by TJ Park
His end of the crate slammed into the dirt, cutting a deeper channel.
Doug was about to tell him to shut up and concentrate on carrying the crate when a light appeared in the distance. It twinkled like a faraway star.
“Car,” Mick said hopefully.
The three men swung off the side of the road with their freight and camped down in the low scrub.
Surprising Doug, Mick deferred to him. “Do we stop it?”
“No. We don’t know who it is or how many. It doesn’t matter. The road only leads one place.”
The vehicle took an age to reach them, the light not seeming to come any closer or grow any larger. It did nothing for Doug’s nerves after the episode in the house. At one stage he speculated whether the car had stopped. Then he wondered if he and Mick and Warlock were waiting out a streetlight at a crossroads. Finally, after an age, the single light split into two. Shortly after that, the headlights began expanding all at once, as if the vehicle had started from a resting idle only a short way up the road. Doug was finding out how distances could be an uncertain thing to judge at night.
The three men crouched lower and the vehicle passed them with a steady roar – a jeep, like Selena spoke of. Doug did not catch who was inside. It went by too quick, the windows only flashing back the reflected heads of low-lying shrubs.
They watched as the jeep slowed to take the curve into the property.
“Do you want me to –” Mick started.
“I’ll do it,” Doug said, and shoved off and was gone before anything else was offered. He went fast, so he was spared any more of Mick’s sudden new desire to please.
He resisted a hunched-over run, wanting the speed and silence that came with greater height. The moon was behind the world’s rim; no-one would see him unless they acquired their night eyes first.
Cutting through the brush, Doug saw the jeep’s headlights wash over the shed before focusing their brilliance on the house. At that point, he nearly fell over, although he hadn’t stumbled on something in his path, or tripped over his own feet. He had taken a shocked misstep. Something about the sight of the headlights pouring into the front windows of the house … it had shaken him, but he couldn’t think why.
The windows became dark hollows again as the vehicle turned away to park in the yard. Doug heard it halt in a crackle of stones as he sprinted over to the back of the small shed and peered round the corner.
A stocky figure exited the jeep. Doug never really saw the man’s face, only getting a good look at the beefy roll of fat at the back of his neck. His ears were small. His hair was short and too visible in the dark to be black; its short trim was getting a little shaggy though. He wore stovepipe jeans and a checked shirt. Its small check print buzzed in Doug’s straining night vision.
The man went and opened the rear door of the jeep, leaning in and removing heavily-laden plastic bags. He showed no hesitation in approaching the house. He was not expecting trouble. But something about his actions and the steady tread of his boots on the gravel alarmed Doug. For some inexplicable reason he felt on the verge of being found out. Then he remembered. He had been horribly surprised before, just like this. It wasn’t déjà vu; this was recent memory.
The man was at the foot of the porch steps, about to mount them when he stopped. A cold wave washed over Doug, the chills chasing away the heat generated by his quick run and his teeth chattered. Heels grinding in the gravel, the man turned to look further along the porch where he would spy the crate. Doug shook his head, dispelling that notion. Of course the man wouldn’t see it. How could he? The crate was back with Mick and Warlock.
Still, Doug felt compelled to look to be sure. Then he understood what sight the man was pausing at … the upended folding chair on the porch and the windows filled with total darkness. The man finally started ascending the steps and Doug slipped from his hiding place, his swift step matching the man’s tread on the wooden boards. It was not so difficult to do; Doug could recall every sound of it, every halt in progression.
When the man entered the house, Doug quit his sneaking and flew over the gravel to the jeep, left the same place that its ghost – or the premonition of what was to come – had parked earlier.
Quietly opening the door, he slid into the driver’s seat and, as he had fervently hoped, found the key still in the ignition. He gunned the engine and pulled the jeep around in a tight circle, gravel racketing off the undercarriage. He did it to make a quick getaway but also to make noise, desperately trying to outrace the terrible scream that he knew was coming. The encore.
Except this one would be much worse, being the real thing. The origin.
***
Except for Warlock’s initial whoops of joy at Doug’s arrival in the jeep there was not much conversation to be had. A profound quiet came over them as they headed down the road, the three of them bounced and jolted about, discovering how much the jeep’s shock absorbers were stuffed. No-one complained though, not even Warlock. They gladly tolerated it. They’d already experienced the alternative.
Doug was brooding. Catching a hint of that devastating cry of horror and grief a second time as he sped from the house did not help his mood any.
The only reason he had not broached this subject earlier was because he’d been too busy fretting over when their transport would turn up. But now they were in the clear. They had their wheels, a lot of dirt road, and a long black night ahead of them, where the anger that dogged him could have free range.
He knew he should leave well enough alone. As Mick would say, what’s done is done. No point dwelling on it. But his anger refused to be budged in any direction except one. A deadly reasonable voice, one quite apart from him, spoke.
“What happened back there, Mick?”
Still clearly rattled, Mick’s shrug ended in a shudder.
“You got me. All I know is that it gave me the spooks.”
With a steady hand on the jouncing wheel, Doug kept staring at the way ahead. He burned a hole through it.
“No. Before Warlock and I got back. That shit with Cutter. How did it happen? How did you let it happen?”
As soon as Mick opened his mouth, Doug knew he was going to spin him a perfectly plausible yarn, like what a cinch this job would be now.
“Ah, shut it, Mick,” he said abruptly. “I don’t want to fucking hear it.”
To Doug’s dismay, Mick did shut up, and he almost felt cheated. Mick must’ve been more affected than Doug thought if he couldn’t offer any words in his own defence. Not even an “I told you we shouldn’t have split up.”
Let the old man brood. From the corner of his eye, he noted the way Mick’s leathery hands scratched at each other – his version of fidgeting. The old bastard just couldn’t stand not having his hands on the wheel. It was an added punishment Doug was imposing on him.
For Mick, the act of driving was as much a matter of pride as habit. Mick Morrison had the reputation as the best wheelman anyone could want. Like most people with more than their fair share of talent in a given area, he was driven by genuine passion. He loved cars. Doing a long stretch in prison, he had missed driving like some men missed pussy. To be here now, cooped up in a confined space, staring out a tiny window at a whole lot of nothing, Mick would be feeling like he was back inside. Let him. Doug wished he could take more enjoyment out of it. The cabin was tensely quiet.
After a while, Warlock began to fill in the silence.
It was inevitable he’d go in the back seat, but also a mistake. It was easier for him to escape punishment back there, if he said something they didn’t like, and he knew it. With their backs to him he was mostly thinking aloud. It was a rambling discourse, but they didn’t tell him to shut up immediately, because, in reality, they wouldn’t mind having it figured out. Warlock was musing about what happened back at the house.
He got onto the idea of ghost hauntings, babbling about something called “stone tapes”, where a terrible event is recorded into the very pores of a place,
the episode played over and over again under certain conditions, like a recording. Perhaps the killing in the house triggered it off. Or maybe what they witnessed was a more significant event, in that what they had experienced was proof of life after death. It was the woman’s soul they had heard wandering about the house, not knowing she was dead yet and shrieking at the discovery of her own corpse. If not that, maybe it was –
“Put a cork in it!” Mick finally said. “Stop it with the stupid bugaboo stories. Next you’ll be saying it’s us who are the ghosts and don’t bloody know it!”
Mick’s outburst shut Warlock up. It also gave Doug another unsettling possibility to think over; it made as much sense as the rest. Maybe they were dead and on their way to hell. Somehow that was easier to believe than the imprint of sins so awful that their recordings echoed from the future, instead of the past.
UNBIDDEN PART II: KILLING SWINE
Chapter Six
“You’d think we were in outer space.”
Another harsh burst of static scolded Mick. He was fiddling with the jeep’s dodgy CB radio, roving the band for any news about the shoot-out at Mirribindi. He had rooted out a faint, crackling conversation between two truckies, one warning the other to watch his speed because of the increased police presence on the road, but too quickly their chatter faded into the ether, and nothing more was found outside of a steady hiss.
“It won’t last,” Mick said. “The cops think we did a runner by plane. They won’t be looking for us on the roads. We could be anywhere.”
Doug didn’t argue with the last part. The night stars were all they had to go by. The directions drawn out of Selena didn’t seem as certain when travelling through unmarked territory in the dark.
Mick took the dial for another run. Some static blew up into a brief storm, passing over what sounded like a voice mixed in with the white noise. He reversed the dial, hunting it down.
A scream burst from the speakers. It rose too swiftly for reaction, intensifying into an ear-splitting shriek. In the rear-view mirror, Doug saw Warlock clap his hands over his ears. Forced to keep his hands on the wheel, he had no such luxury.
Cursing, Mick twisted the dial savagely but the shriek followed it across the band, not letting up for an instant.
It chased me down, was Doug’s sole coherent thought during the audio assault. It won’t leave me ever. But he knew it wasn’t the same scream he’d tried to outrun back at the house. This came from a different throat.
Rather than Mick getting rid of the sound, the scream fell away on its own into crackling static; it also subsided, as it failed at the end, into a steady ruin of crying and inhuman gobbling. Sounds that set teeth on edge and made their skin crawl.
“What the fuck was that?” Warlock cried out in the sudden silence.
The hairs were standing on the back of Doug’s neck. They stood on the back of the hands seized on the steering wheel as well.
“Feedback,” he replied thickly.
“You’ve got to be fucking with me … that sounded human.”
“No, it didn’t,” Mick said. “It sounded like Cutter.”
“No. No.” Warlock wasn’t having any of it. “How would you know? How would anyone know what Cutter’d sound like if he screamed?”
“The bit at the end,” Mick said with numb conviction. “The bit where it was like he was sobbing or laughing. That’s when I recognised the fucker.”
Except for the jeep’s rattling, there was now only occasional static cutting through the softer white noise of the radio. Every spike of static became a threat … it could turn into something bigger. Mick turned the radio off, trying not to look like he was in much of a hurry about it.
“Would Cutter scream?” Warlock asked weakly. “He wouldn’t scream, right?”
Doug hated the presence of Warlock leaning over his shoulder, crouched there like some pissant voice of conscience. “It was feedback,” he replied forbiddingly.
Warlock was oblivious. “But he was dead, wasn’t he, Doug? Didn’t you say he was? And even if he wasn’t, what would make him scream like that? Who’d be trying to contact us with a radio message like that? Why would he –?
Doug twisted around in his seat briefly.
“I’ve told you for the last time. Shut your cakehole!”
Doug’s ears were still sore from the crap that had roared from the radio; he wasn’t in the mood to have them filled with any more.
***
At two in the morning they stopped a while. Doug turned the jeep off the road, weaving through tall scrub until they were far from passing sight. Warlock was content to doze fitfully while he was being chauffeur-driven, but Mick and Doug weren’t. They were of the same mind, each preferring to be wide awake for what could come round the bend.
However, with the jeep concealed behind a leafy screen they hoped to get a couple hours of uninterrupted sleep. Doug had no qualms about closing his eyes on Mick. He was as good as family, even if he had bitterly disappointed of late. If there was anyone to be suspicious of it was Warlock. Then Doug realised he must be bloody tired indeed, and it was affecting his judgement … Warlock was incapable of doing anything that meant he would be alone.
They gave the jeep a proper once-over before sleep beckoned. The biggest prize was a frayed, but serviceable, road map tucked away in the glovebox, providing them with a better idea of where they were. It was one of several happy finds. There was a full drum of petrol huddled between the shopping supplies in back. Also, they discovered a five-litre jug of water stored away. The abundance improved their mood.
Despite their good fortune, they were still a long way from safety, and when Doug finally leaned back in his lowered seat, arms folded, he slept like a tightly-strung wire. A nightmare should never have penetrated so shallow a sleep. If it was a nightmare. It didn’t seem sensible enough to even be called one.
***
He is back inside the death room of the house, again. He catches himself in the middle of a run, boots striking the floor in wet slaps. His throat is raw agony; every breath is a ripsaw drawn through it. It feels as if he has worn out his vocal cords in some terrible way. He is running to the lifeless woman on the bed, to shake her into life again. Or to hold her.
But his hands do neither. They inexplicably catch at the empty air above her head. They behave as if they are trying to snatch the fine gossamer of spiderwebs trailing downward. At least, that’s what it seems like he is trying to do. The prisms that double his vision, then treble it, make it hard to tell.
He wipes his eyes roughly, only to break the prisms into a worsening blur. He rubs at his eyes furiously again. Then he jumps on the spot, and steps up on the bed to launch himself to the ceiling, filled with the despair of a child failing to snag the trailing string of a balloon that is swiftly rocketing into the stratosphere.
He watches his hands perform the mime of raking back what they can, retrieving only tattered wisps, gathering the pitiful amount together, holding it safe.
Bare traces of what has departed, but he is greedy for them.
Then Doug sees his broad fist clearly for the first time. He examines the ingrained dirt in the livid nails pressed tightly into his white and purple palm. Beneath the deeply-scratched knuckles healing over with scabs, is an ancient scar from an injury he doesn’t remember.
It is not his scar. This is another’s hand grafted onto his wrist.
Then he hears a noise, hears it with ears he does not trust to be his, either. The noise comes from behind him. It comes from the dead man lying against the wall, not quite dead yet.
Doug rushes to him, filled with a stranger’s sudden, lunatic fury.
The dying man groans – no, growls – a second time. He is railing against his fate, one he refuses to accept. Defiance to the end expelled on a final breath.
Doug’s other hand – matching the first in appearance and size and just as alien – shoots out with precision at an empty space above the dead man’s head, not as desperate
to seize whatever is there, just wanting to claw at its substance and hurt it.
As the hand closes over what should be empty air, it bulges into a bigger fist than is reasonable. Doug cannot feel the presence within his grasp, only its ferocious struggle to be free. Unlike the tattered remnants in his other fist, he has caught this one in its entirety. It is vicious, vital. It fights to pull apart the cage of his fingers with the oily, muscular unfurling of a snake. In response, his fist squeezes harder, making it writhe in agony.
And though Doug approves of the harm done to it, he also wants to shout, “No! You don’t want to keep this! Let it go!”. But he cannot. His mouth does not belong to him, either.
***
Doug’s nightmare spilled over into the waking world, though neither he nor anyone else was aware of it. In the dark closeness of the jeep, his warning cry came out as a low moan that could be mistaken for a snore, his desperation to wake up and escape his night terror only a slight shifting in his seat to get more comfortable.
***
Back inside the death room, Doug’s borrowed hand grinds the captive into the palm, making it mewl in pain, wishing to do so much more to it, wanting to hurt it a thousandfold.
For all its formidable struggle, the ensnared thing is weak in this form. What is frightening is its resolve, its strength of will. If it had teeth it would bite. If it had claws, it would rend and tear. If it had a stinger, the fist wrapped around it would be in slick, swollen agony.
And the hand’s true owner is not averse to it having these things. Because the hand’s true owner overheard the jeep being driven away. Because the hand’s true owner knows there is more than one who is culpable.
The eyes that are not Doug’s eyes turn to seek him out.
That is what finally drives Doug awake, the dread of being found out with his own eyes.