Water drips from the ceiling of this room with monotonous consistency. It splatters on the wooden floor boards, not far from an old armchair. I can see him sitting in that armchair, even through the increasing fog of darkness. His spirit lingers there, despite his decaying body having been wrenched out of that seat years ago. Even after death, the expression on his face hasn’t changed. Still it wears the heartbreaking look of unparalleled disappointment. It is a look that makes me want to appease him and, even though he is no longer here, I am still trying. But no matter, the darkness will thicken soon, blotting out even the spirits from the world beyond. It occurs to me then that this form of darkness is a manifestation in itself, ever more potent in its growing despair. I can understand why people fear the emptiness, even though their fear is, of course, utterly groundless.
People are frightened of pioneers, too. I’m not talking about the fools who come up with the next great thing in engineering, or even the dullard who breaks new ground in space travel. I’m talking about real pioneering work; work set to turn everything on its head; work not limited to this world of restrictions. I’m talking about work beyond imagining; sacred work. This is what forms the definition of a true pioneer.
People are frightened of such people.
And so they should be.
Rain pelts against the windowpane, creating miniature gushing brooks that twist and turn to distort the world outside, making it look flimsy and tormented. If the concrete slabs of buildings outside my window had voices, they’d be screaming their rage at the dregs of humanity festering inside them. Ignore what your education tells you and you will hear them; I promise.
Despite the din of the deluge outside, I pick up the constant ticking of an old antique clock on the wall. It seems that at this time, just before the last of the day’s light slinks away like a fearful coward, my senses become heightened. Even the thoughts I have seem to manifest into tangible images, projected onto the thickening blanket of darkness around me. Voices long passed speak up in my head. Smells long since forgotten cajole my mind.
Sometimes I feel as though I can reach out and tear the blackness in front of me like a rotted and moth-eaten curtain, revealing a timeless world of emptiness beyond. Yet despite this world’s emptiness, I feel things there, and I can always sense when the boundaries of this world are close. One of these days I’ll gain access to this world. One of these days I’ll pull something back from it.
Now the room feels more insubstantial than ever, as if I might fall through the floor should I get up from my chair, or disappear through the wall should I lean my weary body against it. Outside, the sound of a car horn startles me. I hear a brief exchange of uncharitable words followed by a screech of tyres. The interruption fades into the distance, and there is just me again, left to suffer this fading room alone. And now the painful memories come.
I remember the day of her leaving, wheeling a suitcase behind her...
#
“You’re not coming back, are you?” I asked.
She stopped dead in her tracks and turned to face me, the early morning light making her eyes look tired and worn. “Jesus Edd, how many times do we have to do this?”
She didn’t wait for a reply. I could see exasperation bringing out the wrinkles on her forehead.
“I told you last night, and every night for the past two weeks: I have to go away for a few days to close a business deal in Boston.”
“Is that why you’re taking half your belongings with you?”
She went quiet. She sighed. “Look, Edd, I’ll be honest. I don’t know how long I’ll be over there. It won’t be any longer than a week though, I promise. And if it does take longer, I’ll come back for a couple of days, okay?”
I was so tense my head made a small jerk which she interpreted as a form of assent.
“You have to stop this, Edd,” she continued. “This clinginess is really starting to damage our relationship. Did you sleep at all last night?”
“Yes.”
“Liar! You were up half the night! Don’t tell me otherwise because I heard you. I even crept downstairs to see what you were up to.”
“And?”
More silence; this time, beautifully awkward.
“I told you weeks ago to see the doctor. It’s okay to break down every now and then, you know?” She looked down at her shoes, aware that she’d taken this train of conversation far further than she’d intended, or wanted. She glanced back up at me and I could tell from the way her jaw was set that this was the end of our discussion. The only response I’d get from her now would be a series of one word answers and grunts. So I’d let it drop, thinking that seeing her off in an amicable manner may have prevented any further rot in our relationship. She gave me a routine peck on the cheek and left, wheeling her oversized suitcase behind her.
#
Four weeks after she’d left, my one remaining friend came to see me for the very last time...
#
“She’s gone, Edd,” he said over coffee.
“She’ll be back,” I replied.
“Edd!”
“She’s cheated before, remember?” I turned my head away and whispered: “Cheated and come back with her tail between her legs, the bitch!” The bitterness I felt was palpable, and, in a peculiar way, almost endearing, as if these were the real feelings behind true love.
My friend shook his head.
I dug deep into my trouser pocket and pulled out an old Nokia phone. It was battered beyond belief, yet it still worked, and that was good enough for me. I used the phone’s pitiful interface to navigate to the stored messages, found what I was after, and thrust the display in my friend’s face.
“What does that tell you, then?” I asked, brimming with satisfaction. “If this doesn’t scream out to you that she’s already regretting leaving, I don’t know what will.”
My friend studied the message. I watched as his face screwed up to betray a complex set of emotions under his otherwise calm and measured exterior. He’d never liked losing an argument and would never back down or apologise, even when his hand had been utterly obliterated. I nodded, more than satisfied that the debate was over. Silence filled the space between us, and for the first time in my life I realised just how beautiful that silence was. Conversation is a symptom of the almost insufferable weakness of being bound in flesh.
I saw him to the door. Before he left he shook his head at me once more. But he couldn’t know for sure that she wouldn’t come back, could he? No, not unless he was in cahoots with her. Not unless he was seeing her. Was she calling him, too?
I shut the door on a bright spring day full of birdsong and scent from newly blossomed flowers.
#
The real beauty of life lies within its contrasts: if everything were beautiful, there wouldn’t be any beauty to admire; if everything spoiled, there’d be no horror to appreciate. My surroundings contrast beautifully with the day I shut out this morning: the bright spring enhanced to an autumn’s storm, building in sublime fury as the evening sets in; the sweet birdsong transformed into a wonderful cacophony of pelting rain and distant rumbles; the sickly smell of nectar purified into a rancid scent of rot and decay.
The edges of the table in front of me begin to blur into the surrounding haze of darkness. Well defined beginnings and endings merge into one constant: the constant of nothingness. In the end everything gets swallowed up.
A bright light on the table top suddenly flares, slicing through the darkness like a powerful spotlight. It shatters the growing illusion of nothingness, and I feel a savage uprising of rage towards its unwelcome interruption. But this torrent of rage is quickly quenched: it is my wife calling. For the past two weeks she’s called at the same time every day. That has to be a good sign. A sure sign she’s coming back.
I grab the phone from off the table, hit the answer button, and put it to my ear.
“Caroline?”
Thunder unravels through the air from a distant source like a wa
ve advancing over the landscape. Foreboding forks of lightning slice cleanly through the air, cracking the dilapidating skies with the most intense light. The ever-deepening shadows in my room remain constant, but soon they will twist and writhe, taking on a depraved semblance of life.
There is static on the line, but I persevere with the connection. Eventually I am rewarded with a distant voice. I just listen. Not being much of a talker myself, I am happy to listen. I always enjoy listening to her voice: smooth and soft and commanding. Her words fester at what little remains of my conscious self. I feel them sink into the deepest depths of my being, latching on wherever they find purchase, maiming as effortlessly as razor blades on skin. Yet despite their scarring, they leave behind a feeling of deranged elation and urgency. It is a feeling I am fast growing addicted to.
Thunder rolls once more. Lightning flashes, depicting demon faces against the dark skies. The tower blocks seem to twist in the rivulets of rain streaming down my window. The outside world calls to me; the static over the phone implores me.
The lightning, closer now, illuminates the room. Glass jars on a shelf above my bookcase reflect the light, denying a visual hint to what putrefied remains lay inside. Yet there are things in this room which don’t reflect the all-too-harsh light. Things which haunt me, flickering in and out of view in time with the lightning. One moment they are there, the next gone. One moment they are smiling, the next they wear demonic grins. Some harvest a rage so unprecedented that their faces screw up on themselves, the flesh folding in ways unnatural to the human form.
I shut the flickering images out and listen to the static on the phone, to the white noise. The sound infects my soul and controls my insanity. Another flash from outside lights up a corner of my room. Here, just over three weeks ago, is where I’d piled what they’d found of my wife’s belongings. On a small round table, just to the left of that discarded pile, her mobile phone sits silent and unused. Yet from somewhere across that Great Divide, she uses it to call me.
Somehow...
A man in the advanced stages of rigor mortis – sporting lines of slimy flesh which dangle from eyeless sockets – jumps out at me, the trick very nearly making me flinch until I realise that that is all it is: just a trick. And as if to confirm that, the next prolonged flash shows him slumped back in the chair where I’d dumped him. He looks totally at peace now; or at least in as much peace as a man missing his eyes can look. His face is calm, not a mark of stress on it. Remarkable really considering all the fuss he’d made.
This is the pioneering work I was telling you about; the work that will allow me to cross the boundary into the world of the dead. It’s obvious if you stop to think about it: how else can you see into the world of the dead, if not through a dead man’s eyes?
Thunder roars and lightning flickers; the storm is getting close. The tower blocks outside my window continue to twist in the rivulets of water streaming down it. Even through the noise of the rain, the thunder, and the static on the phone, I can hear their torment: concrete grinding against concrete. The room in which I sit isn’t going to get any darker; this is it: this is as close to the void as I can get...for now.
I keep the phone held to my ear. I strain to hear the sound of her voice through the static. She will come through soon. No longer is the static merely a monotone buzz: it is a chaotic collection of many voices, each fighting to obtain clarity. Yet despite all these others, Caroline’s voice will come through clearest, shunning the others out almost completely.
“Tell me! Tell me what to do next!” I shout into the phone.
A voice – her voice – drifts out of the static: an amalgamation of sweet tenderness and infinite malevolence. And what she says! Oh, to hear each sickening syllable uttered is like having nails hammered into the base of my spine. But I have to listen. I have to obey.
Finally she is gone, the phone in my hand sounding the lifeless tone of disconnection. More thunder roars overhead. More lightning. The clock on the wall ticks away, while the drip, drip, dripping of water (or is it blood?) onto the oak wooden floor steps up into a double-time rhythm. The putrid smells of the rotting corpses make me grimace.
I have more work to do – as you (and you must be pioneers yourselves: everyone else would have scurried for the hills by now) must surely know. So now I stand. It is time to leave this room. I casually slip on my jacket and venture out into the night to do my sacred bidding.
Clayton Stealback lives in a small Devon village by the river with his girlfriend. He has been writing for over ten years and had his first novel, The Source, published in April 2008. Since then he has published a number of short stories on is website (www.claytonstealback.co.uk), one of which, Belong (gone), appeared in issue 46 of Dark Fire Fiction in July 2010. He is currently working on his second novel, The Loft.
The 18
Ralph Robert Moore
When they were young, he would pull into the parking lot of her apartment building in his red Corvette. Walk across the green grass to below her second floor balcony.
She’d be leaning over the rail of the balcony, waiting for him. Bare arms, bare legs, long hair.
Her on the balcony, grinning down; him on the grass, grinning up.
He could go around to her front door, but he wanted to show her how athletic he was.
He’d jump off the grass, big hands grasping onto the bottom of her balcony, tanned biceps flexing, pulling himself over the rail, into her waiting arms.
Hours afterwards, she’d come back out onto the balcony with him, sad to see him go, him swinging his hips over onto the outside of the balcony’s rail. Another passionate kiss on her warm lips, rail between them, then, as always, a kiss planted on her forehead, to protect her. Hands still grasping the rail, he’d let his body slant backwards, over nothing, let go. His wild blue eyes staring into hers, then dropping. She’d raise her bare left foot as she watched him walk back across the darkening grass to his Corvette, get in, start up the chugging engine, back out of the space, drive off.
Forty years later, he walked through their kitchen, dressed in his gardening clothes. Gave her a kiss on her forehead while she scrambled their eggs. Went out the front door, down the steps, along the sidewalk, to get their mail.
A couple of bills, a couple of DVDs.
He tripped on his way back, falling forward, mail he had been flipping through flying out of his hands.
She went over to the front window as she always did, to make sure he was okay on his walk back from the mailbox.
Saw his body out there, one story below, lying face down, mail lifting on their lawn.
She let out a sob, fingers to her lips. Hurried to the front door, crushing pain in her chest. Staggered sideways, stumbling back into the kitchen, to the phone, clutching her chest.
He got up off the lawn, bent over, chasing their mail. Let himself back in, locked the front door.
She was sprawled across the white linoleum floor. Smoke rising from the skillet.
Kneeling paramedics filled their kitchen, broad shoulders, mustaches, two-way radios strapped to their big hips. All these men leaning over her small body, trying this, trying that, in an effort that was ordinary to them, but not to him. In the end, her mouth stayed slack. Her eyes continued to stare straight up, looking at something he and no one else in the kitchen had ever seen. One of the men, rising, standing by him, averting his eyes, told him his wife was dead.
After they took her away in their ambulance, turning off the siren, because it was no longer needed, he closed and locked the front door as he had a few hours before in a much happier mood. Turned around from the door, looked at the cavernous spaces of their rooms, quiet now. Doorways she’d never again pass through, walls and ceilings that would never again echo her voice. For the first time in decades, they slept apart. Him in their empty white bed, she in a high-ceilinged room, in another part of the city, on a metal gurney, sheet over her face.
He woke up the next morning later than usual, bird song out
side the windows. Reached his hand behind him, across the white sheets, to her side, fingers feeling nothing but flatness. Wrenched his head around, saw the emptiness, wondered where she was. Remembered.
He didn’t tell anyone she had died.
They were both self-employed, allowing them to spend each day together, one room away, so it wasn’t as if any of her friends would immediately know she was gone.
He went to the funeral parlor by himself, picked from the yellow pages based on the largest ad ("Established 1923"). Sitting on a sofa with the funeral director, a thirtyish man in a well-tailored suit, he explained he didn’t want an announcement placed in the newspaper, and there wouldn’t be any guests. Just him. The director closed his eyes in sympathy. "Of course."
He rode with his wife’s corpse to the cemetery, in the front seat of the hearse. The funeral director, at the wheel, spoke about God, the weather, the benefits of living in Texas. Mitch nodded in the rider’s seat, but didn’t remember a word that was said. All he could think of was his wife in the long box behind them, not able to join in the conversation.
He stood on the bright green grass as his wife, inside the coffin, was lowered into the rectangular, chocolate depth of her grave. A breeze picked up. Sheet of white paper vibrating between the grasp of his two hands, as if he were holding wings, he read out loud a poem that had moved them to tears, decades ago. "Remember", by Christina Georgina Rossetti.
Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
Darkest Minds Page 4