by Andy Cox
She wanted to open her arms to it, whatever lurked beyond the world, wanted to breathe it in, hold it there in the cold places that filled her. Because she knew about them now, the things that lived on the periphery, in the spaces between. She would give herself to them, these eaters of skin, of innocence, and they would make of her something vast.
“Come on, come on!” Aaron said, and his fingers closed around the keys, fumbled once, twice, before slipping into the lock, and then they were tumbling into the room, Aaron slamming the door behind them before frantically throwing light switches.
A dull glow filled the small space. A single bed sat in the center, a yellowing quilt tucked military tight over the lumpish mattress. On the wall, a faded watercolor of cows grazing. Someone’s idea of quaint, homey touches of Americana. A window opened to the exterior, spilled shadow into the room, and Aaron pulled the curtains closed. There was the deep, earthen smell of mold, and Rory breathed it in, letting the scent of decay spread through her lungs.
Aaron watched her now, the dark shadows under his eyes like bruises. He clenched his hands, both sets of keys bound tightly in his fists. If she looked at the light, tried not to think about what lurked outside the door, she could almost ignore the cold, could almost imagine that the thing that had crept inside of her was quiet. Something sleeping, but not dead.
He jerked his chin toward the bed. “You should get some sleep.”
“Not tired. You’re the one who should sleep. Driving like you have been.”
He shook his head. He doesn’t trust you, she thought. It made her smile to know this. He had more sense than she’d ever given him credit for. Where she was the intellectual, the literary-minded obsessive who quoted Joyce and Rand, Aaron was a video game addict whose Neolithic grunting only stumbled into actual speech when ordering at Taco Bell.
“Is it better,” he said. A statement rather than a question.
“In the light? You know it is.”
“But it isn’t gone. It’s still in there. Waiting for it to get dark.”
She had no response for him, and he turned his head away, stared at the window. It had been Aaron who found her with the cat, huddled in the shadows of the porch as she ate sloppily, slimy strings of meat stuck in her teeth.
“The fuck,” he’d said, and she’d grinned at him, her eyes yellow bright in the darkness.
He’d taken her inside, wiped the blood from her face, her arms and fingers before putting her to bed, but she hadn’t slept. Instead, she’d whispered to him, told him about the deep emptiness between the beats of a heart, told him that they had found her there at the bottom of that hole and filled her up with cold and night. He’d stayed with her, listened quietly as she told him of darkness.
Two weeks later, she woke under the porch, her skin sticky and streaked with mud and crimson. Before her lay a tiny frilled dress, the light pink mottled with darker stains. She’d asked him to take her away then, asked if he could keep her from the dark. If he would run with her, keep her from doing this thing to the people they loved. And he had.
Outside of the window, something scratched, the high-pitched hum of claws against glass. When Aaron turned two middle fingers in the direction of the sound, Rory laughed. It felt good to laugh, to push all of the cold somewhere else for the briefest of moments.
“Fuck you, motherfuckers!” she screamed, and Aaron pumped his fingers toward the window before leaping on the bed, jumping up and down.
“Fuck you!” Aaron threw back his head and screamed, a raw, bloodied howl that sounded more animal than human. The exhaustion, the anger, the fear all poured into this single sound. Once, it would have set her nerves on edge. Now, the cold that lived inside of her stirred – a sleek, velvet movement – and she licked her lips.
Night had completely fallen. She could feel it moving inside of her, the cold barely contained by the scant light of the room. Hungry. Searching. Daylight was better. It moved easily in the dark, slipping among the shadowed places where people either didn’t or were too afraid to look. Rory had looked too long. She always had. There was too much space in her head, too much silence and stillness to lose herself in. Maybe that was why she had filled it with books, complex ideas that filled the emptiness. It was always in the night, in the quiet that she lost the thread that tethered her to this world. Whatever it was, it had seen her, felt her. All that void asking to be filled.
Aaron sat down on the edge of the bed, his fingers clenched around the quilt. Dirty fingernails digging against the thin material.
“You can feel it now. Inside,” he said, and she nodded.
She moved across the room, sat beside him, and he flinched at the closeness. The desire to scramble away from her, to hurl himself across the room was tangible, a raw, bleeding thing suspended between the two of them. She could feel it. But he stayed, reached a hand across the quilt to grasp hers, and she squeezed his fingers. He was real, the living, breathing thing that connected her to this world, and he would help her fight.
“I miss Mom,” he said.
“Me too,” she said. He dropped her hand then, the warmth of his fingers suddenly absent, and she hated the cold that flooded through her, always probing, always searching.
“If we hadn’t left, do you think you would have…”
“No,” she said, but he glanced up at her, his eyes unblinking, and they both knew that what she had spoken was a lie. She hated herself a little bit more.
“I don’t know, Aaron,” she whispered, and he nodded.
“I’m fighting. So hard. But I lose myself. It’s like falling into a hole, only you can’t see the bottom. There’s just cold and dark, and the edges of the world bleed away, and all that’s left is that thing peeling you open, eating its way into you,” she said.
“You read too many books, nerd,” he said and smiled. It was a small, broken thing, but she loved him for it.
A cold wind howled, and the lamps flickered, blinked out once, twice.
In the quick flashes of dark, Rory saw Aaron sprawled before her, his skin peeled open, a wide, grinning mouth carved against his stomach. Once more, her tongue darted across her lips, and the cold gathered just beneath her skin. Sleeping, but not dead.
“No,” she said through clenched teeth. Not here. Not now. Under flesh and bone, the thing stirred, but she pushed it away, willed it to sleep, to be silent.
“What?” Aaron said, but she shook her head.
“Nothing. It’s nothing,” she said. He stood then, walked to the door, placed his palm flat against it.
“Do you remember when we were kids, and you used to get so mad because I’d sneak in your room at night if I got scared?” he said.
“You wet the bed a couple of times. I’d have a dream that I was swimming and wake up with piss up to my neck.”
“But you never kicked me out,” he said and turned to her. Again she saw him as a child, like the boy he had been. Once, she had protected him from the things hiding in the dark. She wished she still could.
“We should sleep,” he said.
“Yeah. I’ll take the floor,” she said and grabbed a pillow.
“It’s okay,” he said.
“No, Aaron,” she said, but he came back to her, placed a firm hand on her shoulder.
“It’s okay, Rory.”
He waited as she curled her body against his as she had when they were nightmare-plagued children. She watched the light as his breath grew longer, heavier. It did not flicker but blazed out strong and resolute. She smiled into her brother’s shoulder. And she slept.
There was no light when she woke. Only the cold creeping throughout the room and all of those hidden spaces opening like little mouths stretched wide. She stood, opened the door, the window. Behind her, Aaron did not move.
***
Kristi DeMeester lives, loves and writes dark fiction in Atlanta, Georgia. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Jamais Vu, Shock Totem, Shimmer and others. Growing up bot
h Southern and Pentecostal, she witnessed travelling preachers cast out demons. These demons still haunt her writing.
THE BURY LINE
STEPHEN HARGADON
Remember George? No? It was George who got me into this, showed me the way. Tall bloke – I mean really tall, six five, something like that. A real character. Everyone liked George. George Crease. Started in Quality Assurance, when Sheila Fisher was the boss. You couldn’t miss George, not at six five or whatever it was. Always wore a waistcoat, never a tie. Short hair, cropped not shaven, feet as big as skateboards, brown suede shoes shaped like Cornish pasties. Doesn’t ring a bell? That’s a shame: you would’ve liked him. Almost everyone did.
He had this thing where he’d say “I’ve got a meeting” and off he’d stroll with his A4 pad and pen, a sheaf of photocopied docs, looking important and industrious. But he wasn’t going to a meeting at all. He just met up with his mate Doug from Policy: Doug with the lazy eye. They used to go to Alberto’s for a bacon butty. On Fridays it was McDonald’s. We only found out afterwards, of course. No one but George could’ve got away with a stunt like that. Shows you the sort of man he was. Canny. Popular. He played the game, but was never nasty. We trusted him. It came easy to him, the smalltalk and shoptalk: he knew the lingo. Promotions soon followed. We used to joke: our George, he’s going all the way, right to the top. Regional director at forty, CEO five years later. By the time he’s fifty, he’ll be retired and living the dream: a villa down in Monaco, no rain, no tax, a white yacht on the glittering Med. Every year he smoked a cigar at the Christmas do. Not one of those cheap things from a tin behind the bar, but a proper big fat one, probably Cuban, knowing George, he had class. George Crease: he’s going places. That’s what we used to say.
He was actually my manager for a while. He did a good job, always fair. I had no complaints. Then again, I’m not the complaining type.
Some of them – I’m talking about managers now – you know what they’re like. Demented fusspots, salaried naggers. The Sheila Fishers of this world. Small mind, big ideas. Do this, do that, where’s your timesheet, have you sent that letter yet? George wasn’t like that. He was mellow. I respected him. He drew a line and I kept to my side of it. All the same, there was something unnerving about him. The way he talked to his wife on the phone, for instance, calling her Princess. He didn’t bat an eyelid – no whispering, no blushing – just reeled it off like it was an item on a shopping list. I admired him for that. I was impressed. “This,” I thought, “is a man in control of his emotions. An organised man. I can learn from him.” Then I thought: maybe he’s a man who doesn’t have any emotions, that’s why he’s so smooth, so unselfconscious. What sort of man calls his wife Princess? I imagined her sat at home, darning his huge socks – socks as big as sleeping bags – a tiara on her head. Not that he’d care what I (or anyone else) thought. That was another thing he had: confidence. A few years later there was that business at Besses. Smashed and mangled. Bones sticking out like cricket stumps. Took three hours to find his head, what was left of it.
I know what it’s like. I worked in the same organisation for the best, or should I say worst, part of ten years. Get out while you can. George had the right idea. It was different back then, of course, more easygoing: you could have a few drinks at lunch and wear casual clothes. I was known for my bold shirts – paisley and floral, that type of thing. It was my trademark. I always dressed as if going down the pub, and more often than not, I was going down the pub. (Fascist Pyke from HR used to say: “Off to Glastonbury, Martin?” We called him fascist Pyke because he used to be a copper. He was perfect for HR.)
Neil Timpson was my manager in those days. Neil was a lovely chap – gentle, scatty, prone to complication and indecision. He always looked to be in a terrible rush, even when sat at his desk. I remember the flurry of his fingers as he searched for another missing form; the thin rusty hair scratched into a mess; the muttering and pen-chewing. Yet there was something tender, even tranquil, in his eyes. He loved his work, anyone could see that.
He used to make these papier mâché chessmen, bought them into work, showed them off. He made me a knight once. I don’t even play. I didn’t know what to do with it. I was embarrassed to have the thing in my pocket, all that time and effort; so after a few whiskies I flushed it down the bog at the Crown and Anchor. I wish I hadn’t. I was a sod back then. When he sneezed – which was often – he said Gesundheit after. (It sounded like gez-aunty or guz-nightie.) He was full of facts and stories and soft meandering anecdotes about his children (he had three) and the funny things they said. Now that I think about it, his face never seemed very far from a sneeze; he was either preparing for a sneeze or recovering from a sneeze. He had a disordered, ill-prepared face, a face that went best with pyjamas. It was rare to see him without a hanky over his nose.
Neil knew his stuff, knew it inside out. He could quote huge chunks of policy and procedure at you. But when it came to getting stuff done, he was hopeless. Too slow, too picky. Everything that arrived in the post had to be acknowledged with a formal letter. That wasn’t company policy, that was just his way. He used a simple template but always slipped in a bespoke paragraph or three. I refer you to Section A of our Future Operating Framework, where you will find details of the Advanced Services Matrix (North West region)… It could take him a morning or longer to craft one of these replies. They were works of art, masterpieces of tedium. He did the same with phone calls. Dear Mrs Bone, Following our conversation this morning… Madness, I know. He wanted a clear audit trail (he told us) but his trails led nowhere. The multiplying acknowledgements had to be logged on ever more detailed spreadsheets. No one was going to catch him out. Every letter or memo would be accounted for. He spent more time logging work than doing it. He created a most extraordinary backlog. The hearts of the company’s young thrusters hardened against him. They wanted him gone.
He was easily distracted, too. Yes, he was fanatically rigorous about his letters and spreadsheets, an implacable craftsman when it came to carving miniscule facts from a bland slab of data, but if you got him on to one of his pet subjects – trees, trains, the perfect recipe for banoffee pie – he’d chat away like he was at a picnic and everything came to a standstill. At those moments we loved him. His boss, Leia Sutton, hated him.
***
We used a lot of paper in those days. Hard copy – that’s how we worked. We had the internet, obviously, but not all the portals and online stuff for the public we have now. Email was used for spreading dirty jokes mostly. The work piled up. You could barely see Neil behind a thickening, rising wall of paper. He arrived at seven, never left before five-thirty. Once he was in, he was in. He ate his sandwiches at his desk, a smell of egg and cress wafting over the paper hedge as he hummed and chirruped to himself. We all suffered. There were four of us in his team: me, Sally Burgess, Caroline Drew, and John Wagstaff. We grew slapdash. Neil gave us no guidance: or rather, he gave us too much guidance. I soon learned not to ask him for advice. Not because he’d ignore you or bark at you, that wasn’t his style at all, he’d simply give you too many options. It was like watching him peel an onion. He’d make a suggestion, pause, question his suggestion, then peel off another possibility. He was alert to every nuance and variation. It made you want to cry. Or hit him. He looked like a mystic, with eyes of gentle ecstasy, as he tried to find the answer. All I wanted was a straight Yes or No. I didn’t want to think about my work.
Customers started phoning us, angry, frustrated. Where’s my modification certificate, it was due three weeks ago? Have you received my Annex 4 documentation and supplementary analysis? What’s the state of play with the Wilson & Watkins appendix? There were ugly team meetings. Leia Sutton pummelled him with questions. She was a cold, sour beauty. I tried not to fancy her, out of loyalty to Neil.
We need more staff, he said.
That’s not an option, she said. Be creative. Streamline. Do things differently.
It’s not physically po
ssible, he said, if we’re going to do it right.
She pointed at him: Time’s running out for you, Neil. You need to get on top of the situation, and quick. This is the real world. You’re not paid to spend all day writing to your penpals.
This world of work: it was vicious. I thought the topers down the Squirrel were a nasty bunch, but this lot, with their clean teeth and shampooed hair, didn’t need booze to bitch, threaten or disappoint: it came naturally to them. Honesty, I soon learned, was a weakness. To survive, you had to pretend to be someone else. Neil had no guile. He just wanted to do the best he could and that meant writing his acknowledgement letters. You really couldn’t fault them, aside from being unnecessary.
Under the cosh, Neil took to eating doughnuts. Ring, iced, jam, custard: he loved them all. You could tell he had used the photocopier by the sprinkle of sugar on the glass. Not only was the correspondence piling up, it was now becoming dirty with jam and grease. None of us knew what to do. The paper wall grew higher. Morale dropped. Neil scratched his head, ate his doughnuts, and sneezed. He scrutinised handbooks and policy documents, searching for answers. We started to give up. The few bits of work that came my way – having survived Neil’s increasingly arcane acknowledgement process – left me baffled. I felt tense and ill. Nothing was straightforward, everything was an unusual case. I grew lethargic and indecisive. The most difficult items I slyly pushed back into the wall, as low as possible, so that they had little or no chance of ever reaching the top.
Then the purge started. Leia Sutton recruited a couple of goons from the Compliance and Resolution team to help Neil with the backlog. They had just done a course on Managing Your Workflow. There wasn’t a clear desk policy in those days – the letters had never left Neil’s desk before. No one bothered about data protection. Leia’s recruits carried off chunks of the wall for sorting and sifting. That’s what they thought they were doing; really, they were finding evidence for Leia and her superiors, logging the unactioned and unresolved.