by Mark Morris
I stopped and leaned against the cast-iron fence at the park’s boundary. I felt a deep, cool shock settling in me, a sickness of the soul as similar images from history sprung to mind. But these were no murder pits. Piled beside one trench were hundreds of simple wooden crosses, unplanted. I wondered if each of them bore a name, and my eyes were drawn back to the countless skeletons settled in the open excavation, staring at the sky with hollow eyes as they waited forever to be hidden away from this cruel, dead world.
I tore myself away from the dreadful sight and moved on. I saw no other mass burials, but the memory remained with me, an awful visual echo to everything else I witnessed.
When I reached my house there were no surprises to be found. It was the same as everywhere else. My home, the place where I lived and loved and felt safe, had fallen into ruin.
Seeing a place I knew so well in such a state was shattering, hitting home much harder than anything else I had seen. The house name Jayne and I had screwed to the front wall together was broken in two, half of it fallen away. She’d cut her thumb while we were fixing the plaque to the brickwork, and I’d put it in my mouth to ease her pain. The garish red paintwork she had chosen for the front door was faded, much of it peeled away to the bare wood beneath. The hawthorn tree we had planted in the front garden, and which had become so much work to keep under control, had grown wild, its spiked branches reaching forward for the street and back towards the house as if to embrace the place for itself. I remembered clipping those branches one by one, while Jayne snipped them small enough to feed carefully into the garden-waste bags. We’d both suffered pricks and wounds that day. She’d laughed at my pin-cushion hand that evening, and I’d rolled her onto the sofa and silenced her with a kiss.
I sobbed, standing in the street and staring at the place I had once called home.
I’d only left three hours earlier.
“Somebody!” I shouted. “Jayne! Anybody!” My cries echoed from buildings close by, but were soon swallowed by the wild trees and shrubs along our street. I reckoned that within another ten years much of this place would resemble an infant forest. Twenty years after that, new trees would be higher than the house roofs. And a century later, the houses would be little more than piles of rubble subsumed by undergrowth, hugged to the land’s embrace by brambly limbs.
I shouted again, the only reply my despairing and muffled cry echoing back at me. I took a step towards the house. It was desolate, silent and dead, and I dreaded what I might find inside. Nothing would be bad. The bones of my wife would be so much worse.
And then, as I pushed past the rotten front fence and the clasping plants that held it upright, movement. A shadow shifted in one of my home’s upper windows. Sunlight glinted from fractured glass. A pale face appeared at the window, still too far inside to make out properly, but definitely there.
Jayne, I thought, and took a step forward.
But it was not Jayne.
The face that appeared at the window was wild, heavy with beard and framed with long, straggly hair, thin and sunburned, eyes staring and mad. I felt a moment of rage at the man who had made my house his own.
Then I realised that this was the only person I had seen since leaving the tunnel, and my rage became confused. Tears came to my eyes, and I felt a pang of deep loneliness. I wanted to rush in and hug this man, speak to him, and hopefully understand that this strange situation was not merely my own personal madness. I wished it was.
“Hello!” I called. I took another step forward into the front garden, edging around the clasping thorns of the hawthorn. “What happened here? I went for a run and when I came back––”
He lifted an object and pointed it at me. I heard a low twang, and something sliced across my right bicep.
Shock rooted me to the spot as the man fumbled with the object and raised it again. I fell to the left just as another arrow whispered by, bouncing off the road behind me. Then I stood and ran.
Another arrow struck my bare left thigh, and I felt the piercing cool kiss of the tip slicing into my skin. I yelped and reached back, but the arrow had fallen away. Its head had merely cut my flesh, and when I brought my hand up it was smeared with blood. The pain was keen and sharp, the wound superficial. It didn’t seem to have affected my ability to move.
I did not stop running. I could not. I had to run as fast as I could, back across that strange town I had once known and over the drained canal, up the hillside, into the tunnel where everything had changed. There was no discernible thought process leading to this action, no consideration. It was the only thing to do, and it felt like the only way I might find my way back to normality.
From the house I had once lived in came a dreadful, guttural roar, a scream of such hopelessness that my blood ran cold and every hair on my body stood on end. I sprinted back the way I had come, fearing another arrow. The buildings around me now loomed, and every dark window or open doorway might have been the source of another deadly shot. But no more came, and it seemed that the person in my old house might have been the only one. I glanced back when I felt it safe, and for a second––just as I checked the ground ahead before twisting around to look behind me––I knew that he would be there with me, a ragged, wild shape so close behind that I could smell his breath, feel his body heat as he ran after me in complete, monstrous silence.
I was alone. I reached the bottom of the hill and retraced my steps, crossing the drained canal, climbing, arriving at last at the tunnel mouth beneath the steep bank. Panting hard, sweating, I hesitated only for a second before ducking inside. I glanced at the skull as I did so, suddenly certain that it would not be a sheep’s skull at all, but a human’s. Buried there at the tunnel entrance, it was one of the few things about my world that had not changed.
I moved much faster than I had the first time. The tunnel seemed smaller, the floor higher. My head torch lit the way and I ducked to avoid banging my skull on the low ceiling.
He’s behind me, I thought, crawling, hands clawed, so quiet that my own gasps and scramblings covered his sound. I looked back but I was alone.
Every shadow was danger. Only the small splash of light ahead offered any hope of freedom and salvation, but the sinking conviction came that I would emerge into that desolate landscape once again.
The first time I’d come in here I had somehow turned around, exiting the way I had entered even though I had continued through the tunnel towards daylight at the other end. I had no wish to do that again. Reaching into my backpack’s hip pocket I pulled out the small penknife I always carried with me. Jayne had given it to me for my eighteenth birthday, our first year together.
I opened the blade and crawled to the tunnel wall, ready to carve in a simple arrow to show me the direction I was taking. When I aimed my head torch at the old brickwork, at first I thought it was laced with a network of thin white strands, roots from one of the trees growing above. Then I saw the arrows.
There must have been fifty of them, maybe more, carved into the brickwork and all pointing in the same direction. A few of them were recent, their edges sharp and clear. Others appeared older, with moss dulling their clarity. Some were faded almost to nothing.
I stopped, gasping as I tried to catch my breath. Not my arrows, I thought, because they could not have been. I’d only been inside this tunnel once before and I hadn’t taken out my penknife.
I carved in a new arrow nonetheless, finding a bare spread of pitted brick and leaving my mark. I tried not to touch any of the others as I worked. Touching might link me to them, draw me in and make me part of the experience that had etched them there. All I wanted now was to find my way home.
* * *
It was like waking from a bad dream.
When I emerged from the tunnel at the same location where I’d entered––even though I knew I had not turned around down there––I could sense that everything had changed once again. Birds were singing a more familiar song. The light was softer and less threatening. Trees no longer w
hispered in the breeze. The skull close to the tunnel entrance was more exposed, and when I ran downhill and approached the canal, the old man who lived in the house there gave me a gruff nod.
I drove home faster than I should have, to find a jug of coffee on the warmer and Jayne in the shower. I stripped and got into the shower with her, and she reached for me as I started to cry, shivering uncontrollably even though she turned up the heat and hugged me to her, confused at my reaction and almost crying herself. I welcomed her touch and smell. I never wanted to let go.
By the time we went to one of our favourite riverside pubs for lunch, the things I had seen and experienced were starting to feel like a dream. The memories were woolly, although they did not fade. I drove so that Jayne could drink, but the real reason was that I did not want to muddy my thoughts and allow back in the fears and confusion.
Later, with Jayne snoring softly in bed beside me, moonlight passed through the curtains and cast uneasy patterns across the ceiling, shapes in which I perceived uncertain truths. But they were only shapes in my imagination, it was only moonlight, and I eased into a comfortable sleep listening to my wife’s breathing and feeling the weight of night as a comfort rather than a threat.
Upon waking, the previous day’s events had faded even more into that place where bad dreams inevitably dissolve.
* * *
Two days later I started climbing the hill to fill in the tunnel. Jayne knew that something had changed within me on that early morning run, and she did her best to draw it out and help me move on. But she also acknowledged my need to return on my own. The first time, I sat twenty feet from the tunnel and just stared, tempting the darkness to reveal to me what had happened. Something in there, I thought, and I imagined old discarded canisters of degraded gas, natural fumes from an unknown cavern system, tainted water dripping from the tunnel ceiling and entering my mouth. Something had taken me and edged me towards a terrifying madness, holding me over the edge of a deep and awful ravine. Only my determination had prevented me from falling.
That first day I kicked the sheep’s skull into the tunnel and piled a few rocks into the entrance, sweating and panting with the effort. When a family climbing up for a walk on the mountain gave me a strange look, I paused in my efforts and smiled at them. I offered no explanation. There was none that made any sense.
From then on I returned in the early mornings, telling Jayne I was going for a run up and around my familiar route. I halted every time at the tunnel, and after five days I’d piled in enough scattered rocks and fallen bricks to clog the entrance. On day six I used a heavy block to loosen more bricks, encouraging heavy falls of damp dirt from the banking above the tunnel, pushing it into hollows to bind and seal, testing the new barrier by standing and jumping on it.
Still it was not enough. At night the bad dreams lurked, and sometimes they came fully fledged, pursuing me like that mad, raving shape from my own ruined house as I thrashed and groaned myself awake and submitted to Jayne’s concerned hugs. She suggested I see someone. I agreed. I never kept the appointments, instead climbing the slope with bags of sand and cement in my rucksack. When there were enough I mixed the concrete, and probed it deep between rocks and bricks, filling hollows and smearing it across the filled-in tunnel entrance until I could see no holes at all leading inside.
Once dried, I covered the rough structure with mud and leaves and fallen branches. I planted several fast-growing shrubs around the area. By the time winter came, all evidence of the tunnel entrance was gone. Some people might have remembered it being there, but soon they would forget.
Sometimes I had nightmares about being buried alive, following a thousand arrows to an entrance that no longer existed. Often I believed that my waking life was the dream, and the tunnel was my dark, damp reality.
Jayne became tired of my nightmares. She found out that I had never gone to any appointments with the doctor or therapist. She left, accusing me of not doing anything to help myself.
In truth, I’d done everything I possibly could.
* * *
I’ve become one of those people. You know the type. People talk about me behind my back, sometimes in pity, more often with humour. Part of me wishes it was all back to the way it was before, but another part of me knows that I’m doing the right thing. This isn’t madness. I left madness down there in the tunnel, scratched on the wall and shut away with tons of stones and bricks, soil and cement. This is the exact opposite of madness. This is clarity. This is being prepared.
People have started to die. I’d been expecting it, and I’ve always been certain of who would go first––the closest person to me, though that closeness has changed. At least Jayne welcomed me to her bedside as she was ailing, and when I told her I loved her she smiled and said she loved me too. That means an awful lot and such knowledge will, I hope, give me courage in the times to come.
Times of plague and death, confusion and chaos. Times of silence. Times of decay.
I still go running every day, sometimes covering upwards of twenty miles. I pass by the hidden tunnel mouth occasionally, but I have no worries about anyone emerging from there. It’s solidly plugged. Besides, there are countless other places. Manholes and culverts, drains and caverns, riverbank hollows and old, forgotten tunnels under churches and castles, car parks and hotels.
I’m collecting as many weapons as I can find. I target houses where people have died, and it’s easy because the authorities have started painting these places with red circles. So far I have seven bows, three crossbows and two shotguns. Hardly a stockpile, but it will only be one man, and it will only take one shot.
I brought something back with me through that tunnel. A disease that is making this world its own, and which does not touch me. Thinking about why that is will send me mad, because I’ve heard no evidence of anyone else being immune. I’m cursed with a terrible purpose. I saw evidence of the contagion on the plants over there, the strange fungal-like growths, and perhaps I should have thought more of it when I found the empty town, the dilapidation, the mass graves. But I’m not in the business of regret.
Today, the traumatised authorities started digging a huge trench in the local park.
One day soon, when the world is dead and I’m one of the last left alive––perhaps the only one left––he will emerge from somewhere else and come to pay me a visit. He’ll know where to come because home is an important place. It’s somewhere you’re meant to feel safe. Once here, there’s no way I can let him return and take the infection back to where he came from. It’s a heavy responsibility, but one which I know I was destined to shoulder.
I have no idea what shooting myself will feel like.
This time I will not miss.
ON CUTLER STREET
Benjamin Percy
This isn’t a neighbourhood where bad things happen. You can tell just by looking at it. The 1920s bungalows have been lovingly refurbished. Flowered pots hang from porches. The gardens are freshly mulched. Lush, knuckly oak trees reach their branches across the street and create a sun-dappled archway. A sprinkler hisses. An American flag ripples with the warm breeze. A boy with a soccer ball chases around his yard, dodging imaginary opponents, and a girl on a bike with pink streamers pumps her little legs and calls out, “Pumpkin? Pumpkin, where are you?”
Her name is Sadie and Pumpkin is her cat. That’s how she thinks of the cat anyway—as hers—even though her parents haven’t officially said yes. Yet. The cat showed up yesterday, pawing at the screen door with a plaintive meow. The cat didn’t wear a collar, but it was clean and purred when scratched behind the ears, and Sadie begged, “Please, please, please, can we keep her?” This is the kind of neighbourhood, after all, where everybody has a pet—dogs and cats and turtles and even one African grey parrot—everybody except Sadie. So it was only fair.
When her parents put out a saucer of milk and a plate of tuna, the cat would only sniff it. “She must not be hungry,” Sadie said, scooping up the cat so that it d
angled pendulously from her arms. “Or maybe my kitty only eats mouse lasagne.”
She played with the cat the rest of the day, kneading her fingers into the orange fur of its belly, rolling a tennis ball across the living room for it to pounce on. When it was time for bed, she begged to sleep with Pumpkin, and though her parents tried to refuse her, saying the cat wasn’t a stuffed animal, Sadie kept up her argument.
“What if she has a disease?” her parents said, and Sadie said, “Then I already have it.”
“What if the cat is dangerous,” her parents said, and Sadie rolled the cat around and flopped its tail and squished the fur around its face and said, “See? She’s perfectly friendly. She loves me.”
It is easy to believe in love on Cutler Street. Whatever war or crime or monstrousness afflicts the rest of the world, you are safe from it here. You can leave your doors unlocked and your windows open. You keep the weeds picked and you keep an eye out for each other.
The Petersons sometimes grill out with the Jacobsons. And the Whites sometimes have the Lordans over for cocktails. And the Bergmeyers don’t really like the Stotts, but their children are friends, so they tolerate each other. During the winters, everyone strings coloured lights from their gutters and keeps their sidewalks shovelled and salted—and during the summers, everyone washes their cars in their driveways and fertilizes their lawns, mowing the grass into tidy stripes.
Even now, a mower growls, the only sound. Herb Adams is pushing it. He wears a white undershirt and gym shorts and flip-flops, his feet stained green from the clippings. Something catches his eye and he looks toward the end of the street.
An orange tabby cat scurries along, and then pauses in the road, looking back the way it came.
Something is there. Something is coming.
The lawn is only half finished, but Herb releases the handle and the mower engine powers off. “What in the name of—”