The Firebird and Other Extracts from Strange Matters

by Bret Allen

Saturday’s Child

  Henri walked around it once more, pacing like a nervous parent over a child’s crib. He looked at it, frowned, sighed. He ran his fingers through his hair and shook his head in frustration.

  The ‘it’ was his corpse, lying broken on the floor of his apartment in a ramshackle part of Rio de Janeiro. The building was part of a ‘favela’, a slum town comprised of twisting alleyways and tiny apartments built on top of each other, separating a myriad of lives with corrugated iron and sun-baked white brick. The favela was normally bright with colourful clothes hung out to dry between whitewashed buildings, but the apartment and his body were now a monochrome grey. He wondered if his eyes were at fault.

  Henri stopped pacing, tears running down his face, to kneel beside his own body. He found it hard to see the body clearly, as if he and his remains no longer belonged in the same world. He concentrated and managed to make out the lines of his absent face and the gun-shot wound that had destroyed his right lung.

  What confused him was that he still had a body of his own, separate to the dead shell on the floor. He looked down at his new form; it was colourless, like everything else, except for one thing. His right lung was shot through with glowing red veins, emanating from a bright red hole in his chest. The hole was in exactly the same place as the fatal wound on his corpse. He looked around the bleak grey room and knew that he was dead.

  “You look lost,” said a gentle female voice with an edge.

  He twisted around in surprise; sitting perched on the window ledge, knees tucked up to her breasts, was a young woman. That was a second floor window!

  The woman had darker skin than Henri, though it still looked greyish, as if the whole world and everyone in it were under a monochrome veil of depression. He felt like he was in a black-and-white movie. However, just as Henri had a glowing bullet wound on his chest, she had a glowing mark of her own. It looked like a set of three claw marks across her stomach and they were visible through her clothes. He sensed that it was not a death wound like his, but a symbol with some kind of meaning, like a tattoo.

  “Who are you?!” he gasped, stepping backwards in alarm.

  “My name is Sábado,” she crowed, unfazed by the abnormality of the situation. “And this is Gatinho,” she continued, motioning towards the entrance of his apartment.

  He turned and saw a cat sitting in the doorway, still and regal, looking just like a statue of Bastet. It bore the same three-claw symbol as the woman, a much smaller version that glowed from its shoulder. Gatinho meant ‘kitten’, but the black animal was fully grown. He guessed that the cat was female, though she was decidedly large. She had a musculature that spoke of quiet menace.

  “What… where am I?” he stammered.

  Something was strange about this place. He seemed to be in his apartment, but most of the furnishings were gone. The ceiling was crooked and the walls leaned in too closely. This grey place was some kind of poor copy, as if this world followed the shape of the world he knew but elaborated on the details by its own whim.

  “The Fringe, of course. This is… the borderland. How did you die?” she asked with mild curiosity.

  When he remembered those moments of panic and the gunshot that had killed him, his glowing bullet wound ached distantly like an old scar. He could only guess that the body he now inhabited was very different to the corporeal one he had left behind. The wound he had now was not dangerous; it was like a vivid memory.

  “I… I was shot by another dealer. They wanted my cocaine,” he said. “Are you dead, too?”

  “Not anymore,” said Sábado with a laugh. “What’s your name, friend?”

  “I’m Henri. Henri Laurent. I live here… or I did.”

  She flexed herself at that moment, a grin playing at the corner of her mouth.

  “You said your name is Sábado, but what is it really?” he asked, aware that ‘Sábado’ was Portuguese for Saturday.

  “Oh, my dear Henri, I cannot possibly tell you that. You must never give your true name to anyone in the Fringe,” she informed him with a laugh.

  Henri tensed up, wary of the playful glee shining in her eyes. She was enjoying his confusion and fear. Gatinho mewed gently and Sábado smiled, seeming to hear something that Henri could not.

  “Patience, Gatinho. We’re making a friend,” she said.

  “Forgive me, Henri, you know how impatient and rude cats are. You see, we have a certain way of understanding each other. So much can be said without words! A movement, a scent, a look…” she explained as her eyes danced over him.

  Henri just nodded, trying to deny that the woman had spoken to her cat as if she could understand her. Gatinho remained stoic, insofar as he could tell.

  “This is all wrong. I can’t be dead.” said Henri. “I’m dreaming! I must be.”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes, you are; but this dream will go on for the rest of your… existence. You’re a spirit, Henri, a ghost. I wonder what terrible worries weigh your pretty head down so much that you ended up here instead of passing away.”

  “No, this is insane! Você é um demónio!” cursed Henri, his mind racing.

  Flashes of his drinking friends, his women, his clients, his stashes and his money flickered through his mind. So much was lost to him now. Curiously, the image of his estranged daughter in São Paulo also entered his mind. He had not thought about or seen the girl for many years. He shook the strange thought away.

  “I’m not a demon, silly man,” said Sábado. “I’m a sleepwalker. I can visit the Fringe, but I still live in the real world. I wonder if this apartment will be available now that you’re dead. I could use a new place to crash.”

  “This is my home!” he shouted, starting to get angry.

  He touched the wall, but instead of the dry plaster he expected, he felt a surface like cold marble.

  “No, it isn’t. You’re dead and gone. You’re just a knot of emotions and energy, walking around naked and dumb. You’re nothing but a headless chicken. You won’t survive your afterlife unless you start being nice to helpful strangers like Gatinho and I.”

  “You’re wrong, you have to be,” he protested weakly. “Please, just leave.”

  Henri moved towards the door, but Gatinho hissed at him; in the same moment, the whole world seemed to shake and blur, as if a great wave of bass sound had vibrated through his being. The sensation made him dizzy at first, then caused his joints to ache and his heart to constrict. He stepped back, feeling suddenly tired and ill, as if he had lost blood.

  “Now, now,” purred Sábado. “That is no way to treat a new friend, sister.”

  “True,” she agreed, enjoying Henri’s ignorance, laughing gently with a terribly feminine joy.

  “Leave me alone!” he shouted, losing his patience. “Get out, you bitch!”

  Henri stormed over to her, meaning to force her outside by closing the wooden shutters on the window. She casually kicked out at him, bracing herself on the frame with her hands. The light climbing shoe she wore connected neatly with his chin and sent him backwards. Pain flared through his skull, pain as real as it had ever been back in the world of the living.

  Sábado dropped into the room and kicked again, this time at his stomach, making a dull thump. Henri doubled up and dropped to the floor, gasping in pain, clutching at his abdomen. He realised only then that she was beautiful.

  “You have no manners, Henri Laurent.”

  Sábado drew on her chest with her index finger as she intoned his name. She traced a small circle that radiated jagged lines.

  He stared dumbly; as she drew, her finger left behind thin, red lines. The lines glowed faintly just like the other marks they both wore. He realised that she was making a rough copy of his death wound. When the symbol was done, a new pain flashed through his being, sapping his energy and leaving him exposed. He felt like she had torn out his heart, like she held it in her hand.

  “What are you doing to me?!” he whimpered, but there was no weight in his voice.
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  “I have caught your name and so I have caught you,” purred Sábado. “You’re now bound to me. I can find you anywhere. You belong to me.”

  “Why are you doing this? Leave me alone! Please… oh, I just want to wake up. I want to live…”

  “You’re living right now, aren’t you? An echo of life, but better than nothing. You need to embrace your afterlife, Henri. I’m trying to help you.”

  Henri was fairly sure that she actually meant that. She was genuinely trying to act as his guide in this nightmare. The problem was that she seemed to share the fickle and cruel sensibilities of her cat. He was exhausted and confused, his belly and chin hurt and his thoughts were a jumble. He rolled onto his side, crawling away. Henri looked for his corpse but it was gone. He was growing more distant from the waking world.

  “Are there others?” he asked with a hollow voice.

  “Others? You have me, my love,” she said with a smirk.

  “No… are there other dead people here?”

  “Oh yes, many of them. Don’t expect any kindness from other spirits; the older they get, the stranger they get. Purgatory wears them down.”

  “Madre Mia…” he breathed.

  Purgatory. He had not considered this place in that light until now. His eyes went to a cross on the wall, one of the things that the Fringe had copied from his real-world apartment. He was not a religious man, but most people had a cross or a picture of Jesus somewhere in the house. Rio was religious by nature and it rubbed off on all of her inhabitants in one way or another. It hung in the air with the heat and the music.

  “Gatinho and I will look after you; in return you’ll keep us well fed,” said Sábado. “We need your vitality… your life. Does it surprise you to learn that spirits still have life? In a way, you have more than you did before. You’re no longer limited by your body. So, you’ll allow us to feed from you just a little each day and we’ll keep you safe from harm. This is fair, don’t you think?”

  “Feed from me? What are you? Why are you doing this?!” asked Henri, pleading.

  The thought of her (or her cursed cat) drinking his life away was abhorrent. It spurred him into action, scrambling across the floor until he met the wall. He looked to one side and found that here in the Fringe, in the echo of his old home, his old desk still stood. There was his salvation, taped under the desk; he could see it from his position on the floor but she could not. He silently thanked the Fringe for duplicating this particular detail from his old life. When he was killed, barely an hour ago, he had failed to reach it in time to save himself. Perhaps this time he could.

  He threw himself towards the table. Sábado stepped forwards to catch him but in her overconfidence she had let him slither too far away. He reached under the desk, groping at the tape desperately with a prayer on his lips.

  Gatinho leapt onto the table, inches from his face, hissing like a wild cat. Henri shouted in alarm but his fingers wrapped around his prize. Sábado barrelled into his back and pulled him around, but his hand came up with a black handgun. The weapon came to bear directly at her face. Faster than anything he had ever seen before, she was already starting to dodge when he pulled the trigger. The barrel flamed with red light, the mechanics of the gun jarring with the rules of the Fringe, but it worked nonetheless. The bullet tore through her shoulder and she faltered, shock written on her face. The next bullet grazed her upper arm. She fell backwards with a shout of pain.

  Gatinho growled and the air shook with a strange vibration again, but Henri was now powered by desperation and horror. He swung the handgun like a club and slammed the beast to the floor before she could sap his strength.

  Henri ran, faster than he had ever done when he was alive, fighting through his pain and exhaustion. He sped through his apartment door, onto the thin ledge outside that was actually the roof of the dwelling below.

  He soon saw that like his apartment, the rest of purgatory was shaped more or less like the real world, but certain things were wrong. Some buildings were taller or shorter than they should be and there were no people or cars. There was a tree in the courtyard of his block that had certainly not been there before. He looked for the statue of Christ the Redeemer in the distance, only to see that here it was broken, the entire top half missing. He heard a growl of anger behind him and turned to glance back.

  Sábado rose from the floor against all explanation, a wicked glint in her eyes. She steadied herself on the desk and he noticed that her fingernails looked longer than before, curved and wicked. Gatinho fussed around her.

  Henri could take no more. He fled, hopping onto the corrugated iron roof of the next building. He leapt from there to the next building, no stranger to running through the maze of rooftops that made up the canopy of the favela.

  Sábado gritted her teeth, which were rapidly growing into needle points. She tensed herself, bracing against her pain. Her bullet wounds were already healing as Gatinho purred beside her, sharing her strength with her sister. Sábado sighed and walked to the doorway as her flesh knitted back together. The cat skulked beside her feet.

  “I know. Time to hunt now,” she said, glancing at her with a smile. “You did say you wanted him to run.”

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  Thanks for reading!

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  If you enjoyed The Firebird, British Gods, Thornback or Saturday’s Child, you may also enjoy the full version:

  Strange Matters

  A compilation of short tales of fantasy, myth and magic.

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