by Adam Nevill
I kicked the door of the living room open and let it slam against the wall. Briefly wishing Ewan was still inside, so that I could deal with him in hand-to-hand combat, I stepped into the gloom. And then stepped straight back out again, choking on the carrion smell of rotten flesh – in the place where it was most powerful, the origin, where everything began. And where it seemed to have ended.
Leaning through the doorway, I peered into the room with my hand clamped over my mouth, but failed to see the immobile lump of a body. Unless his corpse was crammed behind the settee, he was not inside the room. So the smell of decomposing meat must have been issuing from one of the many bags littered about the floor, or it wafted from somewhere else within that meadow of garbage. A chicken wing in a heated and unventilated flat could produce the stench of a charnel house within days. And I thought it not unlikely that a box of fried chicken had been left out to ripen in my absence, in honour of the Goddess, because this was no longer my home, but a temple of filth dedicated to her.
The floor was strewn with food wrappers and screwed-up sheets of newspaper, crisp and yellow with urine. The strange order of the original garbage pyramids had gone, though, or been kicked into oblivion by a pair of dancing, dirty feet. But my visions of a destroyed music collection were not unjustified; Ewan had smashed every CD and record against the walls or snapped them between his long fingers.
I quickly noted that my books appeared strangely undisturbed; perhaps Ewan had discovered some residual respect for what had once been important in his life. A small mercy, but one that failed to give me much comfort. The sheer stench of their pages would now prevent their further use.
Hauling the curtains wide open and throwing the two big sash windows up as far as they would go, I begged the fresh air and sunlight to come inside the room. I then turned around to better survey the destruction in proper light. Like the victims of hurricanes, you just have to walk through the wreckage and see what’s left. And it was then that I saw Ewan.
I’d not seen his remains from the doorway, nor as I walked through the room, because my focus had been solely directed at the floor. But now, with my back to the glare of the open windows, I discovered what was left of him. On the ceiling.
Unthinking, I walked toward the opposite corner of the room. Unable to blink or take a breath through the cloth of my shirt, I moved on legs that I could not fully feel, while looking up at that terrible smear.
Within the dark, brownish stain of an entire human skin, turned inside out, I saw the unmistakable evidence of the long, oily strands of Ewan’s hair that had previously drooped from beneath a baseball cap. Where the bones and innards and eyes were, to this day I will never know, but I was struck with an impression that he’d shed his skin while departing the room through the ceiling, at considerable haste, and in the most uncomfortable manner imaginable.
1. For she doth declare that when all is done, the god-man shall be given passage into the light of a hidden sun. 2. And lo, he will be stripped of all earthly things to enter her kingdom, where such beauty and riches beyond the dreams of lowly men will await him, her chosen love. 3. Yea, the god-man shall lie down with her, as does the proud groom with his sweet bride, and they shall be joined for all time. 4. And as a babe doth enter the low world, without raiment or hair, and wet with a mother’s red blessings, so will ye come unto me. 5. And pure and clean ye shall be embraced.
On the floor, directly beneath the large, circular blemish on a ceiling once coloured a shade of porcelain satin, I spotted Ewan’s teeth. His yellow teeth, with dark matter still attached at the root. They were no longer grinning at me, though, but were now scattered amongst the litter, like seashells broken from a leather thong.
Pig Thing
T he end of light seemed to rise from the land rather than descend from the sinking sun, and a darkness that they seemed to feel upon their skin entered the bungalow. Day’s end came with its own taste and smell too, was peaty, and dewy with sodden ferns, and seeped inside to make the air as damp as the garden’s black earth. The skeletal branches of the mighty Kauri trees surrounding the bungalow vanished into the void of the moonless country night and made the children feel a strange dread that was much older than they were.
Had they still been living in England, this would have been an evening when bonfires were lit. And to the three children, although these nights were frightening, they had a tinge of enchantment too and were never as unsettling when their parents were inside the house. But tonight, neither their mother nor their father had returned from the rear garden that was enclosed by a vast wilderness of bush, ever intent on reclaiming their home, or so it seemed. Whenever the sun shone after the heavy showers of rain and made their world sparkle, their dad often remarked that he could hear the plants growing.
Dad had ventured out first, to try and get the car started in a hurry, shortly after nine o’clock. Twenty minutes later, her face long with worry, Mom had gone outside to find him, and they had not heard from her since either.
Before their mom and dad had left the house, the three children remembered seeing these same expressions of concern on their parents’ faces when Mom’s younger sister caught cancer and when Dad’s work closed down. That wasn’t long before the family travelled to New Zealand in the big ship for a fresh start on the day after the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. Tonight their parents had done their best to hide their anxiety, but the two brothers, Jack, who was nine, and Hector, who was ten, knew that the family was in trouble.
Together with Lozzy, their four-year-old sister, Jack and Hector sat in the laundry room of the bungalow with the door shut, where Mom had told them to stay before she went outside to find their father.
Jack and Lozzy sat with their backs against the freezer. Hector sat closest to the door by the bottles and buckets that Dad used for making wine. And they had been in the laundry for so long now that they could no longer smell the detergent and cloves. Only in Lozzy’s eyes existed an assurance that the situation might become an adventure with a happy ending. They were large brown eyes too, and prone to awe when she was told a story. And these eyes now searched Jack’s face. Sandwiched between his sister’s vulnerability, and the innocence that he recognised in himself, and his older brother’s courage, that he admired and tried to copy, Jack’s task was to stop Lozzy crying.
‘What d’ya reckon, Hector?’ Jack said, as he peered at his brother while trying to stop the quiver in his bottom lip.
Hector’s face was white. ‘We were told to stay here. They are coming back.’
Both Jack and Lozzy felt better for hearing Hector say that, although the younger brother suspected that his elder sibling would always refuse to believe that their mom and dad were not coming back. Like Dad, Hector could deny things. Jack was more like his mom, and by making their voices go soft he and his mother could sometimes get Dad and Hector to listen to their ideas.
But no matter how determined anyone’s voice had been earlier that evening, their dad had not been persuaded to stay inside the house. He had always rubbished their stories about the bush not being right; about there being something living inside it; about them seeing something peer in, through the windows of the two end bedrooms of the bungalow that overlooked the garden and the deserted chicken coop. When their dog, Schnapps, disappeared, their dad had said they were all ‘soft’ and needed to ‘acclimatise’ to the new country. And even when all of the chickens vanished one night, and only a few feathers and a single yellow foot were left behind, he still didn’t believe his children about the bush not being safe. But he took them seriously that night, because he had seen it too. Tonight, the whole family had seen it, together.
For months now, the children had been calling the intruder the pig thing. That was Lozzy’s name for the face at the windows. She’d seen the pig thing first when she had been playing with Schnapps at the bottom of the garden, amongst the dank shadows where the orchard stopped and the wall of silver ferns and flax began. Pig thing had suddenly reared up between
the dinosaur legs of two Kauri trees. And never had their mother heard Lozzy make such a fuss. ‘Oh, Jesus, Bill. I thought she was being murdered,’ she had said to their dad, once Lozzy had been taken inside the house and quieted. Up on the hill, east of the bungalow, even the boys, who were putting a better roof on their den, had heard their sister’s cries. Frantic with excitement and fear, they had run home, each carrying a spear made from a bamboo beanpole. And that was the day the idea of pig thing established itself more formally in their lives. But pig thing had returned and was no longer a children’s story.
That evening had played host to pig thing’s worst visit, because earlier that evening, as they had all sat in the lounge watching television, pig thing had come up and onto the sundeck, and had stood by the barbecue filled with rainwater, to look through the glass of the sliding doors, like it was no longer afraid of their dad. The pig thing had come out of the darkness beyond their bright windows and reared onto its hind legs to display itself like an angry bear, before dropping to all four trotters and moving back into the shadows of the Ponga trees at the side of their property. Pig thing could not have been visible for more than a few seconds, but the power in the thin limbs and the human intelligence in the eyes had frightened Jack far more than the large Longfin eel that had once swum over his boot in the creek.
‘Don’t. Oh, Bill, don’t. Let’s go together, Bill, with the torch,’ their mom had said to their dad, once he’d said he was going out to get the car started.
They were so far from Auckland, and, had either of the police officers based at the nearest station been available that evening, it would have taken them over an hour to reach the bungalow. Their dad had told their mother what the police operator had told him, after he called the police and reported an ‘intruder’, some kind of ‘large animal or something’ that was trying to get into their house. He couldn’t bring himself to say ‘pig thing’ to the operator, though that’s what it had been. Lozzy had described it perfectly. Maybe it took a four-year-old to see it properly. Pig thing wasn’t quite an animal, and was certainly not human, but it seemed to have the most dangerous qualities of each when it had risen out of the darkness, bumped the glass and then vanished.
The two police officers had been called away to a big fight between rival chapters of bikers on the distant outskirts of the city. And with pig thing so close and perhaps eager to get inside the bungalow, waiting for help to arrive was not an option that their father even entertained.
Their nearest neighbours, the Pitchfords, lived on their farm two miles away and hadn’t answered their phone when the children’s dad had called them. They were old too. They had lived in the national reserve since they were both children, and had spent the best part of seven decades within the vast cool depths of the bush, before much of the area was cleared for the new migrants. Mr Pitchford still owned hunting rifles that were as old as the Great War. He’d once shown the guns to Jack and Hector, and let them hold the heavy and cumbersome weapons that stank of oil.
After the children’s father ended his phone calls, he and their mother had exchanged a look that communicated to Jack a suspicion that the pig thing might have already visited their neighbours that night.
Going cold and shuddery, Jack believed that he had been close to fainting with fear. And all that repeated inside his mind was the vision of the creature’s long torso pressed against the window, so that its brown teats, inside that black, doggy belly hair, had squished like a baby’s fingers on the surface of the glass. Pig thing’s trottery hands had merely touched the pane, but that had been sufficient to make the glass shake in the door-frame.
There was nothing inside the house, not a door or piece of furniture, that could be used as a barricade. Their dad knew it, and Jack had imagined the splintering of wood and the shattering of glass, followed by his sister’s whimpers, his dad shouting and his mom’s screams, as pig thing came grunting with hunger and squealing with excitement into their home. He had groaned to himself and kept his eyes shut for a while after the form had disappeared into the lightless trees corralling the sundeck; had tried to banish the images of that snouty face and the thin girlish hair that fell about its leathery shoulders.
And then their mother had said, ‘Bill, please. Please don’t go outside.’ The children had guessed that their mom had put her hand on their dad’s elbow as she’d said this. They didn’t see her do it because, by that time, they had been herded into the laundry room, where they had stayed ever since, but they had known by the tone of her voice that she had touched dad’s arm.
‘Ssh, Jan. Just ssh now. Stay with the kids,’ their dad had said to their mom. He’d gone outside but no one had heard the car engine start. The Morris Marina was parked at the bottom of the drive, under the wattle tree where Hector had once found a funny-looking bone that might have come from a cow skeleton. Inside the laundry, the children had all huddled together and silently strained their ears and prayed for the sound of the car engine, but they were left disappointed. And since he’d gone for the car they had heard nothing more from Dad at all.
The new and sudden gravity introduced into their evening had increased with every passing minute as a stillness inside the house, and a heaviness that had made them all aware of the ticking of the clock in the hall; it was the very thickening of suspense around their bodies.
Their mother had eventually opened the laundry door to report to the kids. She was trying to smile but her lips were too tight. On her cheeks were the red lines made by her fingers when she held her face in her hands. Sometimes she did that at night, sitting alone at the kitchen table. She did it a lot when Dad was out looking for Schnapps, day after day. And Mom had never liked the new house, or the surrounding countryside. She didn’t like the whistles and shrieks of the birds, or the yelps in the night that sounded like frightened children, or the animal tracks in the soil beneath her washing line that spun around in the fierce winds, or the fat, long eel that they had seen by the creek with a lamb gripped between its jaws, or the large sticky red flowers that nodded at you as you walked past, or the missing dog, or the stolen chickens . . . Their mother didn’t like any of it, and she had said that she doubted she would ever become a Kiwi. She had moved to this place for their dad; Hector and Jack knew that. And now she was missing too.
Holding Lozzy’s Wonder Woman torch, because their dad had taken the big rubber flashlight from the kitchen drawer where the matches were kept, they had heard their mother calling, ‘Bill. Bill. Bill!’ and trying to smother the tremble in her voice as she went out the front door and then walked past the side of the house towards the car. Her voice had gone faint and then stopped. Just stopped.
And the fact that both of their parents had vanished without a fuss – no shout or cry or scuffle had been heard – had made the two boys hopeful that their mom and dad would soon come back inside. But as the silence lengthened, their heads had become busy with some dreadful ideas, including one that suggested that whatever had taken their parents had been so quick and so silent that they’d never had a chance to escape. Not a hope out there in the dark with it.
Lozzy had sobbed herself into a weary silence after seeing the pig thing on the sundeck, and had then begun whimpering after her mother’s departure. For the moment, she had been placated by each of her older brothers’ reassurances, lies and brave faces. But her silence would not last for long.
Lozzy stood up. She was wearing pyjamas. They were yellow and had pictures of Piglet and Winnie the Pooh printed on the cotton. Her hair was tousled and her feet were grubby with dust. Her slippers were still in the lounge; Mom had taken them off earlier to remove a splinter from her foot with the tweezers from the sewing box. Although the soles of the children’s feet were getting harder, from running around barefoot all day outside, they still picked up prickles from the lawn and splinters from the sundeck. ‘Where’s Mummy, boys?’
Immediately, Jack patted the floor next to him. ‘Ssh, Lozzy. Come and sit down.’
Fr
owning, she pushed her stomach out. ‘No.’
‘I’ll get you a Tip Top from the freezer.’
Lozzy sat down. The freezer hummed and its lemon glow emitted a vague sense of comfort and familiarity when Jack raised the cabinet lid. Hector approved of the ice-cream trick, and, after a deep breath, he returned his stare to the laundry door. He sat with his chin resting on his knee, both hands gripping the ankle of that leg, listening.
Committed of face, Lozzy tucked into the cone loaded with Neapolitan ice-cream.
Jack shuffled to sit next to Hector. ‘What d’ya reckon?’ He used the same tone of voice before he and his brother crossed a waterfall in the creek, or explored the dark reeking caves up in the hills that Mr Pitchford had told them to ‘steer clear of, lads’, or shinned across a tree fallen over a deep gorge in the steamy tropical bush surrounding their house. The forest stretched all the way to the crazy beaches of black volcanic sand, where the blowholes and riptides prevented them from swimming.
Hector was the eldest and in charge, but he had no answer for his brother about what to do. But he was thinking hard. His eyes were a bit wild and watery too, so Jack knew that his brother was about to do something. And that frightened him. Already he imagined himself holding Lozzy when there were only the two of them left inside the laundry room.
‘I’m gonna run to the Pitchfords,’ Hector said.
‘But it’s dark.’
‘I know the way.’
‘But . . .’ They looked at each other and each of them swallowed. Even though Jack hadn’t mentioned the pig thing, they had thought of it at the same time.
Hector stood up, but he looked smaller than he usually did.