by TJ Park
***
Doug told himself it was a breeze that swung the door shut, the same that made the wind chimes tinkle merrily outside, but that didn’t make him feel less uneasy. It was too convenient that he’d be plunged into darkness as soon as he broke into the house.
He assumed he could find the door easily enough again, but it was a wall that fended off his outstretched hands. Its surface was sticky to the touch, like the things his feet kept stumbling over. After a few more moments of fumbling at the walls, he retreated to an open spot, trying to keep it together, trying not to lose control.
The room was hot, suffocating. He couldn’t see the windows. There was not a hint of ambient light. Stay calm. It wasn’t a problem with his eyes, nor was it from some unnatural cause. The windows were heavily draped or blacked out somehow. He steeled himself and began shuffling his way across the room, arms out to ward off obstacles. He hoped he was headed for where he remembered the kitchen to be.
He shied from brushing the walls as he did the lumpy things at his feet. None of it felt right. He was blessed with a short space of unimpeded passage, then gnarled and knotted things began twitching over his outstretched hands. He jerked back, uttering a shocked noise, before realising he’d found the entry to the kitchen.
He passed through the bead curtain, hating the feel as it drew over his face and neck, even though it was the most ordinary thing he had touched inside the house so far. The room beyond was as dark as the one he’d left, but he knew it was the kitchen. The air was ripe with rotting food.
Using memory to guide them, his hands found the benchtop and quested along it, knocking things to the floor before they finally came across the stove. The rings on top told him it was gas, as he’d hoped.
He felt about the area with more care, fingers tracing the outlines of bottles and jars. He came across a box that initially seemed right – it had chaffed sides – if slightly too big. He shook it. It rattled like a matchbox. He slid it open, picked out a stick and felt for the head before striking it.
Its flame confirmed what he had sensed by touch. He went giddy with terror.
He should never have willingly entered the domain of witches.
He was shrunk to the size of a child. He was the boy, Matthew, from the airfield; he was Scott; he was his own neglected child. He was condemned to live out the wrongs he’d committed on sons. Then the moment of vertigo passed and his hands were of normal size again, holding an oversized matchstick used for lighting stoves. Idiot.
The flame was nearly finished. He wagged the match out and lit another, the smoke cutting briefly through the stink of death and putrefaction. Bringing the smell back to the forefront of his thoughts made him gag.
He waited until the flame was sturdier before looking around. There were no nasty surprises to be had, not yet. The kitchen looked normal, if a mess. Cupboard doors had been thrown open, the contents strewn about. The pantry doors were caught ajar on the heaped spills at its foot. An infestation of maggots crawled over the floor, several of them squashed into his boot-prints. In the wavering half-light of the match their twitching movements made him feel queasy.
There was a mound of smashed glass in the sink: the remnants of handmade glass bottles with long twisty necks, crumbled corks and broken wax seals. On the windowsill sat an old, puckered apple. It had a blackened centre like a scorched bullet hole. Doug somehow understood it was not the apple that had been wanted, but the worm that nested inside it.
The kitchen was abnormally dark because the windows were slapped over with what looked to be a thick patina of black paint. Looked like. He chose not to inspect too closely. His examination of the kitchen used up two more matches. He knew he was stalling. He didn’t want to return to the living room and the frightening, bewildering experience he’d had in there. He didn’t want it explained.
Shielding a fresh match with his hand he took a deep breath through his mouth, backed out through the bead curtain, and turned around. And learned, to his dismay, that he’d returned to a house filled with more death than he’d left behind.
***
Janet went about the business of making tea, stretching it out as long as possible to give her children as much time as they needed.
She was surprised by her own outward calm. She turned with two cups of tea, one in each steady hand. Danny now sat at the table, waiting patiently. He looked worse sitting down; an atrocity contaminating a normal domestic pastime.
She could try to make a run for the hallway, but the gap past him was so narrow he could easily snag her.
Throw the tea in his face? The only outcome she saw was a wet, steaming Danny still grabbing hold of her. How could she hurt him worse?
The back door was no good. Not after she’d stupidly given Danny the key – in the pocket of the coat, along with the gun.
She put the cups down on the table, keeping to her side. She sat down, not drawing her chair in. She knew she shouldn’t ask. She should hold off to give her children as much time as possible. But she couldn’t bear it any more. She just couldn’t.
“Danny?” Her eyes felt hot. “What do you want?”
Danny smiled moonily. “Bickies?” he suggested.
***
Lauren had Scott dangling halfway out the window. On first re-entering the bedroom she had found her brother encased in the covers, not a hair showing, nothing. It was as if he’d known what had entered the cottage and wanted to be sealed away from it.
She had hesitated, afraid of what she might find pulling away the covers, but it was only Scott. He still gave her a fright though. His eyes were open, staring at her.
But he was not there with her in the normal sense. She found out soon enough when she pleaded with him to get moving, then screaming at him in throat-tearing whispers. She tried her best to convince him. She told him about Danny. She lied and told him the monster was back for them. She said she would leave him if he didn’t come with her. His only response was to curl up into a tighter ball.
She hit him. Once, twice. That did not rouse him either. Worse, he did not even try to protect himself.
But at least that meant he wouldn’t fight her, either. She almost pulled him off the bed, then had the idea of shoving it against the window. If only she had the strength to lift it and tip him out. She fumbled and wasted precious time working out which parts of him to push and pull, levering him out the open void. It was easier to manoeuvre his upper half first, and less embarrassing.
Like the main house, the workers’ cottage was built on stumps, though not nearly as high, which was fortunate for Scott. Lauren tried to lower her brother down gently, but his momentum got too much and he fell headfirst into the garden bed.
***
Doug felt like he was standing in a cavern. The living room was much larger than the kitchen and drank in all the match light. He had to move around to pick out details, each telling him he’d discovered the wasteland of some great, deliberate rampage.
On his third pass with the dying match he found candles. There were several crowded together on a cabinet top. They stood without bases, fused together by melted wax into an inelegant model of snow-capped mountains.
He lit some, spacing them out, wary of too many close flames merging into one great whoosh and setting the ceiling ablaze. By their illumination he discovered more candles upright on the floor, deliberately spaced. He hadn’t kicked even one during his blundering about in the dark. It seemed predestined.
He lit the candles on the floor. He preferred there being as much light as possible, but he left two or three alone, thinking it best not to complete the pentagram.
He received a nasty little jolt when a candle flame suddenly revealed two beady black eyes next to him. He knew more of the same were scattered all over the floor. He just didn’t want to dwell on it, not until he finished pushing back the shadows.
The candles lit, he stood and surveyed the changes made since his first visit.
All furniture had been shoved aga
inst the walls to make as much room as possible for the pentagram. Even then, in some strange manner, the object seemed too large to fit the room. Though its boundaries were the foot of the walls, something about it gave Doug the impression the chalked lines reached far beyond the confines of the house, continuing for unimaginable distances.
And the “pillows” …
The dead birds lay about the floor in drifts. Crows, magpies, butcherbirds, currawongs, others. One could only be an eagle or falcon given its tremendous size and the large, hooked beak. Some carcasses he couldn’t recognise at all … they were eviscerated to the point of being turned inside out.
All were mutilated. Some had heads twisted several times to face front again, or were missing entirely. Some had their claws crushed and broken, their beaks smashed to bits. Doug found himself surrounded by low-lying stars as candle flame reflected from the dozens of staring, glassy eyes of these birds … those with eyes still in their heads.
How anyone could procure such an aviary – the sheer logistics of luring and snaring the bloody things – was shouted down by a single word. Witchcraft. One word, now his go-to for a whole shitload of craziness. It was welded into his mental lexicon as the word describing some trade outside his particular knowledge, like “stitchcraft” or “woodcraft”. It described a way of making things happen. Or making “things”. If he left it at that, his mind held together. He focused only on the concrete aspects.
One thing he understood about the selection of birds here – they were predators.
The room felt very close and stifling with those dead stares. He looked to the windows for relief, and found he’d guessed right. Each was covered by rugs that once adorned the walls. Someone had wanted it dark in here, very dark, day or night.
Several abstract designs on the walls were now revealed. They were vandalised, the higgledy-piggledy symbols crossed out in wide, bloody strokes. Doug made out feathers stuck to the brush marks and understood what had been used for the brush.
He made another discovery, lost at first in the bird carcasses heaped about it, concealing it from easy view – a sealed glass jar set in the dead centre of the pentagram.
He pulled the jar from the pile. It sloshed, heavy and full. He inspected it closely. The reek of pure alcohol burned his nose and made his eyes water. The jar itself was common enough, the type you’d use to pickle fruit.
He’d upset the contents, slow particles flying up in a cloud as he tried to see better what was mashed inside. It looked like a pale wrinkled squid of some kind. Most of its feelers had been removed, only broken rubbery strands left. It was like a specimen in a display container you’d find in a museum.
He rotated the jar until his gaze met with the squid’s one eye pressed against the glass. Doug did not fling the bottle away. He did not want to spill the alcohol, or the awful part of Cutter it preserved. Without another look, he returned the jar to its nest of feathers, kicking a dead shrike over it.
No wonder the familiar was so formidable.
Doug shuffled around in the circle. What more could he do here? Complete the destruction? He could feel the pointlessness of that in his hollow chest. The pentagram was spent, its objective complete. And unless the witch was sleeping it off in the abattoir-that-was-once-a-bedroom, he was long gone.
Something warm dripped on Doug’s neck. He swiped at it feverishly and studied the traces on his hand. It was a clear liquid, not red. Another drop struck him. He sprang away to avoid more, looking up to see where it was coming from.
He reeled across the room, kicking over a candle. It fell on a bent and broken crow, the briefly burning feathers adding to the room’s stench. In that first extreme instant of fright, Doug thought he had caught someone in the act of leaping upon him, arms and legs outstretched.
Learning differently didn’t make his heartbeat any slower.
He cautiously approached the man pinned to the living room ceiling.
***
Across the table from him, Janet repeated despairingly: “I’m serious, Danny. What are you doing here? What do you want?”
Danny crookedly looked out into empty space, finding his answer there. He swayed back to Janet again, his broken face sorrowful.
“Ah, missus, why didn’t you ask me that before?”
“I did, Danny.”
He reached up to rub his head. The action wasn’t very effective. What fingers remained on his hand swung back and forth like tassels on a curtain. He didn’t seem to notice, too busy trying to put his thoughts together.
And what was she thinking, offering him a cup of tea? She’d have to hold it to his lips for him to drink it.
Danny began speaking with slow exactness.
“You were supposed to ask first and I was supposed to answer straightaway. I was supposed to hurry. But it’s hard. She can’t guide me all the time. Sometimes she has to leave me on my own and then I … I find it hard to think straight.”
“Sure,” Janet said. She continued to look encouraging, nodding, when all she really wanted to do was run shrieking from the room.
His ruined hand flapped about, trying to conjure what he wanted to say. Finally, he found his words.
“If she was leading me all the time, it would’ve known and it would’ve stopped her. She had to let me go by myself most of the time … after telling me what to do.”
His terrible face went blank. He looked at Janet, imploringly.
“What was I saying?”
Janet struggled to keep her composure, though her mind raved chaotically.
“You’re telling me why you’re here. You have something to tell me.”
“Oh, yeah,” he said. He brought forth a relieved smile. “I’m supposed to warn you. It’s coming. It’s coming right now. It’s coming to get you.”
Janet floated up from her chair, seemingly elevated by no means or effort of her own. Her hands grasped for purchase on the table.
Seeing her distress, Danny was quick to say, “Don’t worry, missus, it doesn’t matter now. It’s not coming any more. It’s here. It’s already here.”
Janet was around the table and digging into the pockets of Danny’s coat, never mind how she felt about doing it before. At that moment, he was the least threat she could imagine.
She retrieved the key. Taking the handgun never crossed her mind; she’d seen what good such things did against it. She ran over to the kitchen door, unlocked it and swung it wide.
And there was the familiar, as if summoned, some distance away across the yard, but already building up into a full charge at the joyful, rapturous sight of her.
It was no coincidence it was there. It had been drawn by the only light showing on the property. Janet leapt back and slammed the door shut.
She thought she may have seconds to turn and flee before the monster started to batter down the door. Instinct made her drop instead. That simple act stopped her skull from being caved in.
As she hit the floor the door blasted inward. Instead of striking her in full, it deflected off her bowed back, sending her flying across the kitchenette. The door struck like an arrow into the wall cupboards, smashing them to kindling.
Danny remained seated in his chair, untouched. The table was swept away as Janet flew across the room. It flipped over with her heaped beside it.
The familiar’s head was crammed in the doorway, a yowling severed head flattened out and twisted into a jubilant grin. No dirty phosphorescence hindered the monster this time or batted it away into the night. If Doug was right and Janet had in some way fortified the house with an inadvertent curse, then such a thing didn’t extend to the workers’ cottage.
The familiar began to shove its way in.
***
Doug approached as close as he dared to the man on the ceiling. He thought he recognised him. The same man who arrived at the house three nights ago in the jeep just before Doug stole it. The dead woman’s partner. The vengeful husband. The witch.
Nothing appeared too wrong about
him, except for where he was hung. And the eyes. He couldn’t have been dead very long. He hadn’t started to rot like the birds. The face was unmarked in death. Nothing too noteworthy about it. Ordinary. It looked like it hadn’t experienced much joy in life. The hair might’ve been brown once. Wild hands covered in blood had pulled through that hair, shaping it into shiny plaques and glued spikes. Patches of dried blood prickled the down on his neck, cheeks and chin, bits of feathers pasted to them. With his outstretched arms the man looked like some large bird of prey himself, a most ferocious one, frozen in the act of swooping. But something else about the man disturbed Doug – beyond the blood and out-of-kilter location. There was something else out of sorts with him … exactly what, he couldn’t say.
Even if Doug wasn’t sure about the face, he recognised the clothes. The man was still wearing the same outfit worn three days prior. Yeah, he must have been too preoccupied to bother changing. The clothes were filthy now, stiff and black with dried blood. The sleeves were rolled to the elbows as if in preparation for a lot of hard yakka. Doug supposed there had been.
He kept returning to the dead man’s face. His eyes were open, but that didn’t mean anything. They appeared wiped clean. They were rolled right back into his head. Only white showed, with red veins threaded through them. Doug had not a clue how he was kept up there. He appeared stuck to the ceiling like a magnet, or a bug.
Was being up there a necessary part of the ritual? Doug couldn’t imagine the witch would want to die, not until he’d seen his vengeance carried out. Doug felt no satisfaction in finding him this way. It only made him more afraid. It might mean the witch was so sure of what he’d created, he didn’t need to stick around.
But Doug suspected what happened here hadn’t gone exactly to plan. The place had a look of things having gone very wrong. You could see it in the man’s face. There was something wrong with it, outside of the blank-slate eyes and bloody tufts marring the otherwise smooth jaw. Realisation struck Doug like a blow. He arched his back to see better what he should have known in the first place.