The knowledge of darkness consume me…
I hate it. It’s just so ominous, so inherently evil. All that talk of casting out souls to fiery pits. The mutilation and the consumption…
I shudder afresh.
I have thought about sending him the translation, but I don’t want Holly to read it over his shoulder. We have our contingency plan in place, there’s nothing to be gained by admitting that I let myself into his house behind Holly’s back.
Not over a message, anyway.
Mark’s got this. Everything’s going to be okay. Or that’s what I tell myself as my eyes grow heavy with sleep.
And I never got to tell him about my nightmares either, I think as I scoot down the bed and reach out to turn off the lamp. It’s just too freaky that our dreams have matching backdrops of full moons…
I wish I’d got to talk to him more. I’ll show him the translated rite tomorrow.
There is always tomorrow.
FORTY-THREE
MOON PHASE: FULL MOON
On this day, the Moon will be in a Full Moon phase. During a Full Moon, the Moon is 100% illuminated as seen from Earth, and it is on the opposite side of the Earth from the Sun. The Moon will be visible throughout the night sky, rising at sunset in the east and setting with the sunrise the following morning. The point at which a Full Moon occurs can be measured down to a fraction of a second. The time it takes between Full Moons is known as a Synodic month, and is 29.530586981 days long.
31st October
Mark calls my mobile at just gone midday. I am in the kitchen, boiling the kettle, and I rush over to where I left it on the kitchen table, snatching it up, heart pounding.
“Hello?” I gasp breathlessly into the mouthpiece.
“Hey, Claire. So me and Holly were wondering if you fancied popping round for a drink before the party starts. Say, around five?” He sounds chirpy. Overly bright. I can hear Holly saying something in the background, but I don’t catch the words. “No, no, scrap that,” he reiterates, clearly on receiving a different set of instructions. “Can we make that half five?”
“Sure. Is everything okay? Is it raining again?” I ask pointedly.
“No. I don’t think that it will.”
“Well, that’s good to hear. Just text me if I can help with anything,” I say. “You know what I mean. Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Yes, everything’s going fine. Holly’s got everything under control; she doesn’t need any help.”
It’s obvious to me that she’s paying close attention to Mark’s end of the conversation – I’m just going to make him uncomfortable if I carry on asking awkward questions.
“Okay, I’ll see you at half five, then. You know where I am if you need me.”
“Sure. I’ll pass it on. See you later.”
“Bye,” I say, but I’m already talking to a deadline.
*
I have never seen Holly looking so beautiful. She looks positively resplendent in a capped-sleeved, knee-skimming white dress that hugs her tight curves. Her stylish, ombre blonde hair gleams, piled on top of her head in a haphazard updo, a few curly tendrils framing her face. She positively glows with an otherworldly beauty.
“Are you sure I can’t do anything to help?” I ask, feeling quite shabby next to my foe.
I am wearing a black cocktail dress in a style not dissimilar to Holly’s, which only knocks my confidence further. I feel like a fat frump next to her elegant, leggy brand of beauty. She is glowing and dressed in white like an angel, and I am the opposite. My dress now feels too dark and too dowdy, like I am her fat, distorted, misshapen shadow.
“Yes, quite sure, but thanks so much for asking. I’ve been prepping the party snacks for days and there’s enough booze in the kitchen to sink a battleship. Please, won’t you have some more wine?”
“Holly’s right, you know,” Mark says jovially. “She’s got everything under control. We are surplus to requirements; therefore we should just relax.”
He jumps to his feet from his seat on the long, leather sofa that has been pushed against a wall of the living-room, plucks the already-empty wineglass out of my hand and goes over to the fold-down table with the ornately carved legs that Holly brought with her from London. There are trays of drinks laid out on the tabletop – mostly spirits – and he grabs the lone bottle of red, topping up both our glasses.
He turns around, a glass of wine in each hand, grinning.
“So there is nothing left for us to do but get drunk,” he laughs.
He definitely looks more like his old self tonight, I decide. Gone is the tired, stressed, and, dare I say it, crazed Mark of yesterday. In his place is the cheeky, upbeat Mark that I have loved all these years. His dark hair, flecked with those few strands of grey is shining from a recent wash. He is dressed smartly in a pair of new-looking, dark-blue jeans and a light grey shirt that perfectly compliments his eyes, which he wears untucked over his jeans, the sleeves rolled up.
I glance at Holly, noticing that she hasn’t even touched the wine that Mark has poured for her. She is sitting perfectly still on her spot on the sofa, ever watchful, her expression unreadable. I sit opposite them on Mark’s old leather, Chesterfield armchair, which has been pushed against a wall. Everything has been pushed against the wall in fact, and the glass-topped coffee-table has been evicted from the premises, probably out of fear that some drunken fool will trip on it and land in a puddle of broken glass and blood.
A drunken fool, like me, most likely.
“Thanks,” I say, when Mark passes me my refilled glass.
He sits down again, but I notice how he doesn’t fling his arm casually over her shoulder like he might normally do.
I take a large slug of wine before speaking. “So, how many people are coming tonight?”
Holly smiles. I’m really nervous, I realise. I can’t seem to stop trembling.
“Not too many. This an intimate gathering.”
“It’s all top-secret stuff, she hasn’t even told me who’s coming,” Mark says. There is no fear or recrimination in his voice, and I marvel at how composed he is.
“Right,” I say, floundering around for something to say.
This all feels wrong. I simply can’t relax – I’m just waiting for Mark’s declaration on the weather, where I will then jump up and feign a headache.
Mark’s just being crazy paranoid, I tell myself. This is a party, not a Satanic ritual…
“What time are things kicking off, then?” I ask.
“Very soon,” she replies.
“Right,” I say again.
“Do you like the wine?” Holly asks. I can’t say that I care for her sly smile.
“It’s lovely.”
It’s not. It’s kind of bitter, but it’s red and it’s wet, and therefore it’s better than nothing.
“It’s a very special wine. Quite the vintage, one might say. We don’t have music.” She springs to her feet. “What is a party without music? Why, I don’t think it’s a party at all.”
I watch the way she sexily saunters over to the fireplace, where she proceeds to navigate Mark’s spare smartphone which is permanently on the mantlepiece.
The opening bars of Coldplay’s song, ‘Fix You’ fills the air, and Holly swivels on the spot, fixing her glittering, cat-like, emerald green eyes on me.
“What’s the matter, Claire? aren’t you a fan of Coldplay? I find them rather invigorating myself.”
My heart slams in my chest. She knows about Bill. She’s playing me…
“I like them just fine,” I say with as much indifference as I can muster.
“I don’t,” Mark pipes up. Or slurs, more like. “I used to like them when they first came out, but now I find them dreary, stale and pretentious. Dated, rather than classic.”
I notice how he is sprawled so ungainly on the sofa, his body slumped and his backside on the very edge of the cushion.
He seems off his head, I think in alarm. The extent of his slurring
is scaring me – I really need him to be with it tonight. He had been alright a few seconds ago.
“Do you like the wine, Mark?” she asks.
Mark holds up his near-empty glass, frowning at it in consternation, as if he has never seen a glass of wine before. I’ve barely touched my second glass, and he’s drunk all of his.
He turns to me, pinning me in place with his pale-blue eyes that appear unfocussed and glazed.
“Claire, dear Claire,” he slurs. “I think it’s raining again. It’s raining hard.”
I stagger to my feet, gasping in shock when it feels as if I’ve left my head behind on the back of the chair, such is the extent of my lurching vision.
I focus on Mark – I can see two of him, sprawled on the sofa. My head is swimming, my ears are ringing. My stomach clenches, the base of my tongue suddenly floating in a flood of mouth water.
“You look terrible, Claire,” comes Holly’s voice, floating towards me as if carried on a far-off breeze. “I really think you should sit down.”
I plop back down in the chair, not because I want to, but because my legs have collapsed beneath me.
Mark is groaning from over on the sofa, mumbling things I don’t understand. I want to go to him, but my jellified legs won’t obey the commands of my fogged brain.
Through the haze of fear-drenched numbness, I am dimly aware of a doorbell ringing, then Holly’s voice, as chirpy as a lark’s.
“Oh good, the guest of honour has arrived. Please excuse me a moment.”
I am aware of Holly leaving the room. Or lots of Hollys, leaving lots of swaying, blurry rooms.
“Mark,” I cry, although my lips feel fat, tight, yet numb, and I can feel how slack my face has grown, along with the rest of the muscles in my body.
I feel as if I’m sinking in quicksand when drunk out of my mind. But I’m not drunk, I know that – I’m not so far gone that I can’t recognise the fact I’ve been drugged.
“Mark,” I try again, slurring horribly.
But Mark has fallen quiet. It takes all my willpower to focus on him; I see that he is slouching dramatically, that his head is at a painful-looking angle on his neck and his eyes are shut.
Oh God, I don’t feel so good, I think, groaning loudly. And all the while, Chris Martin’s voice drifts around us, telling us that lights will guide us home, that he will fix us.
Beyond the music, I am also aware of distant voices, emanating from the hallway. I want to scream, to rage, to get to my feet and go to my beloved Mark, but nothing upon nothing works. My body and my mind are failing me.
The voices out in the hallway grow louder – masculine voices, accompanied by Holly’s girlish, giggling lilt. These voices are growing louder by the second, like bubbles rising upwards through water.
They are in the room now – I am aware of movement by the living-room door, strangely slowed-down and weirdly graceful, like the gentle undulation of ocean waves, lapping at the shore.
“No, fuck off,” I slur, my brain numb, yet full of obscenity and hate.
I close my eyes, quite sure then that I am in the throes of the most miserable nightmare yet.
When I open them again, Holly’s beautiful face fills my vision, doubling, then tripling, then widening and lengthening, like she is a reflection in a funhouse hall of mirrors.
“Are you still with us, Claire?”
It’s like she is talking to me through a body of water, as if she is on land, and I am lying at the bottom of a lake. Her voice is just growing so quiet now, so far away and small.
“It’s really quite astounding; Mark is so much bigger than you, but he was the first to fall. I know that he had more of the drug than you, but he is still a man. Still, I guess you have more padding on you than him.”
Her words wash over me, making little sense. She straightens up, her tiny waist all I can see before she steps to one side. I struggle to remain above the surface of consciousness, but it’s so hard. I am drowning and I don’t know how much longer I can fight it.
I concentrate hard, trying to focus on the other figures by the doorway. I moan in terror and scrunch my eyes tightly shut, sure that I must be hallucinating. Because I’m sure that I just saw Bill in here. Bill, with two other men, both a little older than him and whom I don’t recognise.
But the most disturbing thing, perhaps, is what the three men were carrying into the room. It was a long, thin, wooden box, shaped very much like the crudest, most basic coffin.
I open my eyes, praying that the terrifying vision will be no more. But, alas, I can still see them.
They place the wooden box by the door and go to Holly in the middle of the room, where she is rolling back the Persian rug. Bill and another of the two men help her roll it into a long sausage shape, where they then proceed to kick it to the other side of the room against the wall. I couldn’t say for sure, but it looks like there is something drawn on the dark floorboards in white paint, newly revealed in the absence of the rug. It is big, perhaps seven feet across by seven feet wide, and it is in the shape of a giant star in a circle.
No. Not a star. A pentagram.
The thought catches me off-guard, like it wasn’t me who thought it at all, but rather was planted in my brain by an outside source.
Hazily, I am aware of Bill turning around on the spot. He fixes me with his dark gaze, grinning broadly.
“Hey, babe. Long-time no see.”
He makes his way over to me, or rather, a whole bunch of Bills come over and crouch down before me. “You look like crap. I think you need a lie down on the sofa.” He twists his head -or heads – around to address the men behind him. “Best move lover-boy, then.”
Through my increasingly dimming vision, I watch the three men go over to Mark, lift his floppy body off the sofa and carry him between them to the newly-revealed space on the ground, where they lay him down in the middle of the pentagram.
Seconds later, the men swarm around me, and I am bodily lifted out of my chair and carried over to the sofa that Mark has just vacated. They lay me down, my head resting on a cushion against the armrest, me facing the room.
My eyelids flutter shut. My brain is closing over, shutting down, my limbs so heavy.
Dimly, I am aware of music floating around me, as if I am privy to a concert playing miles away, the sound carried to me on the wind. It is Coldplay again. Chris Martin is singing to me, telling me that I belong to him, that I shall be swallowed by the sea.
When my bleary eyes flutter open again, I watch in a state of disbelief when the three men reach into the coffin-shaped box and lift out the figure of a nude, unconscious woman. She is bone-thin, long-limbed, dark-haired…
I watch them carry the girl over to Mark, where they lay her down next to him, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip.
It’s Blythe, comes my last, coherent thought.
And then I see no more, because the blackness rushes up to finally swallow me whole.
FORTY-FOUR
It is the chanting that brings me round, or rather, round to a different level of consciousness. It would appear that I am gliding upwards into an REM state from that inky-black, drug-induced, coma-like sleep of death.
I am sure that the chanting in foreign tongues that I hear is part of my nightmare. In this nightmare, I am lying on something soft, my eyes squeezed tightly shut in an effort to blot it all out. To make the nightmare end. All I want is to seamlessly slip into a different dream, or back to that ever-waiting, black void.
But the nightmare intensifies, not dims, the chanting growing louder. It is a horrible sound that curls around me, chilling me from the inside out, curdling in my mind like rotten milk.
The language the voices chant in harmonious unison is one that I don’t recognise, part humming, part words, with many different octaves all at once, punctuated by the occasional ringing of a bell.
The summoning of the demon Frucissiere, comes the entirely unwelcome thought on the tide of my ever-clearing consciousness.
A foul stench wafts under my nostrils, a malodour so fetid it makes me think of rot. Nothing specific, just decay and death. Like old meat left to spoil under a blazing sun, or the reek of old urine in a litter-strewn back alleyway.
The stink had gotten so strong, so utterly repulsive and impossible to ignore that in my nightmare I open my eyes…
And recoil in shock. I am in Mark’s living-room, lying on his sofa, where Bill and his cronies had placed me before I had passed out. Except, I know that didn’t happen. That was just another nightmare.
But nightmare or not, the horror that hits me square between the eyes is just too much to take in; I have great difficulty comprehending what I’m seeing.
Nude figures form a circle in the middle of the room – possibly around ten or so people, but I can’t be sure. They are mostly male, swaying and chanting by the flickering candlelight, the glistening flesh from all age groups crawling with black shadows.
And they all wear masks. Each face is bone-white and pebble-smooth. The masks are a simple, totally flat design, but look substantial, rather than made of plastic. They mostly consist of two eyeholes and a mouth. The mouths are twisted into disfigurement, and a couple don’t seem to have mouths at all. None of the masks have noses, or nose holes.
Visually, it is a perverse game of ‘Ring a Ring o’ Roses’, except this circle doesn’t hold hands and their movements are disorganised, their swaying shambolic as they turn in their circle at a painstakingly-slow pace.
This is only a dream, I tell myself, my hands flying up to my face to blot out the nightmare.
But it doesn’t stop.
I go to move, to sit up, but I feel like death. It occurs to me that maybe I am dead. I ache all over, and I am so numb.
When I lower my hands, I see that one of the masked figures has broken free of the circle. It is a woman of breathtakingly perfect proportions. Even without seeing the snake tattoo that curls around her right hip, there can be no doubt as to who it is. Holly’s mask has no mouth, just two eyeholes in a smooth, blank face.
Two Doors Down: A twisted psychological thriller Page 24