by Gary McMahon
I glanced around, and then up, before following the Pilgrim through the opening. His stride was long and graceful, like that of a trained dancer. He was brimming with confidence, and knew that I was almost powerless here, in this place. His place.
He stopped before a set of steel doors. I waited. Finally he turned, his face glistening slug-like in the foetid darkness. "I hope you are prepared for what you are about to see." He seemed to grow and swell, taking up far too much room in the increasingly claustrophobic space.
"And what's that?" I stared him down, sensing his pleasure at this whole situation. "What's this all about, Pilgrim? Is it all just part of some endless game that you play? Are you just having fun?" I sounded unafraid but I was terrified.
He sneered, and then laughed. The sound was awful, like the gurgling drains of hell. "Oh, yes. I am indeed having so much fun. But there is a serious side to all this. The stage was set by those pretty dead things, all hanging like party favours and charging the atmosphere like leaking batteries, and now at last we have a vessel fit to contain the multitudes that will follow. Penny is such a lucky little girl. She will know pleasures that others cannot even bear to imagine."
"If you're so powerful, why can't you just open the door all by yourself and let it in – the darkness?" I was beginning to sense the limits of his power, and I doubted that he liked the fact I was constantly shifting my position within our dynamic.
"Even places like this have certain… rules. There is no such thing as true chaos; you above all people should be able to understand that. Chaos is just another name for order."
Something was nagging at me; an idea that had brushed up against me several times now, but was only just coalescing into something that I could put into words. "You're lying, aren't you? You're not some adventurer who cruises the realties for fun. You're trapped here, only able to flit into existence occasionally, when you are allowed… or if you are called. If you were even half as powerful as you claim, none of this would be necessary. None of it."
Something flickered across his face; an expression that could not be described in human terms but might just be a hint of weakness. It was like the tip of a serpent's tail flicking in darkness: sharp, fast, barely even there at all.
"I once had the thought that you might be some kind of priest, and that's not too far from the truth, is it? You are bound here, and your only possible way out is by arranging for something else to pass through, so that you can latch onto its back and ride it. You're like an insect, scuttling around behind the skirting boards of reality, stuck there feeding on crumbs and scraps, waiting to be let out."
The mask slipped, just for a second, and as his hairless face drooped I saw behind it a vast and infinite emptiness: a void that hungered for substance, but was cursed never to attain that which it coveted so intensely.
"This way," he said, and opened the steel doors.
I entered a large room that looked not unlike an average lounge in a normal home. Cheap furniture was arranged around the room, and pictures hung on the walls. There was a gas fire, a faux surround with a mantelpiece, and windows that looked out onto nothing, just an empty expanse devoid of feature and character. The room looked familiar, and it took me a while to realise that I had been inside here before. It was the Royale's living room.
They were all there, inside the room: Shawna and her husband Terry Royale, Baz Singh, in his expensive suit and shoes, Mr Shiloh, his mask now firmly back in place and his Pilgrim identity cast aside like a costume. They were standing in a circle, and at their centre was a cheap Formica dining table. On the table was a girl, lying on her back. A girl called Penny Royale.
She had been stripped down to her underwear, and the bruises on her body stood out livid against the light surface upon which she lay prostate, one arm dangling limply over the edge and the other clasped across her flat little chest as if in some final desperate act of self-protection. Her eyes were wide open, staring beyond us all, and her nose and teeth were broken. Blood had dribbled between her lips and onto her chin. Her left cheek was swollen, the bones beneath shattered, and there were finger marks on the pale skin of her throat.
Her mother stood over her. Her mother stood over her with something shining in her hand. Her mother looked at me as if I was the one committing some kind of atrocity. With something shining. In her hand.
Her mother.
Her mother looked at me and snarled.
Shining in her hand.
As my gaze travelled along Penny's poor little abused body, I saw that her stomach had been hacked open and the skin of her ribcage was peeled back like the flesh of an orange. Blood was beginning to congeal against her pale skin, and her innards hung out of the wound like clumps of red rope.
It was then that I finally looked at the knives: small, sharp blades in all of their hands, which they had been using to skin her.
Her mother, holding a knife.
Her father, holding a knife.
The benefactor of her finders-fund, holding a knife.
All shining in their hands.
Baz Singh had blood on his suit. Shawna Royale had blood matted in her badly-dyed hair. Terry Royale was crying, but the blood on his face destroyed any vestige of sympathy before the notion had even entered my head.
Blood; her blood. Penny's blood. They were all lathered in it.
Blood. Blood. Blood.
"I see you found my little gift," said Singh, nodding at the gun. His face was loose and hung as lifeless as an empty sack. His voice sounded like stones rattling in a box. I stared into his eyes, but the man I had dealt with was no longer in there. Instead there was a gap in the shape of a person – a gap clothed in skin. "I left it there for you. Thought… you… might be able to use it."
I realised then that Baz Singh was begging me for death. He wanted me to kill him, but at that moment the concept of mercy was the furthest thing from my mind.
Mercy was for those who deserved it.
I looked back at the corpse – the partially flensed corpse of poor, poor Penny Royale. She lay there like a slab of meat, a plaything for animals, and my heart groped towards her across that dreadful killing room. I could smell the flat, coppery odour of her blood, even see fine red particles still misting like a light red rain in the air. Seconds earlier, this grubby little coven of would-be witches had been hard at work, looking for the doorway that had been created inside her, and ignoring the precious young life as it bled from her body…
Something caught my eye then; a small fluttering, like the jittery movement of a bird's wings. There was something stirring in the ruin of Penny's belly: a small burned shape that could have been a foetus but was too ugly and mutated to be anything even resembling human. It rolled in the thickening blood and slowly pulled itself partway out of the hole in Penny's abdomen, its mouth opening and a terrible squalling noise issuing forth.
It was burned and blackened, but it was being born – born into this place, a way station from where it might then enter our world, our reality, and possibly stop us believing in the structure of what we saw around us.
"Say hello to our baby," whispered the Pilgrim.
I raised my hand and pointed the gun at the table, at the dead girl, at the thing being sired from her ruin. The creature's small white eyes were upon me; its singed tongue emerged from between cracked lips and flickered back and forth, back and forth.
"No," I said. "No." My mind was racing; images spun before my eyes. Reality falling apart, spinning away from the centre in a whirlwind of unbecoming… Then I pulled the trigger and the squealing thing exploded into a rain of ash.
The Pilgrim stepped back from the others, gliding as if on castors. He hissed at me, his eyes bulging from that smooth, bald head. "Kill them all. They did this – they skinned the girl."
Still, after everything that had happened here, he was playing his little games.
I trained the gun on the Royales and then on Baz Singh's empty features, wondering what could have possibly led
them here, to this. Even then, lost in my rage, I knew that the Pilgrim was toying with me, using me for some complex plan, and I fought against carrying out the task he was goading me into.
"Do it," he said, harshly. "Do what you failed to do last time – what you couldn't do to Ryan South. Take a step towards the dark; unleash the true potential of what's inside you, and join me on my pilgrimage. We can work wonders. We can take it all. Release the true nature of the power inside you. Let it out to breach realities, and we can rule over it all…"
I shot him. I shot him. I shot him in the head. In the throat. In the chest.
Bits and pieces of him flew off, spinning through the air like yanked doll parts, and I knew that I was not doing him any harm, but I kept on pulling the trigger until the bullets ran out. Then I pulled the trigger again, again, again…
Thick white appendages, like pale, hairless insect-legs, erupted from beneath the sham of his body. They groped in the air, with monstrous pincers snapping, and as I stared at them those hideous limbs began to sprout flowers. Tiny red and yellow and purple blossoms grew at speed from the bleached flesh, their petals opening to reveal tiny mouths ringed with diamond teeth.
The Pilgrim was a thing of masks: beneath each face there hid a new one, and at the bottom of them all was nothing but an endless pit of despair.
Baz Singh chose that moment to strive for redemption. He lunged at the Pilgrim's protean form, grabbing at the flailing limbs that swayed and lashed at the air. One of them cut his face, cleaving it down to the bone, and another latched onto his throat, the blossoms burrowing into the flesh and supping his blood.
Singh grappled with the monster, wrapping his own arms around the now frantic limbs, but he was no match for the Pilgrim. He was cast aside, flopping like a bloodied doll, and came to rest against the table upon which Penny Royale now stirred…
I stared at her poor little body, trying to convince myself that the sight was not genuine, that it was just another of the Pilgrim's games. But it was real. And it was awful. Penny's lifeless body had already hitched along the tabletop, and was now dropping down onto the floor, her back arching as if boneless and her face turned up to the ceiling. The blasted thing in her belly had partially reformed, and was moving her like a sack of old clothes, dragging her off the makeshift altar and towards the gaping onlookers.
I didn't know what to do. Of all the things I had seen, all the ghosts and entities I had ever encountered, this was the worst. It was the worst because, despite being dead, it was still human – still a little girl – and she needed her mummy.
Shawna Royale began to back away, her hands flapping in front of her breasts. She tried to scream, but no sound came; she tried to cry but there were not tears enough to wash away this horror. Instead she sank to her knees, lifted her hands, clasped them together and began to pray. Right at the end, she rediscovered her humanity, but it wasn't enough. It was pathetic.
Penny's stilted corpse jerked its way towards her mother, half walking, half crawling, mostly just flopping like a filleted carcass. It fell upon her, tearing with limp hands and biting with shattered teeth. Shawna just knelt there, her mind gone.
Then the Pilgrim once again stepped forward, those spidery albino limbs having retreated back inside his shell. His cracked face shone; his eyes rolled back in his head like onyx marbles. Through his broken skull I glimpsed pulsing translucent matter, like shredded wet plastic bags slowly filling with air…
His shell reforming from the darkness around him, the Pilgrim shook his head and smiled. "Not ready yet, Usher. Not yet. But some day you will be, and when that day comes I'll be walking alongside you, just as I have been for all these years, giving you a nudge, pushing you in the right direction. You may ignore the dead, but the dead will never ignore you. That slice of darkness inside you, it calls out to them, draws them in. It burns like a flame in the night."
And then he was gone. For now. But his final parting words remained, hanging in the air like ash:
"Memento mori."
I had failed to notice it before, but a strange glow had entered the room. I looked over towards the fireplace, where something was forming, knitting together from the darkness. It was a tree: small, stunted, charred, yet glowing from within. Pale flames licked around the edges of a hole in the trunk, then ignited and traced a route along the withered branches to engulf the whole thing.
The remains of the stillborn creature – the Pilgrim's Mistress partially reformed – slouched across the floor, called back to its prison. It moved slowly, pulling its blackened form along on spindly limbs, even using what few teeth had grown in its tiny, malformed mouth to gain purchase on the carpet. I kept watching as the monstrosity inched towards the burning tree, and stepped back as a tongue of white flame snatched it up and drew it into the silent conflagration.
I walked over to the table, where the others now stood, and dropped the gun at their feet. Shawna Royale was silent beneath the weight of her dead daughter; Terry, her useless husband, was staring at the floor. Baz Singh looked shocked, as if he had been caught in the middle of an explosion.
I picked up the girl and stepped away from the group, resisting the urge to tear them to pieces with my bare hands. I grabbed the table cloth and wrapped it around Penny's bloodied remains, attempting to treat her with the respect she had never been given in life.
I barely noticed as a battered and bloodied Baz Singh struggled wearily to his knees, then bent down and picked up the gun. He took some fresh bullets from the inside pocket of his jacket and slowly loaded the pistol. I could have stopped him, but I no longer cared what happened to these beasts. I had watched a man die before, and knew that I could live with what was about to happen.
Terry Royale had not moved since I entered the room. Nor did he move now, even as Baz Singh pointed the gun at his face. He seemed to welcome the sight of his own extinction.
"Leave," said Singh, nodding. "I'll take care of this." Blood poured from the ruin of his throat and his face was lacerated. He was a dead man anyway; at least this way he could exercise some control over the nature of his exit.
I looked again at the fiery tree. The pale flames had enveloped the charred entity, and rolled it gently in a huge hand of fire. The thing rotated, supported by the living flame, writhing in exquisite agony. It was still small, but it had grown – evolved by flames. As I watched, a single spark drifted from the tree, floated through the still air, and landed on the curtains. They caught fire immediately, going up as if they had been doused in petrol.
I turned and hobbled away from the fire.
The sound of gunshots followed me out of the door, blowing me back towards my own version of reality.
I stepped down from the ruined frontage of the dilapidated concrete tower, being careful not to do any more damage to the girl's body, the heat of the flames at my back and the memory of this night burned into my mind forever. Then I carried Penny home, through the night and the capering shadows, past the old bonfire and the broken down fence.
I carried her home and I put her to bed, and when I looked out of her bedroom window I could see, on the horizon, what looked like a burning tree on a distant hill. The shape that writhed in those endless flames no longer seemed triumphant; now it seemed agonised, as if the pain it endured was indeed eternal, and was starting all over again.
I turned away and tucked in Penny Royale, aware that even the dead need some form of comfort, even if it is from a stranger.
Then I went downstairs and put in a call to DI Tennant, asking him to come immediately to the residence of Shawna Royale. I used the mobile phone he had given me, and decided that it was a good gift after all. In the end it had come in handy. Again, Tebbit would have a lot of work to do if he wanted to keep my name out of this, but I trusted him to do what was right, what was just.
I stared at the framed school photographs of Penny Royale as I waited for Tebbit to arrive, hoping that the girl might now be allowed to rest in peace. Her death had been needle
ss, part of a failed ritual which was destined never to succeed, and the main culprit in her demise saw it all as part of a fucking game – a game whose meaning I could not even grasp.
Penny's parents would not be found, and her murder would enter the mythology of the Bestwick Estate, where it would be discussed over drinks in the local pubs and on windy street corners by women who wore bathrobes and slippers at midday.
The Pilgrim's motives were less easily resolved. I knew that I had not seen the last of him, but the next time I would be prepared. Now that he had shown his hand, I could take steps to beat it. At least that was what I hoped.
Poor Penny Royale had been doomed from the start – probably sold to the highest bidder before she was even conceived. In return for the empty promise of powers that I couldn't even begin to imagine, the Royales had created a daughter only to act as a vessel for something darker than even they had failed to estimate.