by Greg James
Guin picks up a stick, nudging the dripping, dangling worms. They are so soft and stretchy. She twists the stick in them, winding them onto its length. She tugs on them, feeling them elasticate and strain. The bird scratches fiercely at the earth with its scaly feet. She smiles because she hates it. She knows what the ‘worms’ are. She keeps prodding at them, pulling at them. The bird spits out a sticky dark stream. A buzzing cloud of flies hums over it, waiting for death. It snaps its beak, twitching at the insects with its broken wings. Wishing to keep a little dignity for itself. But, each time it snaps at the flies, Guin raps it hard on the beak with her stick.
… naughty birdy … bad birdy …
It looks at her, with such terrible eyes, when she does that. It looks like it is crying. Guin keeps on playing. She hits the bird on the beak again. It snip-snaps at the air. It is a funny thing. It takes half an hour to die. She is five years old.
Guin goes down below. Into the night-time space under the stairs. She follows the cooing. She sees pudgy shapes that hiss and grow from old shadows. They have silver fangs, beaks and nasty teeth. Diseased feathered flesh pushes itself through the holes here. Birds died here. Lots of birds. This bad place. It ate them. Made them hurt insane. They can never leave it. They call for blood, for pain, for little morsels to quell their hunger, hate and fury. Libby lies dead in the cellar. Her face lies open. The ragged cleft there completes the cut Arcade began with his knife. Guin sees him. His trainers jut out of the nearby dark. She hurls herself at him. Beating and pounding on his legs and chest. Blind, crying, it takes her time to see the truth. Arcade lies dead too. His face too lies open. A matching cleft makes his corpse a twin to Libby. What he hoped to do to her has been done to him.
Guin’s tears fall fast and hard, she steps away from the dead. She looks up at the ceiling that is not there, sees what is there, the light pattering of wings becomes fierce and frenzied. She covers her ears with her palms and screams at it. Screams for all she is worth, for her sister, for Arcade, for herself. Then, she is a statue, her face is a rictus and she cannot move. No feathers, no pieces of the dead, fall this time.
The birds come instead, their scraggy skins crawl, teeming white with parasites. Clawed bones puncture their tatty skin, waiting to rake and tear at hers. Their little eyes look at her, trailing tears that are bulbous with worms and twitching black maggots. Blood-barnacled beaks cut the air apart, dripping, eager to bite, bleed and feed. Behind Guin, camouflaged by the din of the tsunami, stands Libby. Dead on her feet. Hair hanging in tangles, black and matted. A flux of grey matter and crimson gore cascades down over her throat and chest.
In her hands, she holds the axe. She raises it high. The birds call to her. It descends. Biting deep. She gives her sister forty whacks.
Darkness comes next.
But, there is no end to things here. No, not in this place, this soured portion of time and space. Those who come into the street become a part of it; slaves to it, playthings, marionettes, its toys. Lives here can be long. Lives here can be short. As long as the blood flows and the screams can be heard. Lives can end in so many ways and then begin again in so many more. This time will be different and the same as every other time before. It puts the pieces back together and then it draws the darkness back.
Guin hacks Libby to death. Arcade hacks them both to death. They both hack him to death. It puts the pieces back together. Makes them dance and jig when they are dead, sometimes. Feeds feathers into their dead mouths. They go from one room to the other. Orders change. Sequences shift. Down the stairs. Up the stairs. The dead fall, rise and fall again. When the axe blade falls, they forget everything.
When they open their eyes though, something does stir. Each time, a little clearer, better remembered. Something that is more than a memory.
Something waiting for a true awakening.
Guin sits on a chair, waiting. The door to the room opens, in walks Arcade. He is smiling. His hands are behind his back. He is hiding something. The smile grows and grows.
Guin tries to speak.
She spits a wet clot of gristly feathers.
Arcade shows her what he was hiding. Her stomach becomes hollow. Her lungs crumple, her breath whistles out thinly. Her ribs are vicious bars crushing her insides, caging her heart. Her skin feels too tight and suddenly sore. She can hear the fluttering. The birds are inside her. Scrabbling away, the horrible scratching of their beaks and claws, dirty razors parting flesh. Tearing at her so emptily, so mindlessly, these raging dead things. Tears run down her face. She can taste the feathers in her mouth, smell the decay on them, feel their dreadful softness. She is their puppet. She cannot speak or move.
She looks into Arcade’s eyes.
She feels it brushing through the air, so close to her skin. One little feather, what he was hiding. She shakes. She aches. She freaks as it touches on her cheek, her forehead, her eyes, her lips. Seismic shudders pound through her heart. She wants to curl into a ball. An ugly string of spittle slips out of her mouth. Rash and fever draw out sweat. Her tongue feels fat and useless in her mouth. She laps at the ridges of her palate. Her throat is tight, a constricted needle-hole, no sound escapes from it. She sees nothing, feels everything. She is a singularity, burning without heat, choking on paralysis.
Arcade laughs and spits on her.
That was it.
It breaks the spell. She can move once more.
Guin kicks out, she gets him right in the balls. He cries out. The feather falls from his fingers, away from her. She smiles. Guin kicks again, pushing herself back and away from him, away from the birds, away from the feathers.
Back and away, to where it all began.
Arcade awakens with a great pain in his crotch, then in his thorax, a burning creepy-crawling its way up through his insides. He grasps at his throat as the burning creates a bulging, tissues give way, muscles split, bone crackles, cartilage grinds. He can taste blood in his mouth and something else. The texture of it seems to splinter and separate as he works his teeth and tongue over it. He finds a hard root running through it. He spits it out onto the cellar floor – a mangled feather robed in fat and residue.
The burning erupts in his skull, surging into his mouth. Arcade feels his body go into spasm. He pukes out a gluey yellow trail of feathers. Acid scars his mouth. His eyes become thick with tears. The spasm subsides. He can breathe again. He wipes away the tears. He can see again but, God, it fucking hurts. In the corner, as before, rests the axe. It glints and shines. Arcade goes to it, as before. What happens next is different.
It began with the bird, a scrap of roadkill. A grey smear of feathers and putrefied guts. The knuckle of the head mashed flat by car tyres crushing it, day after day. It took a good while to scrape it all off the tarmac before bringing it here. To the empty flat on the Estate, where they hang out. Do some Bombs. Drop a few tabs. Smoke whatever they can get. Haze a newbie. The hands in Guin’s hair are evil, yanking and tearing threads out by the root. Voices jeer, tease and mock. Got to prove yourself. Got to do this. Be like us. Join us. Be in the gang. Gangs look out for their own. Loners are targets.
You don’t want to be a loner, do you now?
Her face is so close to it. She can taste the bird’s death. See pieces of it. How rotten it was. How alone. Like the bird that died when she was five. She can see the quills of its feathers and the black wires of its bones. A breeze, from somewhere, stirs them. Makes the grubby feathers tickle the tip of her nose. Bile courses into her mouth. She dry heaves, catches it, swallows it back down.
Can’t be sick here, not now.
The shame would be too much. The shouting, the jeering, the howling in her head. A tsunami of sound descends over her. Battering and beating her into submission. Making her go low, down low, until her face is right in the dried feathery carcass. She breathes in, feeling the foetor of it in her nostrils, tangible. The feathers stroke her eyelids, her lips, her cheeks and her earlobes. She breathes out. She feels knees and elbows on her, pro
longing this episode of reeking horror. She feels the dead bird stirring.
Something soft and damp crawls onto her skin.
Guin screams.
Arcade’s steps are slow. The burning has not left him. It brushes up and down within his oesophagus, driving him on. His eyesight blossoms and blurs. The axe whunks and thunks as he weaves his way from the darkness of the cellar, up the stairs to the dimness of the floor above. It is in the walls, the thunder, the merciless clamour, the endless beating of those wings. He follows it. It is taking him to them. Arcade’s mouth forms a broad smile, showing cracked and bloodied teeth. His eyes are crimson spheres. The burning is fierce, so hot inside him. The wings are in frenzy. The door is there. The women are here. He will kill them for good this time.
Make a feast of their deaths.
Inside her head, over the jeers and shouting, she hears it. The whistling of her breathing through its bones, a quiet cooing, as her face was pushed into those remains, all those years ago. That charnel sound, it was her. That calling, from the cellar. Down through the years, through the dark, backward through the abysms of Time. Shaping her. Shaping her fear.
Arcade stands before the door, his head swimming. He closes his eyes, sees the sulci of his brain haemorrhaging tacky clots of plumage. The black eyes of the birds are opening in there too. He feels a bristling along his spine, a crackling of cartilage, as a hundred points of pain struggle under his skin, puncturing him further. His tendons are mere strings. He can feel them snapping inside as the hungry beaks snip away. Blood trails from the portal of his left ear. They are taking him, their meat puppet, to pieces.
He must kill the women, or the birds will kill him.
Guin awakens in the filthy bedroom with newspapered windows. Libby lies beside her, still asleep. Her face, unwounded. She understands now, sees the design, feels the structure that she has made over the years. This place is the root of the fear. It radiates out through her life, her past and future, from here, this nexus point. She never knew but she knows now. She can make it stop. She looks above, to the ceiling that is not there. Those dirty white flakes come down, dripping so much blood from their quills, waiting for her scream.
Guin reaches out. She opens her hand, unfurling her fingers. She watches a feather fall. An unpleasant tremor of gooseflesh tickles along her fingers as it comes close to her palm. She does not move.
The feather comes to rest. She was holding her breath. She does not scream. She breathes out, easily. Guin’s heart feels so light.
A bird freed from its cage.
He can hear the birds. He raises his voice in unison with them. A choir ever-growing, a screeching multitude. Arcade stands alone in pure eclipsing pain. He is them and they are him, trapped together, bound in dark communion. Raw tears run through the ruin of his being. Arcade shakes his head. Clears it, for the moment, from the confusion of the birds and their pain.
He opens the door to the room. Guin and Libby are side by side on the bed. He raises the axe high. Spitting chewed feathers and sticky bits of blood. He opens his mouth, tries to shout, instead a high and horrible screeching comes out.
The axe comes down.
Into one, into the other.
There is no blood.
Nothing flows from the wounds.
Nothing but feathers. Billowing bright clouds of feathers, not speckled, not soiled, but clean and glossy. Settling over Arcade and the rest of the room. They are not here. They have gone. These things are not them. They are leftovers, husks conjured by bitterness of the birds, by his hatred. Arcade howls, calls out, lashes out, hacks and tears at the wood-wormed walls. Shatters the door into splintered fragments. He pulverises the remains of the feather-stuffed mannequins. Shreds the facsimile flesh. Rips away the false hair and plasticised faces. How he hates them. How much he wants to hurt them. He can feel it, the black stuff, oozing inside him, hurting, so hungry. No longer able to feed on them, it feeds on him.
Arcade weeps blood. More blood gushes from his mouth, from his tongue, which is growing fatter and fatter. He wheezes tightly as it becomes too much for his mouth to contain. He can feel them digging in, scratching hot wet lines across his palate, the needle-tips of wicked quills emerging from his distended tongue. His red eyes burst, giving birth to a shower of pale embryo curls that fall, calling, cooing, through the gaps in the floor. Into the dead and thoughtless space beneath, where they will wait, until footsteps disturb the dust and voices upset the silence.
The street breathes out. Guin and Libby breathe in. Their lungs feel heavy and rough as they run out from the darkness. Libby feels her face, where the cut should be. She smiles. Guin pauses, she looks back into the darkness where no light shines, where they have left Arcade. What will the birds do to him? What will he become?
Then, she turns away and they walk away. They leave it all behind. Fear, bitterness and hatred, such things are best left to the shadows. Libby kicks at the cardboard box that once held Arcade’s chicken and chips. A cold piece of fried white meat still lingers inside. Dark grey nuggets of bone show through cooked flesh that is sweating an oily syrup. The syrup darkens, it colours, running more thickly. Staining the card ruddy, flowing out into the gutter, then dripping down into the sewer, into the darkness and shadows there.
A blood-tipped feather flutters to the ground.
His Loathsome Kiss
The moon went out without ceremony; leaving a hazy red smear to dissolve across her field of vision. Marie looked up the street and down the street. It was early in the morning, winter-dark and cold. Not many people about at this time except for those like her - night-shift folk with washed-out skin and tired eyes. Insomnia was a low-level subsidence in the fissures of her brain; slowly dragging her down through these long and lonesome hours. There was only so much she could do at home in the claustrophobic cell of her studio flat so she got up, got dressed and went for walks. Long, long walks until the houses around her became sketchy and unclear. A drowsing child’s dream-idea of a town; crayon-edged and crumbling, lines not meeting right, scribbles over empty spaces trailing off into a sodium-haunted nothing. She had been sitting on the wall outside a block of council flats, where it was all dark and quiet, when the moon went away and the stars began to do the same, one by one. Marie didn't know why she was not afraid. She should have been. The sun, the moon, the stars and the clouds that stray across them were constants; meant to remain when all else in the world quickly aged, loosened to frayed elastic and then fell apart. But even though the moon and stars were out, it did not get dark. It did not get dark because the city was alight in a way she had never seen before. The windows in the houses were pulsing with a strange colourless illumination that was an inversion of the principle - it seemed to be glowing inward; an emanation disappearing into itself rather than radiating out. Looking at it hurt her eyes and felt like stiff, dead fingers were tickling through the soft folds inside her skull. Turning her eyes away from the light in the windows, she slithered off the wall and began to walk her way home.
Home was the same as the other houses; the windows alight, leaving unsteady and convulsive images flickering across her retina in carousel slow-motion. The off-colour darkness, all-pervading, was the same as when a bulb pops and you’re left alone in a lightless room. After-images roam everywhere, smears of television static and colour-ghosts. You see them as much as you can feel them, moving about, circling around, dizzying, feathery and electric, like being tickled all over but not in a good way.
Marie remembered how it felt when she spun and spun on the spot as a child until she was sick. What she was seeing felt just like that as the after-images went grimly circling faster and faster around and around; promising to strip her bare, to take away skin, sense, being and reason, to leave everything that was unnecessary in a bloody pile on the ground, to crucify her skinless insides onto the nonsense grid of reality itself where she would be endlessly flayed to the bone by life’s blind, twisting mathematics.
“We-will-suckyoudry!�
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Then, as if summoned or called off, the after-images drifted away and apart; leaving Marie bemused and blinking as she came back to herself, wondering what had just happened, what she had just communed with.
Marie walked away from home, thinking about how quiet it was. No, not just quiet, this was silence, the kind that comes when a world ends. She had seen no-one since the moon and stars went out and the lights came on.
Am I all that's left? The only one?
The houses around her seemed to be pressing in, keeling over, leaning golems of stone and mortar threatening to crush her down to nothing. Her breath shortening to threadbare gasps, she ran out of the street that for too many years she had called home.
In the gardens, on the street, lying by the walls and crumpled in heaps in the doorways, there were shapes; very pale shapes, rustling like dry, dead leaves even though there was no wind to stir them. The rustling became a crackling when the sound of fast footsteps echoed down the street. The crackling was accompanied by a thin sibilant hissing and slowly, ever so slowly, the shapes arose and began drifting, drifting after the retreating echoes of that sound.
Marie was wheezing hard, she could feel her lungs shrinking tight inside so she stopped to rest. I can take all the time in the world, she thought, now I'm the only one that's left.
Was this real?
Was this madness?
She knew madness, she knew it very well. The psychiatric wings of several hospitals had been home to her for months at a time. Each relapse was no romantic fall from grace as each time she was left in a bloody mess; having her stomach pumped, her slashed wrists and cut throat patched up. One time, a razor blade had to be removed from her where she thrust it into genitals. Luckily, the doctors said, no damage was done – except for what was done by the cures they had to offer.