Garfield did not pay particularly generously. I’m not above pocketing the change that sometimes gets carelessly dropped into neglected vegetation.
Stepping closer, I saw that this wasn’t money. The silver sheen came from the foil wrapping on some pills. Prescription drugs thrown down by the woman in the window?
The leaves whispered as I stepped into the shadow of the elder. Something scuttled away. Crouching down, I picked up the foil wrapping. There was writing on it. The words were somehow familiar.
Something else caught my eye, something equally shiny, but this time gold instead of silver. It was further back in the wilderness, behind a small clearing where an abandoned picnic table, the kind with the seats bolted to the edge, had succumbed to the ivy, rotting in the poisonous elder’s damp shade. The ivy’s muscular roots had latched onto a low wall, sucking the moisture out of it until it crumbled under their weight. This dried out husk of a wall marked out what must have been some kind of makeshift picnic area. Something else was feeding here now.
Behind the wall, the ivy was rampant. It reminded me of the sea of ivy in a wooded area behind my dad’s cottage, where I used to pretend I was marooned on a tree-stump desert island, in the days before I became aware of hushed murmurs and side-long glances, before I learned to forget things I didn’t want to think about. You could sink into this ivy, get lost in it. That was the location of the glimmer I’d seen.
I hesitated, thinking of the movements I’d heard around the elder tree. What kind of things lived in that unfettered growth? Ticks, insects, parasites. Larger animals perhaps. ‘Vermin,’ the old woman had said.
They’re harmless really. She knows that now.
‘Who said that?’
‘Tillman!’
Garfield was looking for me.
He won’t look for you in here. He knows not to come in here. He’s got an understanding with them, see.
That voice again. A whispering, female voice, coming from everywhere and nowhere.
‘Tillman!’ Garfield called again.
I plunged into the ivy, lay down so it covered me totally.
There were lowered voices as he and his boys discussed what to do next. Maybe they’d heard leaves rustle as I jumped in, and were undecided as to whether it was me or something sub-human. Then again, I sometimes think they see me as sub-human.
After a while I could hear my breath hissing against the glossy leaves I’d pulled down over my face. That and faint sounds of things crawling and scurrying and dripping all around me in this strange, half-lit world.
Tillman.
This time it wasn’t Garfield calling. He and his sons must have gone to look elsewhere in the complex. There was faint, wet laughter rustling through the ivy. I can’t describe it any other way than that.
You never told her your name, but she’s heard it now. From now on, your name shall be ———
And the voice said a name. If you asked me to repeat it or write it down, I couldn’t.
‘Where are you?’ I asked in a hoarse whisper. ‘Where’s the old woman?’
Gloria, you mean? She’s here.
‘I can’t see you.’
Look for the place where the ivy rises.
Slowly I raised my head over the surface of the ivy sea.
There was a spot where the ivy was higher, mounded over something that gleamed through the gaps in the leaves. I waded towards it, almost waist deep in the thick vines. I felt at any moment that a strangling briar would trip me, and I would have to crawl-swim through it. With each step, it became clearer that someone had hastily pulled the ivy over the shape, which was almost my height, but broader. Even distorted by the ivy, I could see that the shape roughly mimicked the human form . . . a suggestion of head and shoulders in the narrowness at the top. . . .
Staggering towards it through the grasping foliage, I grabbed hold of some of the vines covering the thing. A hideous, grinning face of tarnished gold leered back at me. I stepped back in shock. Was this the owner of the lilting bodiless voice that had called to me? Was this mouth, with its obscene, distended tongue, the one I was looking for?
No. This is the god they replaced her with, and sacrificed her to. Anyway, his true mouth is in his belly. Look lower!
Scrabbling through the ivy to where the metallic effigy’s bloated midriff sat, I ripped more leaves away and felt something rattle, a door held in place by some kind of latch. Pulling it ajar, I peered into a maw darkened by soot and filth. I smelled a burnt smell, a charnel smell. I couldn’t open it fully because the bottom of the door was trapped by the greater, thicker weight of the vast ocean of ivy that surrounded it, but I could see that it was large enough for someone to fit inside it.
Rain was beginning to fall, heavy enough to penetrate the willow and ash canopy overhead, beating steadily on the ivy. Some of it pinged off the horrible, bald head of the giant stove god.
The giant stove god that ate the goddess of the grove. All that’s left of her is ash and fragments in his bowels.
It seemed as if she was talking about herself as ‘she’.
Fumbling downwards, I found the other, lower door in the thing’s fat rump. It was too overgrown with ivy for me even to try to open it, but I guessed what was in there.
‘Tillman!’
The voice sounded wearily angry this time. I turned round. Maybe I should go back.
You can’t serve her and Mammon. Besides, he knows now. He knows that you know, and he’s in on it.
Mammon. Of course. The name ‘Monmouth Park’ is nothing to do with the place in Wales! It’s a contraction of Mammon’s Mouth.
Something hums and vibrates in my pocket.
Jim Garfield calling, the flashing screen shouts. I duck back down into the ivy like a soldier in the Viet Cong, my heart pounding deliciously.
Hurriedly, I jab some keys to shut it up, then throw it towards my feet, where I jab it to splinters with my heel.
That’s it. Good boy!
The fog is lifting from my eyes. I can remember things now, from way back and from more recent times. Dad holding my hand as he took me blackberrying in the woods. Me helping him in the garden when I was a little older, pricking out seedlings, planting, weeding. Him giving me my own patch in the garden—his pleasure at the results. I can even remember what those foil wrapped pills have to do with me.
Don’t worry, son, I’ll look after you. I won’t let them put you away. Just keep taking those little pills. It’ll give them the excuse they need, if you don’t.
But I don’t need them anymore, Dad! They were the things helping to pull the cotton wool fog over my eyes. That’s why I flung them into the ivy.
I can see her face now, all shining with a gentle light, not like the brash soot-and blood-stained brass of Mammon—her hair soft and pale, as it was before it sloughed off and turned to ashen vapours. The breeze blows her breath upon me.
They’re calling to me again.
‘Did you hear his phone?’ one of them says.
They’re heading off to look in another part of the grounds. They don’t want to come into this defiled, yet still sacred place.
I have helped to defile it, I remember, thinking of the mutilated elder. Will she punish me for that? Will it break our covenant before it’s even started?
I ask her, but there’s no answer. I don’t know if that’s a good sign or not.
Maybe Garfield will ring Dad and say things haven’t worked out. Maybe he’ll come back with men in black and men in white to look for me. The men in black and the men in white are in with the Residents’ Association.
But the voice speaks to me by my strange new name, tells me not to worry, tells me just to rest awhile in this quiet place of soft, furtive movements. Maybe I’ll just lie here for a while, until it’s all blown over, until strangling blackberry thorns wind around my limbs, until the ivy feeds on my bones. Better that than let Mammon’s furnace devour me.
McBIRDY
David McGroarty
&nbs
p; I had an immediate reaction the first time I saw Aiden Dyer. First year biology, day one. He was already perching on his lab stool, his legs tucked under his backside, back straight, hands clasped, when I and the other boys came in from lunch. I ran up behind and kicked the stool from under him. He hung in the air for a fraction of a second, his arms folded on the bench in front, before his legs came down and the rest of him followed. There was laughter, but it was brief because the teacher had seen the whole incident from his office, through a little round window at the front of the lab, and he fluttered in and silenced the room. The teacher’s name was McBurney, but we called him McBirdy.
My friendship with Aiden would be the most enduring I made in life, although we never became close. I invited him to my wedding and I might have gone to his. Though we did not see each other often, we kept in touch, back in the days when that was not as easy as it is now, and once a year we would meet on a winter’s night outside the school grounds like we did when we were younger. There was an old wooden bench by a bricked-up substation in the woods behind the school, which we called the Smokers’ Bench, because when we were at school it was where the older kids would go for a fag. A half-bottle of blended whisky each and we sat drinking at the Smokers’ Bench until we were merry enough to break into the school grounds. It would be dark, being January, but we would wrap up, and the booze always made us feel warmer and bolder than we were.
The last year but one, I arrived at the gate to find that the school was halfway towards being demolished. This hit Aiden hard. He arrived after me and stared through the fence at the piles of rubble for some time before even saying hello. From what he told me later, this seemed to be the pinnacle on a mountain of disappointments. I knew he was getting treatment for heroin, and I could see that he was still using, but he had been using before and had always looked well. That night he did not look well at all. We talked about climbing the fence; we had broken into construction sites before, as boys. But at thirty-eight, no amount of whisky made it seem like a good idea, so we sat on the Smokers’ Bench while the substation thrummed and crackled, and we talked.
That night Aiden told me about his fear. He had, he said, always been scared of something—not always the same thing, but always something. He described his fear as a thing that moved like a hermit crab from one source of dread to another, as his circumstances changed. He had come to think of it as an organism in its own right, part of him, but nothing to do with him at the same time: a parasite. He told me it had found a home in me for a while, after the incident with the lab stool, and in many other people since. That night at the Smokers’ Bench he said that he had recently come to accept that he would never be rid of the fear, and had given up trying.
A year later we met again by the brownfield site where the school had been, and he was fat, happy, clean and well. Some short time after that, Aiden died.
***
McBirdy suffered under one of the better nicknames. Teachers at Saint Columba’s were more often given by the students some variant of their first name, prefixed by whatever descriptor was most apt: Wee Billy, Fat Tam, Sweaty Jim. There was the odd exception. The Assistant Head was a tall, thin man, so diabolical that nicknames seemed inappropriate, which, I assume, is why no one ever called him anything but his surname: Darroch. Darroch was given to standing in the corridor whispering almost inaudible slurs at the children as they passed. Fat boy. Disgusting spots. The girl with no friends. McBirdy was small and round, with greasy black hair that always seemed in need of a cut, a long nose, a slight bob of the head when he spoke. And his name was McBurney. His nickname was inevitable.
McBirdy was not disliked by the students, but neither was he completely respected. He was too meek for that, and too strange. His lessons would deviate oddly into metaphysics and ancient history when the whim took him. He did not seem to care whether he met his lesson objectives, or how engaged the class appeared to be. One of his favourite topics was a seventeenth-century natural philosopher named De Sousa who claimed to have discovered a fifth humour, a pink liquid that could be extracted from the skull, which he associated with the capacity for malice, and a hypothetical fifth element he called palette.
I loved it. I would draw him along these meanderings, probing him on this discredited theory, that occult figure. It provided a welcome diversion from work, but more than this, it gave me an insight into a hidden science more vital and dangerous than the one on the curriculum. And Aiden Dyer surprised me by being every bit as fascinated. He would also quiz McBirdy, lead him deeper into his detours, often asking the same questions that were on my mind. I caught Aiden watching me once, trying, I think, to judge whether my interest in McBirdy was genuine. I mouthed, ‘What?’ and then later stabbed him in the neck with the pointed end of a compass, but by then I had already decided that I wanted to know him, to better understand why he alone shared my enthusiasm for McBirdy’s old science.
I intercepted him on his way home, and with all of the awkwardness that usually comes with such conciliatory gestures, I started a conversation.
‘What’s McBirdy on about?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Do you get what he’s on about?’
‘No.’
‘You seem like you do.’
‘I don’t know. Maybe, a wee bit.’
‘Where do you stay?’
‘Shawfields.’
‘Shawfields? What do you stay there for?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘Have you got any brothers?’
‘No.’
‘Got any sisters?’
‘No.’
‘Me neither.’
His house was further out than mine, but I walked back with him, through half a mile of farmland and a golf course, to the housing scheme and the bungalow where he lived with his mum. By the time we got there we were friends, and had agreed that we would visit McBirdy after school.
I remember walking back home over the golf course alone, feeling changed, as if I had been carrying something close to me for years and had at last been able to put it down.
***
We went to McBirdy at four o’clock on a Friday. He was in his office. Through the little window at the front of the empty lab I could see him standing over his desk, leaning forward at an awkward angle. We approached the door and I noticed that there were a number of objects and he was arranging them delicately as though they were part of a puzzle he was trying to solve. He ignored Aiden’s knock at first, stared wide-eyed at whatever was on the desk and ran both of his hands through his oily black hair—a gesture that made him look strangely desperate, almost frightened. He only came to the door when Aiden knocked for a second and a third time.
He did not seem surprised to see us there. ‘Boys,’ he said. ‘What can I do for you?’
It was for me to speak. We had planned this. But I was distracted by the objects on McBirdy’s desk. I tilted my head to look past his shoulder. A red silk or satin cloth was spread and the things on top of it were pieces of bone, splintered and mouldy. They might have been human bone. They were about the right size. I thought I saw part of a jaw.
It was Aiden who spoke: ‘We wanted to know about De Sousa.’
McBirdy nodded. Again, he did not seem surprised. ‘Yes, well, come through then.’
I expected him to gather up the bits of bone in the red cloth—I think because the expression I had seen on his face through the window led me to suppose that he had been doing something illicit—but he left them there, fetched two books from a cabinet in the corner and sat by his desk with the books on his lap.
‘De Sousa,’ he said. He held up one of the two books. It looked cheaply made, as if it had been produced in someone’s front room, and the cover, which showed various abstract geometric forms, looked as if it had been printed on a home computer. The title of the book was Heretics. McBirdy handed it to me. ‘Most of it is frightful rubbish,’ he said. ‘Uninformed nonsense, but there is the odd bit of genuine insight, including the sect
ion on De Sousa. You can take that home, but do bring it back.’
He handed the second book to Aiden. This one was older: a dusty thing, properly leather-bound and fragile-looking. It had no image on its yellow cover and no title I could see. ‘And that one’s for you,’ he said.
McBirdy sat there, flapping his hands feebly on his thighs for a moment. I realised that he felt he had answered our query and was expecting us to leave.
‘How do you know about this stuff?’ I asked him. Aiden was staring at the cover of his book. McBirdy licked his front teeth and scratched his jawline.
‘De Sousa’s work is well known.’ I waited for him to go on, but he pursed his lips, looked at Aiden, looked at his feet.
Aiden turned to me and nodded, then said thanks and left. I went after him, but stopped to examine the bones on McBirdy’s desk. What I had taken for a human jaw was clearly that, and there were other items like strips of leather that I took in the strangeness of that moment to be dried human flesh.
‘Bones. . . .’ McBirdy said, with a lengthening of the vowel and an inflection that made it sound like a question. Booooones? I turned back to him and saw in his eyes something of the desperate look I had seen through the window. His lips were smiling sweetly.
‘Bones,’ I said, as if answering the question, and then I left.
I caught up with Aiden in the corridor, but we saw the thin figure of Darroch prowling the hall in front of us. Aiden seemed to shrink away from him like a dog trained to expect a beating. As terrified of Darroch as I was, I found this odd. And I thought I heard Darroch whisper as we passed, a word or phrase that sounded like, Liars, both of you. Aiden and I did not speak until we reached the golf course. He veered from the path, sat on the edge of a bunker and opened his book. I sat alongside him. He started to read.
Strange Tales V Page 26