by M. V. Stott
It was then I felt a prickle dance across my scalp.
I was suddenly very sure that I was not alone in the bathroom.
I looked to my right, to the bath, with its shower curtain pulled across.
My head told me to get out of that small room sharply, my body, ever the traitor, reached out a hand and pulled back the shower curtain.
The axe-wielding fox, Roman helmet still upon its head, was stood on its hind legs in the bath tub.
‘All hail the saviour of the dark lakes!’ it said in its small, cumbrian voice, waving its axe aloft.
I replied by yelling, ‘Argh! Oh Christ, argh!’ in a strangulated voice and falling off the toilet, landing on the tiles with a thump, my left elbow jarring painfully.
‘She waits for you upon her throne of skulls, saviour!’ cheered the fox.
I was closer than last time, and I could see the fox’s fur was thick and messy, and its large, bushy tail cut short, the end missing. It was proportioned like a regular fox that had somehow learned to walk on its hind legs; it stood upright with confidence and poise.
A knock at the door. ‘Are you okay in there?’ asked Chloe. ‘I heard noises.’
‘Yes! Yep! I’m…’ I looked back to the bath to find the fox had disappeared again.
‘Are you sure? It sounded like you yelled oh Christ! in a high pitched voice.’
I crawled over to the bath and looked for any sign of the bizarre fox but didn’t find so much a muddy foot print staining the white porcelain.
‘Should I be worried?’ asked Chloe.
I pulled myself up and opened the door, legs a little unsteady, ‘Nope! No worry, just, thought I saw a… spider.’
‘Okay.’
‘A big spider.’
‘Oh.’
‘And then fell I off the toilet.’
‘Right. You’re acting a little oddly, even for you, Joe.’
I stepped out of the bathroom and headed back through to the front room.
‘Yeah, sorry, just, blah, head all over the place.’
‘Don’t worry, me too.’
‘Oh?’
‘Today’s the anniversary of my mum’s death.’
I was very much not expecting that.
‘What? Really?’
Chloe nodded.
‘Right. Shit. Jesus. I’m sorry. I didn’t realise.’
Chloe had mentioned her mum a few times. Usually after a few too many glasses of wine. Mentioned how she’d died when Chloe was only very young. How it was the entire reason behind her becoming a doctor. Every time she worked on someone, she was trying to save her mum.
‘Joe?’
‘Yes?’
‘Do you want to do a bit of kissing?’
At least three silent seconds passed.
‘I’m sorry? Come again?’
‘Kissing. I’m sad, and I like you, and I thought I’d invite you over so we could try out a kiss or two to cheer me up.’
‘Oh.’
‘If that’s okay with you.’
‘That’s okay with me.’
She looked at me oddly, and I suddenly realised I was doing a little jig.
‘You’re so weird,’ she said, laughing.
‘Afraid so.’
And then she reached up, pulled my head down, and pressed her lips against mine.
And we did some of the thing you Earth people call, “Kissing.”
Oh yes.
As the Uncanny Wagon left Carlisle and Chloe behind and I headed back home, back to Keswick, I felt like a leaf on the breeze.
In other words, I was a bit happy.
The kissing had gone on for some time, enough time for a grope or two to occur before, grinning, she told me that was enough for now. We had plenty of time. No need to rush.
‘Are you my girlfriend?’ I’d asked, like a ten-year-old boy who’d just given the best girl in the school playground the last of his penny sweets in hope of affection.
‘Maybe. Let’s see how it goes, shall we? Thanks for making me feel better, Joe.’’
I was so happy and distracted that the fact a talking fox with an axe had greeted me on two occasions had, for a while, slipped my mind. A talking fox that could, apparently, appear and disappear at will. Perhaps the thing was connected to all the cats of Oldstone doing a runner? I supposed that, if I were a cat, I would run from a fox waving an axe at me.
There was also the fact that foxes can’t talk, nor wield man-made weaponry, and that I might very well be losing my tiny mind. Then again, octopus men weren’t real either, and I’d met that sucker (no pun intended) twice. Though, come to think of it, I was the only one who’d seen the assailant in that way. Mary Taylor had yet to give a statement to the same effect. Perhaps is was all in my head after all. I was a crazy, paranoid man in a fabulous, long coat, who thought tramps were stalking him, that foxes could talk, and that there was a killer man-octopus stalking the street of fair Cumbria.
That felt like it made a lot more sense than the alternative.
It was then that a thick, fetid octopus limb reached out from the back seat of my car, wrapped itself around my head, and caused me to swerve off the road and crash head-on into a tree.
10
The world swayed drunkenly before my eyes as I pressed my weight against the car door. It swung open and I fell onto the grass outside before throwing up my guts. I’d blacked out for a moment or two, and had barely clawed my way back to consciousness. My head felt as though a knife had embedded itself in my right temple.
I couldn’t pass out again. I had to stay awake. If I blacked out and that thing was still close, I was dead. Which would ruin an otherwise lovely evening.
I looked up to see the windscreen was entirely gone, my seatbelt having saved me from launching through the hole as the tree brought the car to an abrupt stop. No such luck for the creature that had lunged at me from behind, it had been propelled through the glass and was somewhere ahead of me, hidden in the gloom.
It was almost pitch black out there on the small country road, and the thing could easily be close at hand.
I used the car door to pull myself up to my feet, my wobbly legs threatening to send me crashing back to the dirt. I could feel something wet dripping down my forehead and decided to pretend it wasn’t blood gushing from an open head wound.
A movement in the shadows several metres away, a grunt and a groan.
‘I have a gun!’ I said, holding up my hand with two fingers extended.
Yes, Joseph, that’ll fool them…
It seemed like I had two options: leg it, or clamber back into my poor car and see if I could bring the thing back to life. Well, actually, there was a third choice: try to tackle Mr Octopus and find out what it was like to be horribly murdered.
As I slipped back into the driver’s seat I saw a smear of red on the steering wheel where my head had connected. The airbag had clearly failed to deploy. If the thing was even fitted with one.
I peered through the windscreen, or at least the expanse of air where it used to go. The creature was up on its feet and facing me. Its dark body had an indistinct shape, but its giant, yellow eyes cut through the gloom like twin suns.
I turned the ignition over and the Uncanny Wagon coughed, whirred, wheezed, then cut out.
‘Come on, come on,’ I muttered, trying again, but each twist of the key only achieved the same result. The car was dead, or at the very least, severely poorly.
I slapped my palms against the wheel in frustration, then stumbled back out into the night and tried to run. The sudden movement soon informed me that I was far from over my forty-mile-an-hour steering wheel headbutt. The world weaved before me, my knees jelly, my vision snapping in and out of focus. The world was grey and fuzzy around the edges and static edged further and further over my sight with each desperate step.
The thing was after me, I could hear it. I could hear the sound its beak made, the screeching fury. I could hear its heavy feet mashing the ground.
; I risked a look over my shoulder. Bad move. Moving forwards and looking back was too much for my steering-wheel-bashed brain to deal with, and I tumbled hard to the ground, almost rolling completely over.
‘Shitting shit!’ I cried as I tried to right myself, tried to stop myself from giving in to my mind’s insistence that we just slip into unconsciousness for a quick time-out.
I was up on my feet, almost bent double, trying to move forwards but mostly going sideways. A suckered limb caught my arm.
‘No! Get off!’
I whirled round, swinging out a fist in the creature’s direction, connecting more by luck than judgment. My knuckles met the side of the creature’s head with a squelch and it stepped back, beak crying with anger.
I did my best to run some more but it was no good. I was exhausted, I was broken, I was moments from passing out. I leaned back against a tree, the only thing now keeping me upright, and watched with bleary resignation as the black, multi-limbed creature twitched slowly towards me, convinced it had its quarry beat.
‘Fuck… fuck you…’ was about as much as I could manage. ‘Right up the rear end.’
Its octopus limbs began to dance, as though taunting me. I could see my face reflected in the large, yellow pools of its eyes, and it wasn’t a pretty picture. My features drooped, my face splattered in blood, a large gash streaked across my forehead.
Was this how I would die? At the hands—or limbs at least—of some nightmare beast that shouldn’t even exist?
It all seemed a tad unfair. I still didn’t know who I was. Didn’t know what was going on. Just a fool with great hair being buffeted from pillar to post, begging for a straight answer or two.
And Chloe had just started kissing me. I’d hoped for a bit more of that. Oh well.
‘Well? Get on with it then!’ I demanded.
The octopus man crowed, shrill and piercing in triumph as it prepared to do its worst—
—and that’s when the front of its head exploded in every direction, splattering me in gore.
I’m not at all embarrassed to say that I screamed a scream only dogs would have heard. I swiped a handful of brains from my eyes to find creature still standing, held up by the fist that was now jutting from where its face had one been.
Oh, and the fist was also glowing with what looked like fire.
The flaming fist then gave me the finger.
The creature twitched once, then the hand pulled free and it crumpled, wetly, to the ground, quite dead.
The homeless woman flicked chunks of matter from her now not-on-fire hand, then began wiping at it with her coat.
‘Nasty bloody bastards, those things,’ she noted.
‘You… it’s you…’ I said pointing at her in case she was confused.
‘I know.’
‘And you just… just...’ I pointed at the very dead Mr Octopus.
‘You’re welcome,’ replied the woman, in what seemed to me to be a rather sarcastic tone of voice. She pulled at a cigarette, lit the thing, and inhaled on it deeply.
It was at this point that my body had its way and consciousness finally eluded me.
11
I was looking up at the sky, only it wasn’t a normal sort of sky. It wasn’t the daytime sky, azure blue with patches of white cloud, nor was it the nighttime sky, jet black and pin-pricked by stars. This sky boiled with fire. It roared and it raged and it spat great, flaming arcs down at the earth, as though it were trying to sterilise what lay beneath its endless, angry expanse.
I reached up a hand to my temple—to the wound I’d incurred in the crash—but I couldn’t feel any gash, and my head had stopped throbbing.
I was laying in a small, wooden rowing boat, rocked gently by the surrounding water.
Gripping the sides of the boat, I sat up. I was adrift in the middle of a large lake. The Lake District has several large lakes, otherwise it wouldn’t be called the Lake District, it would just be called the District. This lake didn’t look familiar, though. I peered over the edge of the boat to examine the water itself, which, like the sky above, was far from normal. It wasn’t clear, or blue, but entirely black. Blacker than the blackest black that you could ever imagine.
And then a bit blacker.
Was this a dream? The last thing I remembered was the mad homeless woman enjoying a ciggie after she’d punched an octopus monster right through the head. Life really had taken some turns of late.
I lifted the boat’s heavy oars and placed them in the stirrups, or whatever the bits that you sit the oars in on a rowboat are called. I dipped the oars in the water and began to propel myself towards the water’s edge, towards the shore.
I felt strange, and not just because of… well, everything. I felt a sense of deja vu, like I knew this place. Like I belonged here somehow. Perhaps I’d had this dream before and just forgotten about it. People forget dreams all the time. They say you only remember a tiny sliver of the strange trips your sleeping mind takes you on as you lay curled up in bed and the night rolls by unseen.
The small boat buffeted against the shore and I stood unsteady as the thing tipped back and forth, threatening to throw me off balance. Getting my shoes wet, I leapt out and walked up onto the grass. All around me, hills rose into the roiling sky. There were no buildings to be seen. Just hills, mountains, trees, grass. But again, as with the lake water and the sky, the grass was not the sort you would expect to see. This grass was blood red. Crimson slashes that covered the ground and clung to the hills. I crouched and ran my hand through it and the grass left a sticky, red residue on my skin. This strange place was bleeding onto me.
I stood and decided to explore. If this was a dream, a fantasy my consciousness had retreated to after the car crash, then my brain was being very creative. I wondered what else it had in store for me.
It wasn’t long before I found the first skeleton.
It lay on the grass before me, not a scrap of flesh or matter left clinging to it. I peered at the strange skull. It was large and held enormous, tusk-like teeth in its jaw. As I walked on, I found more and more bones, until it was difficult to find a path through them and I had to resort to trampling them underfoot. Which I felt somewhat guilty for, but something inside of me insisted I push on. Like my feet knew the direction I should be heading. And so my boots crunch-crunched their way over a field of bright, white bones that stretched as far as I could see, with eruptions of blood-red grass forcing their way into view here and there.
I stopped to catch my breath and wondered idly if I’d ever actually been out of breath in a dream before. Is that the sort of thing that happens in a dream? I was also sweating, rivulets of salty water irritating my eyes and causing me to wipe the sleeve of my coat across them to clear my vision.
Can you sweat in dreams? Feel pain?
As I swallowed and realised how dry-mouthed I’d become, I began to wonder if this really was a dream. Perhaps, instead, I was dead. I’d passed out after the crash, after the attack, and who knows what had happened to me after that. Maybe another of the octopus monsters had popped up and finished me off. That or the homeless woman had done the job. She did punch one creature’s brains out. Literally. Maybe she decided to finish me off as dessert.
So, was this death? The afterlife? Purgatory? The sky was on fire, which had a definite Hell-y vibe to it. I mean, if I was going to design Hell, I’d certainly have plenty of that stuff around. And bones. Fire and bones. Your standard Hell jazz.
I climbed over a fence and walked on, thankful to be leaving the carpet of bones behind. As I walked on I became aware that I was making my way towards a particular hill. A bulbous hump in the distance. I lost sight of it as I entered a forest, but still, my feet seemed to know which direction to tread. I wouldn’t get lost.
The trees were decorated with a red vegetation that matched the area’s crimson grass. The leaves formed a canopy overhead, blocking the view of the furious, burning sky. As I walked beneath it, the unbroken red blanket rained lazy, bloody drops on
to my head.
I left the huddle of trees for a moment and emerged into a clearing. In the centre was an old-fashioned wooden gallows, and from its noose hung a dead body. Steps led up to a wooden platform. The body hung above, a stool by its side, the corpse’s feet a half-metre from touching down. It was a woman. She wore a black dress and had long, blonde hair that hung down to her waist. I ran towards her, bounding up the steps, but as soon as I touched her I could tell that she was dead. Cold and stiff and gone.
It was far from the most pleasant thing I’d stumbled across on a ramble through a wood.
The woman looked to be in her thirties, and fiercely beautiful. I sat on the gallows steps staring up at her, hoping this really was all a dream and that I'd hurry up and wake up already.
‘All hail the saviour!’
I turned to see the fox with his axe held aloft, stood at the edge of the forest.
‘You again! What do you want?’
‘I’ve been looking for you. Looking for ages and ages.’
‘Well, you’ve found me. Congratulations. I’m talking to a fox. I’m talking to a fox and there’s a dead woman hanging behind me and the sky is made of fire.’
The fox shuffled from foot to foot, then scratched at his chin with his axe. ‘You what?’
‘Ignore me, I’m just going insane. Who’s the woman?’ I asked, pointing to the swinging corpse.
‘Huh? Y’know who that is. It were your idea, after all. Good idea it was, too.’
‘I think you’ve me mistaken for someone else.’
The fox took a step forward and peered at me. ‘No, don’t think so. Then again, you all look the same to me. Sorry if that sounds racist.’
‘Again, the dead person?’
‘That’s the Red Woman’s sister, ain't it? Blonde Cathy. Was you that told Red to get rid of her. That she should rule alone. Family stabs family in the back, so be sure to be the one holding the knife. Your words, not mine.’
‘That does not at all sound like something I would say.’
‘Come on, then,’ said the fox, gesturing at me with his axe as he turned and walked towards the treeline.