Clive had a sudden urge to hear something civilised, something human. He wanted to listen to the radio. Oh just to listen to something manmade. He thought about searching the house for a radio. But cowardice won through. He stayed routed to the chair. The idea of going out and listening to the radio in the car, popped into his head. But Clive knew that all he would get was static. And he dreaded running the battery dry. But to know that there were people out there. There was a notion lurking somewhere in his mind, that he needed to get away from this place come day break. It would be different during summer. When it was light until late evening and dawn came at four am. He would have more confidence then. By that time the health farm would be booming. It had to be or, there would be no or. All or nothing. Clive was uncomfortable, he wanted human company. He even hoped that Haslett would come round so that they could share a whisky and talk about the estate. He had to know that warm living human beings were nearby. That the universe was populated. The only sound in the house, apart from creaks and bangs, was the grandfather clock which ticked away in a soporific manner. He put away most of the claret and fell asleep, leaving Sabrina to chain smoke and read.
Deep tranquil drowning sea of sleep was harpooned by a blood simmering scream. Clive awoke with a start. His heart about to explode out of his chest, in a bloody spasm. Sabrina was cowering behind him. The moaning wind had started again. Sabrina whimpered and mouthed something to him.
‘Someone’s trying to break the door down!’
Clive hoped it was Haslett, doing his round perhaps. Did the bugger ever sleep? He gazed at the clock. It was 12:56 am. Was that feasible? Farmers work strange hours. But 12:56 am seemed a bit out of sync. What if it was those bloody travellers? Hoping that they could get squatter rights over Craglin House.
‘I was going to sleep, when I heard someone shout and bang the door.’
She was shaking. Her pupils were dilated. Clive pondered if he should go to the door. He was lord of the manner after all. Did Judith keep a gun? He was about to raise himself when the lights flickered, seemed to get brighter and then went out. Darkness flooded in. He froze. The door was struck violently. An icy hollow voice let out a shrill cry of frustration. Then all he could hear was his heart thumping. Clive’s eyes were drawn to the window. A figure in what looked like a winding sheet was gazing in, scanning the room. A grimy shadowy shape with long straggly hair. White pupil -less eyes glowered from the faint blue spark light that emanated from the figure. The figure looked like Judith! Clive’s mind left his body, when Sabrina screamed her lungs out. He realised after a while that he was running up the stairs, in the dark. Sabrina was close by and she clutched herself to him, sending them both crashing to the floor of the landing.
Silence, then the beat of the rain, followed by the keening of the wind. This was added to by a horrific scream that filled the breeze! It cut into their hearts and made terror course through them. Deep animal fear. Panic set in and they clattered into a room and shut the door. There Clive and Sabrina crouched down in the inky dark. An agonising silence took hold and they caught their breaths. Clive was wheezing. He lit his lighter. They needed light. It sparked up and showed that they were in the library. Clive swiftly grabbed a candle and lit it. Sabrina seemed to think that was a bad idea, what were they to do? Sit in the pitch black? Clive began to laugh with nervous excitement just like his paternal great grandpapa had did after his legendary encounter with mad Lizzie. Sabrina was shaking with fright. Her mouth was dry and cracked. She was white as the wraith downstairs. A crackly word issued from her lips.
‘Ghoul’
‘Ghoul?’
Thought Clive. His mind had begun to spool out materialistic ideas. It could be a tramp. There were loads of tinkers and itinerants who roamed this district. And even if it was Judith as he was sure it was. Perhaps she had been alive all the time? Suspended animation. He had read a book about it at the dentists. She had died during a substantial cold snap. Even so, would she have been able to have survived six weeks in a mortuary freezer and then a day in a coffin seven feet under the cold earth? Could she have clawed her way through all that earth? The rain was constant it would have made the earth soft. The downpour would have made the earth like mud. That would have explained why she was filthy when she was at the window.
‘Ghoul… a, a, a Taxim’
Christ thought Clive she’s speaking in tongues again. What is a ghoul? What is a taxim? He had a vague idea about ghouls coming from India. They haunted the cemeteries or something. A taxim? He had no idea. Sabrina was half Lebanese, half Romanian Saxon. What a bloody mixture. Though full Parisian in terms of outlook. Ghouls had a link to the Middle East. But Clive was sure that there was a rational explanation for what had taken place. Mental stress leading to hallucinations. Bad wine. Strange optical conditions. But there was no way on gods good earth that his ever so slightly blasphemous aunt had risen from the grave, and crept over the countryside to seek Clive and his wife. Clive got a sudden brainwave. The powerful electrical torch was next door in Aunt Amelia’s room. Let there be light.
Clive strode briskly through the dim. He had been forceful, thinking that the extra illumination would ward off this ghastly abomination in a godly way. He even considered that it was local kids playing a trick. The little shits would suffer. Yet when he steeped out into the starkly stout like black, his bold spirit evaporated. He could hear a low harrowing moan wrenched through with turmoil. This was intermingled with the glassy panicked intoning of Sabrina. She was muttering something in Latin. Clive groped and then found his way into Amelia’s room. For what seemed like an eternity he fumbled and searched in vain for the torch. But to no avail! It could not be found! He cursed his foolishness. Yet he needed it as a talisman to illuminate the dark. A symbol of all that is modern and wholesome.
Clive searched until fear made him close to tears. He fled blindly to the library cursing that he hadn’t armed himself with a candle. In the abysmal hallway he heard the sound of breaking glass. So loud it made him freeze. Like the very sky had shattered. Shards of terror flew into his soul. The gale blew in with a cold might and rushed up the stairs, blowing his grey hair wildly. He could hear the feverous pitch of whatever it was downstairs. Screaming with utter devilry. It was seething to get through the window and in to the house. Clive ran into the library.
‘It’s in!’
He croaked hoarsely. He was not a man now. Merely a voice. There was no moisture in his mouth or his throat. His tongue flopped around like a strip of leather. His heart beat so hard he feared it would burst sending a tidal bore of blood out of his orifices. He found Sabrina crouched behind the old green leather sofa. She was in a state of abject fear. Gripped by paroxysms of terror. Rational thoughts had long since abandoned her psyche. A malicious scream issued from downstairs. This was followed by sounds of a tremendous commotion, as though whatever was downstairs was ransacking the house looking for something. And the urge consumed the creature.
A thought seeped into Clive’s head. Something that his greed and avarice had made him blind to even though he had looked at it in the plain light of day. The sigils in the wall, no matter what they symbolised, had been scrawled with blood. Thick congealed blood that had turned brown. He knew that now. Then there was the smell in the fridge. Flesh had been kept in there. Dead flesh of dubious origin. He knew it. Clive was unsure of how these revelations would serve him at that precise moment. A cry rose upon the stairs, followed by a spastic perambulation. It was coming up the grand stairs.
Sabrina began to cry like a little girl. Sobbing softly. The wind rattled the door. Clive stopped breathing; an atavistic mammalian impulse had taken over his metabolism. The thing was on the landing. It was using some sense unknown to science, to seek them out. It wanted them. It knew exactly where to look. The door for the library was thrown open with surprising force. Sabrina swooned. Clive sick with fear and abounding with adrenalin ran to the window. In desperation he tried in vain to prise it open. He opened the catch.
But it was stuck fast. A strange glow had filled the room. More a phosphorescence. Like the light cast by some deep sea creature of the bathyscaphe. But in reality it was the faint glow of decay. Coldly burning in its awfulness. Clive crashed his head against the glass he would do anything to get to the car now. By himself if need be and then drive at a hundred miles an hour to the land of the living. The glass was hard, he heard himself moaning with fear.
Clive turned to flee through the door. Aunt Judith was facing him. Under the filth of the grave she was deathly pale. But with that bluish glow. Her long tapered fingers were outstretched like talons. Long ragged nails poised. She was covered in earth and mud. Her hair was matted. Tiny faint blue sparks burst within her like a shower of meteorites. Her eyes shimmered white. No pupils were evident. They were like molten silver. She wheezed and dribbled what looked like a mixture of earth and blood. A stench arose, so foul that Clive retched violently. A smile formed on her face. Clive was sure it had. It was the most fell, maleficent grin that he had ever witnessed and it froze him to the spot with fear.
Aunt Judith the revenant showed Clive her sharp crocodilian teeth. They were brown in the dimness of the candlelight. Again she hacked up something foul and diabolical. This dribbled over her soiled winding sheet. The grin became a snarl as the white hot eyes blazed straight into Clive’s soul…
Sabrina awoke. The candle was flickering, almost about to sputter out. At first she hoped that she had awoken from a long protracted nightmare. And that she would find herself back in the four poster bed in the Wimbledon townhouse. But it very soon became evident that she wasn’t. She was still trapped in that little pocket of hell that had descended upon Craglin House. The cold had flooded her flesh and swamped into her bones. She fingered the tiny silver crucifix that her mother had given to her.
Sabrina sensed that the room was empty. Where was Clive? She weakly tired to croak ‘Clive’ but muteness had taken her. Shivering with exposure she raised her wiry frame from the floor behind the antique sofa. She tiptoed over to the door. The candle was about to die and usher in an almost impregnable darkness. She prayed to the holy trinity that the ghoul had left. Just as she neared the door the ghoul stumbled out of the darkness. As though it had been waiting for her to awaken. It cast a foul light. A light that is not from the living. It was like moonlight. The ghoul looked at Sabrina with an evil intelligence, the white eyes dead like those of an insect. It seemed it was puzzled by Sabrina. As though it wanted to take stock of her. The smell of putrefaction and all that is abominable perfumed the air. Sabrina’s mind began to fail; she trembled violently and let loose a jet of urine into her luxury silk panties.
The ghoul’s winding sheet was about to fall off, so badly was it ripped and torn. It looked as though the ghoul had bitten, ripped and torn it in a violent rage. The revenant was holding something, clutching it like a child with a new toy. The creature seemed to have sensed that Sabrina had noticed this. It raised the object to eye level. In the gloomy flickering tallow light Clive’s torn off head was revealed. It had been much abused. The lips bitten off, as was most of the nose. Revealing the nasal bone. The jaw had lowered giving the head a surprised expression. A frozen scream of agony. The tongue had been ripped out or bitten out. Clive’s dead eyes gazed beyond Sabrina. Suddenly they blinked and she noticed that the jaw began to move in tight spasms. Just like the jerking’s of a dying animal.
‘Help me Sabrina’
She could have sworn the head had spoken. The ghoul took umbrage to this and bit violently into the cranium. Sabrina heard bone crack. Brown blood and cranial fluid bespattered the already filthy face of the ghoul. It looked at Sabrina with a mask of devilry and grinned then shuffled slowly forward in a deliberate way. Sabrina moved back and stood on the headless mutilated corpse of her husband. It was then that the candle finally sputtered out.
David Cairns
MILLERS FOREST
A gusting westerly tossed and bustled the willows as they struggled to form a guard of honour along a two hundred metre stretch of Raymond Terrace Rd. The sun scorched the earth in anger, melting the bitumen road and causing recently filled potholes to become sticky black puddles. Heat waves danced above the road distorting as they obscured, while the needle rocketed into the red zone taking his temper along for the ride.
‘Damn it. Fuck!’
If you are not inside an air-conditioned room, then I suggest you hurry up and get yourself there. Thirty nine degrees and rising, folks and its only ten thirty. The Bureau forecasting storms for this evening but that’s a long way off so stay cool and stay tuned. You’re on ninety nine seven RhemaFM, Newcastle and the Central Coast. Good morning.
The middle of nowhere. The end of the line. Millers Forest. Blake Steele and a clapped out ninety eighty five Falcon on the verge of a fiery death. The first week in March; a very bad week and it was getting worse for Blake. Lost his job, lost his girl, and losing hope. All he could think to say was, ‘Damn it’ and ‘Fuck!’
As there was nowhere for him to stop and cool off, Blake chose to keep going. The air-conditioning roared in frustration as it blew hot air hard into the cabin so Blake switched it off, thinking to himself bitterly that he wished he could switch his life off.
What a disaster it was. What a total shambles. He liked his job but his boss was a complete tool, and Blake could not tolerate the biting sarcasm which that self promoter used to cover his own stupidity and dump on his employees. Blake seemed to be a particularly fond target of his. Maybe it was because Blake refused to kowtow to such an asshole. Maybe it was because he was sick of being the butt of his boss’ stinging barbs. Humour he called it and those who slobbered at his feet laughed along like mindless hyenas. Whatever the reason, his sacking was inevitable. You don’t humiliate a man like that by decking him in front of his employees, without suffering some pretty direct and severe consequences. Good-bye job.
Sam was the sweetest girl he had ever known, good natured and devoted, naturally beautiful and intelligent. How the hell he ever snagged her as his girlfriend he would probably never know, but there she was; patient, kind and even tempered. Blake had a tempestuous nature and a short fuse and without Sam to mollify his rage, he often ripped headlong into trouble. So many transgressions, followed by so many sincere apologies followed by more sins. She seemed like a god to him sometimes but finally proved she was not by leaving him. Her final words? ‘Why don’t you grow up and be a man! You’re killing yourself Blake.’
Blake had thought at the time and still did that her words were a bit over the top, unless she wasn’t talking about physical death. That was a favourite topic of hers; spiritual life and death. Blake didn’t know what she meant, and he didn’t care. All he knew was that he felt terribly sorry and he missed her, and he knew he was a better person when she was around. Who would control him now?
Bang! Ssssshhhhh! A long harsh hiss.
‘Damn it! Fuck!’
The Falcon angrily breathed its last and rolled to a stop, as Blake steered it off the road and onto the shoulder. In the stillness of Millers Forest, the sound of steam rushing from underneath the bonnet was like a hurricane. Blake sat there and stared through the torrent of steam down the long straight road and pondered his immediate future. Rage, although volcanic at the moment, seemed futile, but he was powerless to stop it. He flung the door open and almost fell out in the rush, then began frenetically kicking the side of the car with the underside of his heel. Soon he was exhausted so he lumped his body behind the steering wheel and waited for the last of the storm to subside.
Drenched in sweat and disturbed by the smell of himself, Blake climbed out of the car again and began to walk towards a house which sat quietly on the left three or four hundred metres down the road. It was the only island in a sea of flat grassy meadows and it should have had a huge banner flying over it, proclaiming ‘Last Hope’. His car was stuffed, it was hotter than hell and he didn’t have any water. At the very least he desperately needed a drink, so he dr
agged his feet through the almost liquid bitumen and dreamed of salvation in Millers Forest.
As he approached the house Blake noted the windows were all shut but there was no sign of an air conditioning unit outside. There were two cars in the driveway; a dirty 78 Toyota Land cruiser, and a little red Hyundai. There was also a motorbike and although Blake was not a huge fan of motorbikes, courtesy of the shocking injuries a friend of his had suffered after crashing one into a fence, he could see beauty in their styling and appreciated the passionate feelings they aroused in some. It was all white, even the leather seat and had no badges to identify the make or model. He had never seen one like it.
Gravel crunched under his heavy feet as he walked down the driveway, past the vehicles towards the front door. He waved his hand over the bonnet of both cars but could not tell if the engines had been running recently or not. It was too damn hot.
Horror Express Volume Two Page 6