyes before they reverted back to the crimson red of the blood spilled on battlefields across the world since time immemorial, He struggled to be free of the Freaks hold over him but it was no use. It was an invisible force holding him in the air and he could no more break free from it than he could undo the last twelve months of his life and put everything right.

  He was still praying as he was lifted towards the fluorescent lighting above the metal shelves stacked with the u
seless items ready to be shipped away.

  His arms and legs were limp to either side of him, as if he were being lifted towards the ceiling on some sort of hoist that had a hold of him around the waist. The humming of the fluorescent lights got slightly louder as he neared the ceiling and he wondered if he were just going to be smashed into the ceiling or slowly burnt by the lights.

  He was scared, he was “more scared than a white guy at a dance off” was what his Grandpa woulda said and it did kinda fit.

  ‘Dirty black bitch, dirty black bitch, dirty black bitch’ was all he could make of the words spat at him from below.

  ‘Time to turn the little pig over’ Gavin sneered as he willed the dirty bastard over to face him, just so that he could see the expression on his face before he died.

  Phil was looking down at the man that he knew would bring him certain death, and he knew he deserved it, he begged for mercy and he cried. The tears were a torrent of salty water running from his face onto the dusty ground thirty feet below. His pleas of mercy and requests for a miracle fell on deaf ears as he began to turn around in the air.

  Gavin stood beneath him with both hands in the air and slowly crossed his hands over and over as if he were spinning some sort of unseen basketball. He built the momentum until he could no longer figure out which end of Phil he was seeing... top or bottom? He continued spinning faster and faster until the blood from Phil’s body actually began to weep out of every single pore of his body. This came as an unexpected surprise to Gavin and he leant his head back towards the ceiling and opened his mouth wide to take in the drops of blood that were now falling in a uniform fashion that had created a spray of blood around the top of the building. He lapped it up like it was some sort of alternative communion. When he was finished he uttered the now familiar words.

  ‘We all fall down’ before lowering his arms and unceremoniously dropping the body to the floor with a thwack.

  He knelt down beside the body and as he did so, he felt comfort as the words of that almost angelic song came back to play over in his head. A million children in his head all wishing for the same thing.

  Ring a ring o’ roses

  A pocket full of posies

  A-tishoo, a-tishoo

  We all fall down.

  CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

  When they had both awoken from where they had fell, there was a tang of disbelief in the air. Or at least it seemed that neither one wanted to believe that what had just happened wasn’t some kind of strange collective dream brought on by hysteria or other such thing. Anything but the truth would have been great but unfortunately the truth was staring them both in the face and it wasn’t pulling any punches.

  The talisman had left the mark of the two dragons imbedded into the palm of Clara’s hand like a brand marking and Seb was no fool. He was a man of education but what he had seen would make him question every further teaching for the rest of his life.

  They had actually slept where they had fallen for at least twelve hours, enough time for both of their bodies to get over the shock of what had happened to them and for them to heal. The dragonfire is an exhaustive source of energy and must be used wisely. Of course they hadn’t known at the time that they had yielded the dragonfire for the first time but Liu did, and he was already working on bringing it and the Guardian to him.

  Fortunately after they had both gotten over what had happened to them the previous night. Clara and Seb had sat and discussed the events that had unfolded in Seb’s otherwise quite drab front room and both had come to the decision that the word “empaaasuun” could only really translate to emperor’s son. And after what they had discussed about the five toed dragons and how they were only worn by the emperor or other such important persons of nobility, the connection wasn’t hard to make.

  Although Seb hadn’t actually seen Joseph, he had heard him whilst he was on the floor watching Clara, and he had also heard a number of other voices and sounds that he didn’t think he would ever want to hear again.

  Because to hear those voices, is to recognise and acknowledge that we are not what we think we are. And we do not come from dust and we most certainly do not turn to dust when we perish. There is something else that most of us, even the learned educated men like Seb will never understand or be willing to even contemplate until it is too late to beg for enlightenment. But although he hadn’t seen this Joseph, He had most certainly heard him, and he had seen the strange green light which had washed over his banal furniture and Clara whilst the strange wind that seemed to materialise from nowhere trashed his front room whilst Clara stood screaming into the centre of the whirlwind after Joseph.

  CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

  “You look like ya seen a ghost love” the man with the overgrown unkempt beard and the tobacco stained teeth at the newspaper kiosk drawled, as he took the change in his hands with the fingerless gloves, but damned if she could hear a word he said. She just saw the lips moving of the man at the news stand talking to her, but she couldn’t hear a word due to the deafening noise that had been ringing in her ears since the night at Seb’s. The song was so beautifully haunting. She knew the song from her childhood. Hadn’t heard it for many a year, but now... now it was all she heard all day every day. The song was not beautiful, or calming ...it was frightening. She knew that it had something to do with the events which had recently put her on a different path... it scared her; and at the same time it made her feel so sorry for the children that were singing that song, but she didn’t know why, and as she contemplated this the kiosk vender leaned towards her and almost whispered the words right in her ear.

  “We all fall down”

  The shock of the vendor whispering in her ear and then about an eighth of a second later realising what he had said to her really did send her sprawling to the ground scrabbling to get away from him.

  It was a cold and rainy day, the everyday hustle and bustle of office workers on their way to their monotonous; soul destroying jobs didn’t give her a second glance as they walked either over or around her. She was just a nobody in the middle of a million nobodies... and nobody cared. Even the vendor seemed to be totally oblivious to what had happened. He just gave her a puzzled look before offering her his hand to help her up, which she refused, pointedly pulling her hands away from him with a look of distaste spread across her face.

  “Suit yourself love, just trying to help”

  She didn’t remember dragging herself home after what had happened but she obviously did, as she woke up in her room looking at the windows, but it was still dark. Why had she woken up? And what was it about the window that seemed to intrigue her? And then she saw it... it was something that she only saw from the corner of her peripheral vision to begin with, but then it started to stamp its authority on her own version of reality and it said “I’m here, you cant ignore me” She didn’t know why but she recognised the outline that the water was making on her window, it was in the form of some sort of three pronged fork. Much like a trident, there was a reason that she knew she should understand the significance of this but she had been sleeping and was never at her best in the mornings, never mind the middle of the night or early morning, whatever it was, all she knew was that it was dark and the rain was playing charades on her window. Then she noticed the shapes forming around the outside of the trident shape, they were undoubtedly two water dragons on either side of the trident shape that had formed from the rain drops and they then both dashed into the middle of the trident, into a hole which had been specially formed in the middle prong just for them.. When both the water dragons had entered the circle of the middle prong, they swam around inside , around and around and Clara, although scared, couldn’t seem to take her eyes away from the window with the strange water dragons, but it wasn’t just because she was scared to her very living core... which she was, but because she knew this was building up to something and didn’t know whether to run or scream or what. So her mind made the decision for her, it’s just a shame that it forgot to let
her body know as she tried to run for the door, only to find that her legs somehow had gotten tangled up in her nightie and then the bedcovers as she tried to race for the door she found herself on the floor still trying to understand what was happening. As she attempted to lift herself from the floor, the window appeared to illuminate with a strange green glow but it was just the water. It was illuminating the dark room only it was no longer forming the shape of a trident, it looked like the water had formed into the shape of two old oak trees, either side of a fence with words now beginning to appear in the water underneath...

  CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

  Liu was exhausted, it had taken all his strength to send the message to the Guardian, whoever that may be. He wasn’t doubtful that the message had been delivered as the words only disappeared from his window once the guardian had read them. He leant over to the bedside table and pulled out an old box which his Father had given to him before he died. It was a black box, no bigger than a large matchbox, the long type that would be used for lighting gas stoves. But it was made of the finest dark mahogany and decorated with lacquer from the urushi tree.

  In each corner on the lid of the box was a simple representation of one of the four elements. Earth, Air, Water and Fire.. He traced his finger over the symbol in the middle of these four elements which was the symbol of the dragons as he remembered the day his father passed it over to him.

  They were sat in the little garden with their feet just dipping into the little stream while the lanterns glowed. His father had told him many times of this box but had never shown it to him. Liu was a man now though and must learn the responsibility of his heritage and the importance of the path that had been set for him. It was long after Mei had gone and Liu was content that her spirit was now watching over him.