Pretty Little Dead Things

by Gary McMahon

  "Usher." His voice is low, quiet, almost pleasant to hear.

  His head turns through one-hundred and eighty degrees, so he faces me right-side-up.

  "Who are you?"

  The crab-man shuffles forward and flips upright into a sort of bastardised kung-fu stance: legs apart, torso rigid, arms held across the body and hands pointed like spears. He is wearing a pair of soiled pyjamas. His feet are bare; the toes are long and crooked, the nails yellow and sharp as claws. They scrabble on the floor, sounding like rats scurrying under the boards.

  "Who are you?" I say again, staring him down and keeping the gun trained on him, judging his movements.

  "I am many. We are one. How's the wife and kid, Usher? Whoops – I forgot. They're in here. With us." Slowly, gracefully, he performs a perfect ballet pirouette, stretching up on those ugly toes. The heaped mattress filling shifts on the floor, rising in small heaves and humps around his feet.

  I know enough to realise that Ryan South is not alone inside this body; there are others in there with him, possibly even keeping him prisoner in his own frail cage of bones. "I want to speak with Ryan South. He and I have unfinished business." I straighten my arm and point the gun at his face.

  He smiles. A long, thin purple tongue flicks out between his thin blue lips, licking his chin and leaving a trail of yellow sputum. Behind me, in the other room, the babies begin to cry. From the distant kitchen comes the sound of feet and hoofs clattering on the walls and tabletop, of mutilated bodies thrashing and falling heavily to the floor.

  "Just cut the fucking act and show me who you are. Or let me talk to Ryan South. It won't take long. I just need him for a minute or two." My finger aches to pull the trigger, but I am not sure if I want to shoot the twisted man before me or use the gun on myself.

  Then he sinks to the floor, hands coming up to cover his face. He is weeping: long, heavy, drawn-out sobs. "Please," he wails. "Help me." He moves his hands away from his face and I look into the eyes of the man who killed my family. But then, almost immediately, I realise that he did not do it alone. Whatever was inside him a matter of seconds ago was also there that night: they used him as a puppet, controlling him.

  He smiles again, and then shakes his head.

  I sink to my knees on the worn carpet. The babies continue to cry, slamming their little crucified bodies into the wall: a choir of wailing stillbirths.

  "Is this what you want?" He stands, rising slowly from the white mattress stuffing, like some ancient sea god from the surf. "Do you want to kill him? Is vengeance what you seek, pilgrim?"

  I look at the gun, then back at the man who stands before me with his arms outstretched. It is a short distance between the two, one that I feel I could travel if only I knew how to push myself.

  "Do it, Usher. Do it, now. Take another step on your journey. The power you have has always been inside you, but it took a little push to release it from out of the depths. Now it calls to you, as it calls to us… and to others without names or faces. Can you feel them spinning towards you across the gulf, reaching for you in search of a way in?" He drops his hands to his sides. "Go all the way. Break on through."

  "What do you want from me?" I raise my head and the tears stream down my cheeks. None of this makes sense – even the fact that I am here, with a gun in my hand and a family-sized hole in my heart.

  "Shoot him. End his life. Take another step towards the dark." He steps forward, approaching me. His movements are smooth, unhindered.

  I point the gun at him and try to pull the trigger, but something inside me snaps and my finger refuses to squeeze. I see it in my mind's eye: finger twitching, bullet firing, head exploding, blood misting before his shattered face. But none of it happens.

  None of it happens as I would have wished.

  Wished.

  Make a wish:

  I wish you were here.

  Rebecca. Ally. My loves. I wish you were here.

  "Let us make this easy for you." He reaches into the folds of his pyjama top and pulls out a thin-bladed kitchen knife. "Just watch." He takes the knife and slashes his own face, drawing a long, deep gash across first one cheek and then the other.

  Skin tears like paper, blood flows like tears. He then uses the other hand to grab his lips, pulls them away from his mouth, grasping them between finger and thumb, and neatly slices them off. He throws the meat into a corner, laughing through blood. Bloody laughing.

  Then he starts work on the arms. The shoulders. The chest. The belly. The throat.

  "Memento mori," he says; they say. Gurgling on blood as if it were nothing but mouthwash. It is the first time I have heard that phrase, but somehow I know deep inside me that I will hear it again… I will hear it again, but I do not know where or when. Maybe when I do, things will become clear, and I will discover the nature of the being that stands before me, performing an act that I cannot.

  And I watch. I watch and I gain a perverse pleasure from seeing the man I have grown to hate mutilate his own body in such a way. It is only when I tell myself that he is not doing this to himself – that others are doing it for him – that I finally snap and do what I came here to do.

  Too late, much too late, I point the gun and pull the trigger. The gun does not go off. I pull the trigger again and again.

  Again.

  "Memento mori."

  Then I stand back and watch in silence as Ryan South cuts himself out of this world and into another, where something dark waits patiently for him, washing itself in blood. His blood. My family's blood. All our blood.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  After watching Ryan South die – or, if I'm to be honest about what happened, after I participated in his death by not stepping in to help – everything took on a clarity that terrified me. Suddenly the world became opaque and I could see the machinery that hums beneath; each layer of reality was etched clearly on the glass, and all I had to do was reach out and touch them.

  That was when I began to read books on religion and spirituality, and to study obscure occult texts written by anyone from great religious leaders and half-mad prophets to drunken poets. It didn't take me long to realise that in this context the Dalai Lama had much in common with Walt Disney: both were fabricating their own version of reality, and one was just as relevant as the other.

  There is no forbidden knowledge: everything is permissible. We choose which reality we want to see early on in our lives, usually encouraged by parents and loved ones, or enemies and abusers, and we stick to that version for the rest of our days. But sometimes our faith in that choice is swayed, and we begin to see glimpses of something else… something more.

  Vincent Van Gogh did not paint in forbidden colours, Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights was not a religious vision, and the strange imagery and eerie mysticism of a painting like The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke is just as real as a photograph.

  My early studies had incorporated such commonly available volumes as the Bible, the Torah and the Koran, along with several less widely known Muslim and Buddhist texts. And then I devoured every other religious or mystical doctrine I could lay my hands on, however esoteric – texts on occult science and fringe belief systems. From there I had strayed into darker territory, and managed to get hold of books whose very existence was thought to be fiction. These latter volumes confused me even more, providing no real answers, only glimpses of a form of madness that I felt unable to examine any closer.

  My studies came to an end one day when I was walking on the beach in Whitby, where I had gone to visit a young girl who was hailed as a natural medium. This girl could speak with the dead, or so it was said, but when I got there all I found was a confused teenager with a lot more imagination than the average thirteen year-old.

  Walking along the front, I came to a small fenced area containing a beat-up old merry-go-round and an out of tune calliope. There were various Victorian penny games in what amounted to a tiny arcade, and one of them caught my eye.

  I walked towards the booth
and looked at the large glass case. Inside it was a clockwork chicken collapsed beside a small toy piano. I fished a coin from my pocket and slid it into the slot. The tiny player-piano started up, and after several failed attempts the bedraggled clockwork chicken jerked to its feet. As the tinny music played, the chicken began to dance. I watched it until my money ran out, and came away with an insight that made me quit the esoteric reading matter and concentrate instead on what was really important – people, and how I might help them.

  We are all like that clockwork chicken, dancing to the tune of a toy piano and only ever allowed to stop when the money runs out. But when some unseen hand puts another penny into the slot, we are forced to start all over again, dancing to a hideous tune until our legs break.

  We dance and we dance, but we never know whose hand feeds money into the slot. All we can do is keep going until the dance is over.

  Back at the house I sat downstairs and stared out of the patio doors into my garden, thinking once again about that stupid chicken in its dusty case – amazed because I hadn't thought about it in years.

  It was by now late afternoon and shadows were gathering under the bushes and at the rear fence. A lone butterfly wafted across the lawn, hovered for a while over a certain patch of grass, and then moved on. There were eyes on its wings. The design didn't resemble eyes: there were actually eyes watching me from the insect's beautiful wings. Things were slipping through; or perhaps it was I who was slipping, and inch by inch my grief was pushing me towards the crease in reality where the Pilgrim walked.

  I stood and walked to the bookshelves. My hand strayed over the spine of some of the books I had read years ago, looking for an answer when all along I should have been looking for the right question.

  I turned away and trudged to the foot of the stairs. Dust motes spun in silence, drifting in the air like unfettered souls. But there was no such thing as the human soul – not in the terms of an isolated entity separate from the body. Mind and body are one; we are what we are and after we die we become something else, moving on to somewhere else. The only question worth asking is, "when"?

  Ellen was still there, somewhere. She was dead, but still present in the universe. Just like my family. My acceptance of this was the only thing keeping me going.

  Memento mori: Some day you shall die.

  The phrase hinted at the only truth that was not open to debate.

  The idea of death had not frightened me for so long that it had finally begun to represent some kind of comfort. The one thing that did scare me about my own mortality was the possibility that I might not catch up with my wife and child. Rebecca and Ally had moved on so long ago, and had such a head start on me, that I couldn't be certain they had not left me behind for good.

  I started up the stairs, placing one foot in front of the other, just as I always did. The only religion in which I believe is that of forward motion: keep on going, no matter what, and you will always find yourself somewhere, even if it is the place you least desire to be. But perhaps it's the place you need to be.

  The three girls were now barely even visible: just smudges in the air. Spinks was merely a dark patch against the wall. Ellen had not joined them; her presence was elsewhere, and I doubted that I would ever see her again.

  As far as I could tell, these girls had been used as signifiers; their grisly deaths were nothing more than a method of preparing the way, setting the mood for whatever the Pilgrim was attempting to bring through into our world. I had no idea what that thing might be, but once, a long time ago, he had tried to force it into the body of his sister and failed because of a murderous peasant boy who took it upon himself to kill a witch.

  I also knew now that Kareena Singh had gone willingly, and the very fact of her presence in my house meant that, after death, she had come to have second thoughts. Perhaps once she was closer to the thing the Pilgrim was summoning, the darkness at the edge of the world, she had seen its true face and realised the error of her ways. Or perhaps she had simply realised that she had been wrong. I would never know for certain.

  The room that Rebecca and I had once shared – the master bedroom – was one into which I ventured rarely, and it had been locked up for many years prior to the events of this endless week. I went in there now, knowing on some level that I had to be close to the family I missed. I needed their help, even if they were so very far away.

  I looked around the room, taking it all in. The wardrobe where her clothes still hung, the bed we had slept and made love in, the antique dressing table she had inherited from an old aunt; her hairbrushes on the side, the bottle of her favourite perfume. All of it untouched, left there as some kind of shrine. My eyes stung and my throat went dry. I wanted to walk towards that stuff – her stuff – but my legs had turned to stone.

  There was power here, of a kind: the power of those loved and lost, of the ones we cling to even in our darkest hours.

  But if this room was one that I hardly ever entered, there was also one into which I had not set foot at all since their deaths.

  I turned and walked out onto the landing, feeling the windgust of the ghosts out there if not actually seeing their forms, and stepped across to Ally's room. The white door was looking slightly grubby now, and the handle had always been loose. The door was never locked – there was no need; I simply never went inside.

  I opened the door and stepped into the past, feeling a cold wind caress me as I crossed the threshold. The posters on the walls were still intact, if a little dusty; none of them had come loose. Ponies and puppies and cartoon characters. The wallpaper was a design Rebecca and I had picked out together: colourful clouds and moons and stars, with cartoon cherubs lounging amid the celestial clutter.

  Stuffed toys lay in a group at the top of the bed, clustered up against the headboard. Their glassy eyes stared at me, not judging, just watching, and I felt a tug somewhere deep inside – the tug of a small hand clutching at my heart.

  I got down on my knees and closed my eyes. The power was stronger here, as I had known it would be. I could feel them, both of them, and my desire to see them, even one last time, almost overcame me.

  I said their names over and over again, feeling something stir. I called upon them to aid me, to protect me as best they could, and I'm sure that there came an answer: soundless, wordless, like a silent breath on my cheek.

  I recited lines from ancient prayers once carved in stone, a section of the Torah. Then I spoke the words of a William Blake poem; recited an old Beatles song; a paragraph from John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, which had always been Rebecca's favourite book. I finished by singing Ally's favourite nursery rhyme: Baa-Baa Black Sheep.

  It is not the content of the incantation that matters, but the power of the emotion behind it. Magic is an inexact science, and it can often be made up on the spot. This is what most people do not understand: the words, the phrases, mean nothing, but the thing which holds the meaning is what lies between the lines. Elmer Lord understood this – it was a similar magic to that inherent in his tattoos. I understood it, too. I always had.

  The real magic is interstitial, it lies in-between what we know and do not know. Enchantment lives in the gaps between what we feel and what we say, what we hear and what we miss.

  My tattoos became animated, the ink flowing across my body, running in narrow, coloured rivers before returning to recreate the symbols of protection they were always meant to be. I felt my friend Elmer Lord's art within me; I heard the sound of the tattoo gun and felt the tip of the needle pierce my flesh. Then I felt as if I were being filled with positive energy.

  I knew that my family were kneeling alongside me and that despite my old betrayal they still loved me, and always would.

  I stood and walked to a door in the opposite wall. It was a built-in cupboard, where Ally had always hidden whenever we played hide-and-seek. She kept her favourite possessions in there, the stuff that she wanted no one else to handle. I opened the door and looked inside.

  P
art of me wanted to see her hiding, crouched in the same spot she always hid. But I knew that wasn't feasible – that it would not be so easy. If ever I did catch up with them, it would cost me more than the simple opening of a door.

  It was there. The mirror. I had picked it up in an old secondhand shop for her fifth birthday, when all she had wanted had been a dressing table like her mother's and a full-length mirror. She loved dressing up, and Rebecca allowed her to play with make-up as long as she didn't make a mess.

  Ally had loved the mirror; it had been her "bestest present". I wept when she stood before it dressed in some of her mother's old clothes; my little girl turning into a little woman in the glass. The mirror had always remained her favourite thing. Nothing we bought afterwards could ever replace it in her affections.

  Scrying is simply another method of creating a formula to access elsewhere. An ancient Arabic treatise, De aspectibus, outlines much of the power of mirrors. Its author, a man called Alhazen, studied the subject at length, and his book is considered the ultimate written record of the properties of reflective glass. I had read the volume during my early studies, and it had made such an impression that I had subsequently avoided all mirrors for a year.