You freeze up. You would open your mouth to answer, but he’s already connecting the dots in his head.
‘Uh huh,’ he says, and scratches his rough chin. The noise of it sounds like sandpaper. ‘It was definitely the Henry place. How strange.’
‘Strange? How so?’ Your acting skills have been worn precariously thin tonight. You wish you’d just stayed put on the couch earlier. You wish you’d never started building the town. More than anything, you wish you could just tell Marshall to mind his damned bees wax.
‘Well, yeah . . . what with the real fire in the Henry place last year,’ he said. ‘What a coincidence!’
You watch a frown form as his gaze shifts from the new Henry house across the street to the black remains of the model on the garage shelf. Marshall then looks at the dark outline of the tarp for several seconds before his widened eyes fall on you.
Perhaps it is just your heightened nerves, but you could swear he looks paler now. He backs away from you a step. Apparently, Marshall has a lousy poker face.
‘You had better go inside, now,’ you say. ‘It’s dangerously cold.’
He tugs his robe closed and treads lightly toward his home. You watch him hurry inside. Marshall’s door shuts with a click. You stand in the crisp November night for a further five minutes to check he doesn’t come back out.
Just in case.
Filamo
IRENOSEN OKOJIE
The last monk told the tongue that holding a naked sheep’s head underwater would undo it all. Some time before that, prior to the madness beginning, old Barking Abbey loomed in the chasm, grey, weather worn, remote. Inside the Abbey, a tongue sat in the golden snuff box on an empty long dining table: pink, scarred and curled into a ruffled, silken square of night. The previous week, the tongue had been used as a bookmark in a marked, leather-bound King James Bible, page 45 where the silhouette of a girl had been cut out, loaded with words like high, hog, clitoris, iodine, cake, its moist tip glistening in temporary confinement. The week before that, the tongue had been left in the fountain at the back of the Abbey, between winking coins. There, it pressed its tip to a stray ripple, cold and malleable, shaping it into a weight, pulling it down, under, up again. Several weeks back, it had been in a hallway window, leaning into Mary’s hands, whose fingertips tasted of a charred, foreign footprint from the grass. Her fingertips had sensed a change in the air before the monks came, when the corridors were quiet, expectant. Molecules had shifted in preparation for a delivery. The monks arrived through a hole in time on a cold, misty morning, transported via a warp in space that mangled the frequencies of past and present. They arrived curling hands that did not belong to them. Unaware that this would have consequences none foresaw, except a tongue bending in the background, unaware of the repercussions of time travel.
Each time the tongue was moved, it lost a sentence. The monks missed this in their ritual of silence. They had done for weeks, walking around rooms with arms behind their backs, bodies shrouded in heavy brown robes, shaven, sunken heads soft to the touch. They trod this new ground carrying yolks in their mouths, hardening as morning became noon, noon became evening, and evening became night.
One morning, the monks found a miller’s wife gutted on the stone wall enclosing the allotment, a white felt cap shoved into her mouth, her husband’s initials embroidered in blue at the top right corner of her bloody apron: V.O. They threw salt on her skin. The tongue tasted the sharpness, and that night, Dom Vitelli made the noise of a kettle boiling in his sleep. He began to tremble covered in a cold sweat. He fell to the floor, stuck.
The next morning, the monks rose to discover the empty well near the stone outbuilding surrounded by plump, purple jabuticaba fruit, tender and bruised, the colour dwindling in areas as though a god was sucking it through a crack in the sky. Lonely figures in their heavy brown robes, the monks held their hands out as they circled the abbey. They heard the sounds of buses on the high street, car doors slammed shut, trains grinding to a halt. They caught items that fell through noise, things they had never seen: a white adapter plug from the sound of a plane speeding through the sky, a black dog muzzle Dom Oman later took to wearing when sitting by the fountain, a knuckle duster that fell from the sound of a baby crying. They placed these items at the altar in the chapel, flanked by candles on either side whose blue flames bent, then shrank sporadically. They took turns holding their palms over the flames. By the time the monks began their chores, the cockerel that had fallen over the walls from a car horn began to smash its beak into a jabuticaba fruit. Afterwards, it jumped into the stream connected to the Roding River, following a thinning, yellow light it attempted to chase into the next day.
The tongue was warm in Filamo’s pocket, pressed against a copper coin bearing the number two in Roman lettering. The musty taste of old items passing through lingered. Filamo, a cloaked figure, a betrayer amongst the monks, stood outside the prayer room, fingering a swelling on the tongue, listening quietly. Dom Emmanuel paced inside, the only other place speaking was permitted aside from supper during this imposed period of silence. A slightly forlorn figure, he shook. The bald patch on his head looked soft like a newborn’s. Light streamed through the stained glass window where three naked cherubs wore angry, adult expressions and had changed positions again overnight. One lay on its side holding an ear, the other was eating stigmata injuries and the third at the bottom-left corner had tears running down its cheeks into the jabuticaba fruit growing through its chest. Dom Emmanuel faced the silence of the cross on the nave wall without the figure of Christ, which had turned up at supper two days before, bleeding between slices of bread. There were three deep, wooden pews behind the Dom, half-heartedly built, scratched on the seating. Dom Emmanuel began to walk back and forth. Then, he paused momentarily as though to catch his breath, chest rising and falling. He held his arms out, confessing that lately he had begun to worry about his lover withering in a wormhole. The man Dom Emmanuel loved had not made it through this time, stuck in a winter that would quickly ice his organs and distribute the seven languages he spoke into the orbit for other monks to grab and stow away along with new disguises.
Dom Emmanuel could feel that cold in his bones, an absence of language, lightness in his tongue. Recently, Dom Emmanuel had dreamt of them running through lush, sunlit fields naked, penises limp at first, then turgid, moist at the tips, till thick spurts of sperm dribbled and their irises glinted. He missed the warmth of holding another body skin to skin, the innocence of early youth, the freedom of making mistakes. He moaned that his hands ached; that they had begun to talk to him, consumed by restlessness, till he sat up in bed sweating, tense, listening to a distant mangled cry travelling towards his organs, to his hands. For days the cry had come to him each night while the others slept, on each occasion, magnified by the constant silence, taut, suffocating. The cry grew in volume, weight, intent. Till he was led by it, until he found himself stumbling outside into the grounds, disrobing by the darkened stream gleaming in the night. Naked, covered in bite marks, he hunched down to catch things from the water; Siamese green lizards who shared an Adam’s apple, a piece of jabuticaba fruit which grew another layer of purple skin each time you touched it, one cherub whose eyes had blackened from things it had witnessed upstream, a lung wrapped in cling film. Surrounded by his discontented small audience, Dom Emmanuel removed the cling film, crying as he ate flesh. It tasted like a man he once paid four gold coins in Tenochtitlan to keep him company, to be rough then tender with him afterwards, who had stuck his curious tongue into his armpits as if digging for his body’s secrets using a pliable instrument. Dom Emmanuel did not turn around when Filamo moved towards him lifting the blade. The cut to his neck was swift. He fell to the floor, blood gushing. The cry from his lips was familiar. It had been chasing him for days. He pressed his hands desperately against his neck, attempting to catch one last item rising through the blood. Dom Emmanuel died thinking of his lover’s sou
r mouth, praying into it. The wound on his neck a cruel smile, clutching the lines of an old rectory sign bearing Roman number two in the left corner, his talking, gnarled hands slowly eroding. And half his body purple from a winter he already knew. While the monks scattered in shock, the tongue inherited Dom Emmanuel’s last words, El Alamein.
When the saints arrived through their time cannon, continuing their ancient tradition as watchmen over the monks, the night was onyx-shaped. A faint howl followed them onto the tower. The Abbey was formidable in the moonlight: imposing, damp, grey, surrounded by high stone walls. The saints were orange skinned from the Festival of Memory. Each had a feature missing but something to replace it within their bodies. Saint Peter was missing an ear, yet had a small, translucent dragon’s wing growing against a rib. Saint Augustine had lost a finger on his left hand but had two hearts, one pumping blood, the other mercury, so much so his tongue became silvery at particular angles. Saint Christopher had lost an eye and gained a filmy, yellow fish iris that cried seawater no matter his mood. This time, each had been fired from a cannon. Temporarily deaf, they clutched instructions for short transformations in golden envelopes. They wandered the cold halls lined with carvings and paintings on the walls, while the monks were gathered at supper, oblivious.
The saints deposited the envelopes beneath their beds. Each individual instruction for transformation sealed, yet written in the same long, right-leaning handwriting by the same white feather dipped in blue ink. Each slip of yellow paper wrinkled at the corners, worn from weather, prayer, silence. Then, the saints fashioned three flagpoles from sticks they found in the cellar. They planted them on the grounds. The blue flag for go, red for pause, breathe, green for transform. Afterwards, on their journey back to two golden towers erected between wormholes, the saints became infants in the wind.
Later that night, the remaining Doms filed from the front of the abbey holding their golden envelopes. Dom Ruiz led the way, stopping to take his position at the green flagpole. The other Doms followed. Dom Mendel, slighter than the rest, took a breath on the steps by the Roding’s stream. The white hexagon several feet from the flagpoles spun seductively. In the library window, old leather-bound books nursed the wisdom of hands slowly erased by time. The Doms took their positions on all fours. Light trickles of dark rain began to fall. They uttered Pater tollis peccata. Their mouths distorted. The bell rang. They darted forward, towards the centre and each other growling. A sharp, splintered pain shot through their heads. Spots of white appeared in their vision. Bones cracked as they expanded, organs grew, teeth lengthened, fur sprouted, hooves appeared, nostrils widened. Their sense of smell heightened. Dom Ruiz became a boar lunging at Dom Mendel the centaur, chasing him with an urgency that had his teeth chattering. Dom Kamil became an epicyon hunting Dom Augustine the procoptodon between all three flagpoles, through the other side of the white hexagon where the static hissed, then back up again. They snarled at the skyline, leaping, rushing, following the strong scent of old flesh emanating from the soil. They buried their faces in it, leaving large prints around the abbey that had a peculiar beauty from above. Three hours later, they retreated back to their starting positions becoming men again, exhausted bodies heaving. Speckles of blood fell on the golden envelopes, over the lines in foreign hands that had arranged into blueprints.
There were always injuries during a transformation. But the small, morphing nucleuses they had generated would flatten in their brains, rising again when necessary, mimicking the silhouettes of tiny watchmen. As their breathing steadied, they studied the red flag flapping in the wind for stop.
After the transformation, the silence within the abbey was heavier, loaded. Having been banished by the saints for the fallen monk in their midst, each monk was busy dealing with the repercussions of their borrowed hands. And who knew what that could do to a man? Seeds of doubt and mistrust had begun to take root in this fertile ground of the unspoken, watered by the saliva of sealed envelopes. The monks did not venture beyond the abbey, afraid of being sucked into a vacuum of noise they would not recognise. Noises of a future they felt unprepared for, frightened that the influences of an outside world would somehow shorten their time at the abbey. Everything they needed was within the abbey’s walls. They grew their own food using the allotment out back. At least twelve chickens were enough to feed from for a while, producing eggs for breakfast and the occasional comic attempt at escape. One chicken laid ten eggs that would not hatch, each filled with a finger of a new monk poking through deep red yolks. Somehow the Jesus figurine had found its way to these eggs. Stained by mud, it sat amongst them as they rolled and the other chickens leapt over the sound. Fed on bits of sullied bread, little Jesus waited patiently for a different kind of resurrection.
The saints made several visits back to the abbey through their time cannon to deliver items: salt, a bow and arrow, a television remote, nails, a hammer, three serrated knives. Several days after the transformation, Dom Augustine woke in the middle of the night barking like a dog, tongue slightly distended, skin clammy. The next morning, he began to set animal traps around the grounds: one on top of the tower, one in the allotment, one behind the middle pew in the prayer room, under his bed, one on the white hexagon slowly fading from damp and cold. After all, who knew what a man’s shadow would do while he pretended to look the other way? Dom Augustine felt a panic rising inside him. Each day his tongue loosened further, as if it would fall out at any moment. He did not know whether it was his increasingly intensified barking at nights that was the cause or his particular kink from banishment, from flight. There were always complications. He had arrived in the main chapel, between two tall marble grey pillars, deposited on the alabaster altar, naked and wrapped in a thin silvery film reflecting past angles of light. His limbs had hurt, his head throbbed. His breaths were slow, deep, attempting to acclimatise. He had broken through the film, instinctively grabbing at items from a past that would never appear, knocking over two large, white candlesticks on either side. Famished, he scrambled along the cold altar. He looked down; his gaze met the knowing blue eyes of a cherub who jumped up and down excitedly, showing him its scarred back from repeatedly falling through stained glass windows. Its mouth was purple after eating a combination of plump fruits and unidentifiable things. He’d broken his hands in just like all the other Doms: carving a small Jesus figurine, fixing the hole in the cellar roof, building a pantry. The ache in his hands never fully left, only dulling with time. His fear of items and sounds from the outside threatening to infiltrate the abbey had become so potent, one afternoon he had been washing his hands in holy water by the pantry when the sound of an axe lifting, falling, chopping, breaking, smashing had almost deafened him. Slow at first, coming from afar. Then closer, louder, heavier till he curled up by the metallic bowl of water screaming then barking, breaking the silence.
A week after Dom Augustine set the animal traps, parts of his body were found in each one. Pieces in the traps by the fading white hexagon looked like an offering. The axe the saints delivered had vanished. The tongue in Filamo’s pocket dined on splattered blood.
It was a chilly evening on the occasion Dom Kamil decided to perform his act of rebellion against the silence. A light frost covered the grounds, more jabuticaba fruit from the well scattered. Large pillars at the abbey’s entrance bore tiny cracks oozing a sticky, thin sap. The intricate, golden chapel ceiling depicting Old Testament scenes began to shed tiny specks of gold from the corners. Only an observant eye would notice the figures had begun to head in the opposite direction. Metallic bowls of holy water carefully placed outside room entrances collected reflections as if they were a currency. Dom Kamil awoke to find himself doused in kerosene and Doms Ruiz and Mendel absent. Throat dry, he trembled before swinging his legs over the bed onto the floor. The smell of kerosene was acrid. He did not call out. Instead, he slipped his dull, weighty brown cloak on, briefly running a hand over the length of wooden flute he’d kept close during t
he daytimes. For weeks he had found the silence unbearable, craving the joy music brought. He had resorted to wandering around the abbey with the flute he’d made secretly, rubbing his hands along it when his fingers curled and flexed with intent. Beyond the abbey walls, an ambulance siren wailed. Dom Kamil rushed outside, at least fifty yellow notes were strewn on the frosted ground. He scrambled between each one, eagerly opening them but they were mockingly empty. Distraught, he pulled the flute from his pocket and began to play. When Filamo set him alight he did not stop, playing urgently until he fell to his knees, the heat of the flames licking his skin, veins, blinding him. The sound of the flute hitting cold ground reverberated in the abyss, the ambulance siren shattered. A dark curl of smoke shrank into the tongue poking out from Filamo’s pocket contemptuously.
The next morning, the two remaining Doms wandered the halls with the taste of kerosene in their mouths.
On the fated Sunday that followed, Dom Ruiz and Dom Mendel began their last set of chores for the week orchestrated by the saints, setting scenes for destruction: ripping the pages of books in the library, defacing the expressions of religious figures in paintings hanging on walls, smashing up the organ in the chapel nobody had been allowed to play, flinging the black and white keys over the bodies of ten monks in the deep, open grave tucked behind the stone steps. They sprinkled salt on those bodies. And when those monks’ mouths were sealed shut again by snow from a future winter, they fed the chickens communion. After dying the underside of their tongues purple, they fished out the animal traps, assembling them into a circle at the abbey’s entrance because their hands could not help themselves. They danced within the circle until sweat ran down their backs, till their legs ached and the skyline became a blur. The nucleuses embedded in their brains rose, bubbled, spat. They danced for what felt like an eternity until finally they crawled indoors. Heavy eyed and wary of collapsing in their sleeping quarters, they sat across from each other at the long dining table, watching, waiting. They dared not sleep, until the saint in their peripheral vision began to scream, burning bright, burnished orange smog into their heads.
Best British Short Stories 2017 Page 10