by Greg James
“Then what’re they doing around here in Essex?” Vera asked, “we’re a bit far from Mesopotamia.”
“They are here because of me, or to be more precise, because of my family. My Great-Uncle was Erasmus Caulder. A much-renowned archaeologist in his day, back when we were ransacking the antiquities of Egypt and her neighbours without a thought or a care. Well, he found something of greater value than anyone could have imagined during one of his last expeditions. He brought it back to England with him, to this house. Do you know what it was that he found?”
Vera shook her head and swallowed more brandy.
“It was the Amulet of Akarath. Found in the tomb of Princess Amen-Ra. It is said that it can open a portal between this world and the world of the dead. In the wrong hands, it could bring about the end of humanity.”
“By summoning Akarath?” Vera asked.
He nodded, “You don’t seem to find this so hard to believe?”
“You think I would disbelieve the evidence of my own eyes?” she said, giving him a half-smile. The brandy was starting to have an effect – relaxing her.
He returned the smile, “You are a brave young woman. Others would’ve been broken by what you have experienced tonight.”
“And it’s not over yet, is it?” she said, slurring slightly.
“No, I’m afraid it’s not.” He said, putting down his glass.
Vera noticed that he’d not touched a drop whereas she’d drunk both of the measures that he’d served to her. She tried to stand and found her legs wouldn’t obey. The world was becoming a blur. Lord Caulder’s face loomed large in her vision. His smile had become broad and saturnine. “Welcome, my dear, to the end of your life. I am Akarath’s high priest and your blood will bring him into this world to rule over it forevermore.”
Vera tried to scream but the drugged brandy had left her tongue heavy and her throat constricted. She slumped to the floor and lay there, sprawled out on the carpet. She felt his hands on her body as he dragged her limbs into a spread-eagle position. He began to chant aloud, “O Akarath, we offer you the blood of this maiden in fealty. We give of her life that you might come to us across the far-off borders of space and time.”
He held aloft a pearl-handled dagger with a polished black blade and a crimson gemstone set into an intricate golden lattice. The latter pulsed with an inner light. It made her think of a heartbeat. The more she watched it, the more she felt it. The light of the gemstone was in time with her own heart. It had to be the Amulet of Akarath and, if it was matching her heartbeat, there could only be one place he meant for it to go.
He’s going to cut out my heart and put that stone inside me!
This time, she was able to scream. Lord Caulder looked down at her with disdain and disgust. He sighed, “Such a disagreeable noise. I should have given you much larger measures of the brandy.”
He knelt and stabbed Vera through the heart.
She went quiet. Her eyes emptied of life.
“There,” he said, “that’s better. Now then, where was I?”
The Writhing
Angrisla Castle was a mouldering cluster of grey teeth thrusting out of the dark ground of the Scottish Highlands. The coach, dulled by years of use, hissed and creaked to a stop in the grounds. Feet squelched down into wet earth as the tourist party disembarked. Hearty American accents sounded out, too bright and heavy for the thin grey air.
Elly could see it in his eyes, his resentment at being here. Barry was not a morning person by a long way and she could see his irritation as he made grand gestures of plucking the grains of sleep from his eyes. But she had so wanted to see Angrisla Castle. According to the guide, Mr Phillips, a pale-faced gaunt, it was a very spooky place indeed. There were stories about the last owner, a doctor of some sort, experimenting with this and that, making new kinds of animals, just like in the stupid old movies she used to watch with her brother when they were kids. The stories, according to Mr Phillips, said that the doctor was arrested and put in the madhouse. They never found the things he made. “His children,” Mr Philips had said, “His children, no, they never found them. Not one of ‘em left alive, no.”
Probably all bullshit but it gave the place some atmosphere, a touch of awe, she thought.
Barry trudged along beside her as the party followed Mr Phillips up the path cut into the hillside to the castle entrance; a gothic arch that made Elly’s heart quicken. There was something in this architecture that got her going, the weathered curves and old lines. Reaching out as she passed through it she felt the roughness of the stone under her fingertips, she felt a frisson, a pebbling of the skin.
Oh yes, she thought, I want to do something here.
Mr Phillips’ voice was an insipid drone as he led the tourists from one open chamber of the castle to another. Limp gestures of the wrist indicating worn-out gargoyles and water-battered carvings, triggering mutters of varying interest and a clicking staccato of camera flashes from the crowd. Elly’s hand was in Barry’s and she was tugging him after her, away from the party.
“Elly, what’re you doing?” he whispered.
“Didn’t you see that small archway back there?”
“The one to the crypt?”
“Yeah.”
“Mr Phillips said not to go down there. There’s a chain across it, ‘member?”
“Come on, Barry. I want to do something here.”
“Do something? You’re joking, Elly. Not now.”
“Yes now, I want you to go into the crypt and do something.”
“But he said it’s dangerous down there. Loose stones. The ceiling’s not safe.”
“You either come with me, Barry, or I’ll go down there myself and have a good time alone without you.”
“Elly-”
“You try to stop me, I’ll punch you.”
“For God’s sakes, why’re you being such a hard-ass about this? Can’t it wait until we’re back at the hotel?”
“No, Barry. That’s why I want to do something different, right here and now. In England. In this castle. In the crypt.”
Barry sighed, rubbing his eyes, “Okay, Elly. You win. Let’s go. And this is Scotland, not England.”
Elly beamed, leaned in, kissed him on the cheek and led him away.
*
There was a wicked deliciousness to ducking under the loose chain hanging across the crypt archway and setting her feet on that first step. As she went down into the emptiness below, Elly could smell the mould in the air; feel the soiled dampness of the space. This place was so old, older than anywhere back home in the States. That was the attraction. Doing something bad on this hallowed ground, made sacred by its ancient age. She could hear the reluctance in each footstep of Barry’s. He was a sweetheart but he needed his training. There was no denying she was the alpha in their relationship; the one who liked to do things like this.
Elly reached the flagstones of the crypt itself and stopped, waiting for Barry to finish his descent. Through the gloom, she could see the oblong hollows in the walls of the crypt, where dust that had once been bones resided. Her eyes came to rest on what she had hoped would be there. A long, raised central stone, possibly a tomb, just what they needed. “So, what now?” Barry said, carefully, into her ear, not wanting to upset the stones hanging overhead.
The whistling of his breath, so warm, so close, made her nibble on her lip. Already getting excited by what was to come. Her palms were clammy as she took Barry’s fingers and squeezed them, “Wait out here, sweetie. I’m going to make myself comfortable over there,” she pointed at the central stone, “and then you come in and we do it.”
“You want me to be like a monster in one of those movies?”
“If you like, sweetie,” she kissed his fingers and then let them go, “if you like.”
Elly shucked off her shoes and peeled off her socks. The cold kisses of crypt-stone were like crushed ice being pressed against her soles and toes, it made her fidget with her fingers and thumbs, enjoying t
he moment. She finished undressing her legs, leaving her shirt on, for now. She reclined, giggling in her throat, onto the central stone, peering up into the black static of the ceiling and its corners, throwing her arms about dramatically, giggling some more. She caught a glimpse of something, white, wet and tuberous. It was moving with uneasy, trembling motions, strangely bulbous in places, like a malformed albino caterpillar.
Weird, she thought.
Then it was gone, lost among the shifting underground shades. The central stone was an arctic block under her buttocks, she could feel them growing gooseflesh as she waited for Barry to make his entrance.
Come on, sweetie, she thought, don’t get cold feet on me now.
From the darkness of the entrance there came a sound. A punctuation of the dismal air. Barely begun, then stopping suddenly. Elly felt her ardour diminish, her loins becoming less eager than they were. She closed her waiting thighs together and sat up straight, pulling her shirt back down over her bared stomach.
“Barry?” she called, low and hoarse. A footstep, a pause, then another. Then another pause, then another step. There he was, steadily stumbling in, emitting soft, throaty groans. Oh, I see, she thought, playing zombies, are we?
“You are so bad,” she said.
Barry came slowly towards her, his legs and feet as bare as hers. His manhood was already arching out, long and swollen. The head glimmered in the dim light, thoroughly moistened. A single sticky white tear wept from its tip. That’s what was holding you up, she thought, you were getting yourself ready for me over there. “Good boy.”
Elly lay back across the stone and parted her thighs for him, closing her eyes as she did. She heard his breathing, still stopping, starting and stopping.
“Really working hard at the zombie thing, aren’t you, hun?”
She felt him kneeling, then his hands moving across her feet, ankles, reaching up her legs, brushing over her upper thighs. His fingers had grown cold. They made her gasp as he teased the dampening lips of her vulva apart. They were rough too. Cool and rough like the stone of that arch she touched earlier.
Odd thought, that. No, don’t be ridiculous, stop thinking dumb shit, let go, relax, enjoy.
Those rough, cold fingers of his, they pierced her, one at a time, and she let out a cry, then a long shuddering breath. He was drawing himself up over her, she could feel his weight, so familiar yet somehow different. There was something he was doing, a halting motion in his rhythm as he pushed the hard meat of his erection into her, that made her still wonder, want to pull away, make him withdraw.
It’s just the zombie thing, she thought, nothing to worry about. He’s doing what you said to do. He’s going at it steadily, taking his time, making it last out. Being a good boy.
Christ, he was so hard though and so cold. And his cock felt rough inside her, like his fingers had been, like the stone underneath her. Elly’s breath quickened, because of him, because of what she was feeling, thinking.
Rough, cold, stone. Dead.
Everything stopped – all of it – she could feel space closing in around her, going black, growing tight. Her heart was beating in her ears. Her throat was a whistling pinhole. Her breath became as halting as Barry’s. She tried to move, raise her arms up, but she was caught under him, him inside her, spearing her, keeping her in place. This was not how she had thought it would be. This didn’t feel like fun anymore. This was too much like those stupid old movies they used to watch together when they were little. The crypt, the damsel, the monster, the ritual.
The sacrifice.
It hurt inside; his cold, hard stone abrading her soft, tender layers.
She opened her eyes.
“Barry, please.”
She looked into his eyes. She went as limp as one of Mr Phillips’ hand gestures. Barry’s eyes, her baby brother’s dead eyes, were as cold and rough as stone. His mouth hung open and, from between his lips, she saw long, white things dangling. A host of thin tubers writhing in the musty air that was coming from his broken mouth. They were strangely bulbous, trembling uneasily. She saw the deep gash on Barry’s crown, a piece of bone showing through the flesh there, where a stone had fallen. No, where a stone had been dropped. By something that looked like a malformed albino caterpillar, something that had not been found when the authorities searched the castle.
The voice of Mr Phillips spoke inside her head.
One of his children.
Then, with a grinding granite groan, Barry came inside her, hard and cold. And, whatever it was that came out of him and went deep into her, burrowing away, she knew it wasn’t semen. There was no warmth; no rush to the motion of ejaculation, there was only the writhing – cold, insipid and slow.
Nothing but the writhing.
Bernice
I
None of us age beautifully, except for her. Down through those declining years, whilst I was still in the bloom of youth, I saw faerie ebony become enchanted silver, wrinkles draw across her brow as accentuating lines rather than disfiguring clefts and her soft white skin distinguish itself as a gossamer veil of nacreous transparency. For hours, I was able to watch the slow and steady purple work of her veins and arteries, when she slept I would follow their webbing with my fingertips, lightly so as not wake her. There is a strange glory to sickness and disease and I feel myself privileged to have been a witness to it. The sombre miracle of black cancer eating her alive before my very eyes.
Her name was Bernice and we met at a time when our love was frowned upon by many. I lost friends and she lost friends because of our liaison. The few who remained true were uncomfortable around us; looks would pass between them, unkind, reproachful and killingly passive. They made my heart ache when I caught them at such guilty glimpses in my periphery, supposedly out of sight. As all of us do, I had thought and hoped I knew my friends inside and out. This love I had found was too much for them though. I could see it, feel it; a drifting, silent snapping of the connecting lines, the web woven by Time between us. This piece then, of my Life, was to become fossilised and buried. Lost forever until the day when men are able to dig away the suffocating soil of Time’s grave and exhume What Once Was as archaeologists of the heart and soul rather than the earth. Until then, my love, our time, apart and together, must surrender itself, become one with the dust.
So, abandoned as we were, we took ourselves away from civilisation to a small cottage by the sea. A gnomish thing with hobbit-burrow windows and a stunted fanlight door, its varnish eaten away by the elemental lashes of the salty air. The walls were an odd, uneven substance that put me in mind of wattle and daub, even though the practice of using such stuff in construction was part of a long past time. The roof was an ensilvered thatch, again suggesting dark ages rather than the enlightened present day.
Within the story was much the same, there was mustiness to the air; the funk of ancient buried things and it was dismal too. The light coming in through the burrow-hole windows did no more disturb the darkness that had settled inside the cottage than a single small candle might illumine the infinite void of outer space. I am being too fair, this was not a cottage, it was a hovel. There was a bed in a weak-looking frame, close to the ground. There was a stove of old beaten iron. There were a few cupboards scattered about the place; ramshackle, badly-made monstrosities that looked ready to collapse in on themselves. This place was a black hole, an entropy pit, into which Light and Life might pour continuously without pause only to always be thoroughly poisoned, swallowed down, all consumed. I said not a word to her though of my forebodings, I merely smiled and nodded along to her chatter. A good little man-boy was I.
Bernice, you see, she loved it and so I bought it for her. We moved in hastily. Thinking back, I wonder if the loss of her friends, being left with me alone, so young and inexperienced, dropped her into a depression and that was what drove her to press upon me to take the place before someone else did. Not that I could see that occurring. I think I have already impressed upon you what a dreadfully dim
space it was. Not remotely fit to be inhabited by man or woman, of healthy mind or otherwise, but there we were. I am also given to wondering whether this depression was further exacerbated by other ‘agencies’. I am not certain what else to call them as I do not believe in ghosts or the afterlife. As I have mentioned, I think that Time may well be a dimension through which one might pass from chosen point to chosen point, given the correct knowledge and tools, but I do not think it is a dwelling of the dead. It is a noisome tunnel of rats and filth through which we crawl like wights; dragging our hurting forms on and on until we succumb to that ever-feasting Force that preys on all things in the end, separating them out into their individual atoms and then balefully blowing them further on their way down the endless hollows of Existence. Crypt dust and food for worms, that is our Fate, no less, no more. So you see how if, in many ways, we are already the dead, it makes no sense that we should come back when the grave is our birthing-ground.
I digress, my original point being that I believe there was something else at work inside that hut, gnawing away at the fraying fringes of my sweet love’s sanity. I feel, in my heart, that it was the light-swallowing darkness that one could not seem to extinguish, no matter how many candles burned, lamps were lit and windows flung wide. Nothing chased it from our bedside completely, even when we made love I could feel it there, tickling at my nerve endings, slowing my blood, settling in as a hypothermic cold. Being young, I was able to shake it off without much trouble. Bernice, being that much older was not so fortunate. I have no evidence, not a scrap, but I truly believe there was intelligence at work, that some malign sentient thought was at the root of what that darkness did to her. Somehow, it made its way inside her and found a space in which to settle and grow. As it grew, she shrank, in on herself, every day and night. As I said in the beginning of this tale, she grew fairer in my eyes as she became sicker and sicker. I was equally cursed and blessed by this and I’m sure it was the doings of the darkness. The more life it took from her, the more it showed me the depths of her beauty, peeling away layer after layer, it laid her bare. The flame of cancer’s fever brought a sensuous lustre to her faltering flesh that made me need to relieve myself. Sometimes, I found myself touching her limp, insensible hands and feet against my tender private parts until I was utterly spent.