Terminal: A Collection of Horror Novellas
Author: Adam M. Booth
Date: 2016-08-04 07:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror
Description: Loss, lust and loneliness. TERMINAL collects DRIVE, ANGELA, and THE END into one volume. DRIVE is a psychological thriller that tells the story of David, an ageing delivery man by day, and storied serial killer by night. DRIVE considers what might drive a man to kill, and what might drive a killer to stop. ANGELA, is a bleak and unflinching gothic horror in which we meet a lonely, middle aged woman who must live with the legacy of her family's dark secret, the madness that grows in the absence of love, and a closet full of delicate skeletons. THE END is a zombie horror told from the zombie's p
Publisher: Independently published

TERMINAL

A COLLECTION

ADAM M BOOTH

TERMINAL

ADAM M BOOTH

© 2016 Adam M. Booth

Published: 27th July 2016

Publisher: Adam M. Booth

Editor: L. C. Davies

Digital Edition

The right of Adam M. Booth to be identified as author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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DRIVE

ANGELA

THE END

TERMINAL

ADJECTIVE

1. FORMING OR SITUATED AT THE END OR EXTREMITY OF SOMETHING.

2. (OF A DISEASE) PREDICTED TO LEAD TO DEATH, ESPECIALLY SLOWLY; INCURABLE. (OF A CONDITION) FORMING THE LAST STAGE OF A TERMINAL DISEASE.

3. THE END OF A RAILWAY OR OTHER TRANSPORT ROUTE, OR A STATION AT SUCH A POINT.

DRIVE

ADAM

M

BOOTH

CONTENTS

F

3/4

THE MACHETE MAN

1/2

THE COMPANY

1/4

LISA

THE SNAKE

THE BOY

THE PLAN

E

EPILOGUE

See the man, sat in the vehicle, neon lights warping over his windscreen and his eyes and his mind, night time filling in the gaps wherever there was an absence of anything. Love. Guilt. Mercy. Blank spaces.

He is not a young man, but he is not so old that his grip and his fist aren't a vice and a rock when he needs them to be, that his eyes and his loins aren't red hot pokers when he wants them to be. And see his mouth, a tear in leather. It hides a tongue that can still taste you on the air, and the shadow he casts hides a man that can still split you and slit you and end your life with his weapons of metal and meat.

F

David pulled the van door shut with a slam. Metal found metal and the night settled around him. He breathed it deep. It was done. Finally. They were where they ought to be, hanging from the meat hooks in the back, drugged, bound and gagged, and they wouldn't wake up for a good couple of hours. Plenty of time to get home. Plenty of time. He swigged flat coke from a big bottle and slapped his timeworn face. Wake up David. Stay awake. He had a full night ahead of him, with a van full of fun, a tank full of diesel, and a spare at his feet, just in case. The battered old diesel can sloshed in the footwell and filled the small space with the perfume of ozone and industry. A bag of sharp metal sat at his side, eye slits for button holes unblinking, while the open road stretched out ahead of him full of possibility. There was just one last thing to do. Drive. He would guide his secret cargo carefully through that night, flickering between the headlights and hoardings like a shadow animal made of fists and fingers and an absence of light, almost invisible to those that lived in that light, a nightmare they chose not to see until his knife were at their neck, and his teeth were at their bone.

Neon strips reached down the dark alley from the bright street and stroked his wet brown eyes. He pictured those dense bundles of pleasure swinging from the thick hooks a few feet behind him. The secret things that he had secured in the back of the vehicle from which he delivered meat for cash in the pale of the day. A pleasing heat grew behind his eyes and in his big hands and with one of them he gripped the wheel, and with the other he turned the key. The engine roared into the cold, wet night and he pulled the white van out of the shade of the alleyway and onto a seedy street that hummed with cars and call girls and commercials.

The wheel rotated in his hot damp hands. Home. No diversions, just him, the open road, the two in the back, and all his terrible desire. Desire that could only take him to one place, a place between the pines where he parked the van, then down to the boathouse by the lake, then down again, beneath that boat house, beneath everything. It would be a long, electric night. And it had to be tonight. Lisa was away. It had to be tonight. But patience David, patience, the city streets were busy and the last thing he needed was to get pulled over. That was the last thing he needed.

“Step out of the vehicle. Open the back”.

NO. No. That couldn't happen. The tight leather wheel squeaked in his fist as he rumbled along, his mind ticking through city streets while his mobile phone sat idle in the trunk of his wife’s car, many miles away. No GPS. No trace. Using only his wits he navigated a path toward his normal route home from the depot, back toward the place where, if noticed, he could pretend that tonight was just like any other night. But it wasn't. No, tonight was special. Tonight was about an old man's dreams and teenage screams.

David cut through the dimming day, windows and headlamps staring, winking, and the eyes behind them doing the same. He took the lowest roads in the moon-cast shade of peak and hill, hiding in the smog and shadows that had served him so well. The road curved away from him, up and over bracken dunes and into an orange-bloomed horizon. He followed it. The grime in the sky curled in a desolate tidal wave, filling his vision with a texture that reminded him of a badly tuned TV. His squint bore through it. He picked out a recently burned out car still smouldering on a scrap of rough land. A man stood by it. A solitary silhouette. A charcoal scar against the amber sky. Through those badlands the road slithered, greasy, black, and he was only too happy to go where it lead him.

Tarmac and white lines slid beneath him, taking cars and buildings and people far away. Take them away. Take them all away.

Cruising, he needed music. The radio fizzed between broadcasts and landed on a station playing a song, slow and steady. Through a crackling speaker a finger slipped down a C string and the guitar shrieked. He was sure he'd heard this song before, maybe as a teenager, but maybe never at all. His eyes narrowed as he tuned his mind to an echo across time, someone singing words of yearning, years ago. Yes, he remembered the song. He was too young to know such weariness back then, but he recognised the sentiment now. Those words meant what they meant but the beat of the drum and the ache of the old guitar told their own story, hot and lazy. He was behind the terraced house again on that late and lazy summer day, the two of them on the bare limits of the coastal town they grew up in, so close he could smell their sweet sweat as their clothes came up and off… His jeans were so tight. He had to get home.

The landscape undulated away from him and as it reared up over the horizon David saw a long line of traffic snaking slowly over the hill. He joined the queue. Distant lights flashed all red and blue and urgent and his brow knit. This wasn't good. There were too many people in this fucking world, he chided, even after all his hard work. Too many eyes still attached to too many brains by judgmental nerves. He queued. In the noxious breath of exhaust fumes David coughed and wheezed and his weakened mind set sail in the methane haze. In it he saw a splattered collage of the deaths that brought him here. Screaming girls and bleeding boys. Murdered fathers and buried brothers. His mother, dead on the day he was born, his blood lust desperate from that very first minute. That demon. That dragon. He had only ever known the woman from the inside out, but his brother had known her in the natural way. Paddy had seen her face and stroked her hair and sucked her tit, so he had something to miss. David was just glad to have gotten out of her. But now this fucking motionless line of cars and lights were testing him, God damn it. Those rouge and blue lights were too close, too urgent, their light licking over his bonnet like a tongue tasting him on the air. Could he back away? Turn round and take a different route? The only other route he knew would take him past work. Past the depot and the office. It was late, but that didn’t mean there would be no-one there that knew him. And it would add time, but so would staying here, and that ketamine wouldn’t keep those two back there quiet all night. He looked in his mirror. Behind him the cars tailed and hummed, their lights and engine heat shivering into the distance like the tail of a cobra. Fuck it. He threw the van into reverse and spun it around, flashing and thumbing at the cars that blocked his exit. A bewildered woman in her beige fifties struggled with her gearstick and wheel until she was up on the curb, letting him through, her face set, some instinct telling her not to react to that volatile van full of hormones and hubris. He raged away, turning onto a wide, clear avenue where the space stretched out forever and for while the breathing was easy. He leaned on the vinyl door with a dusty elbow and watched as the world ran towards and then away from him. The light was strange tonight, he thought. Black, but purple, and thick like a liquid. He drove into it, left then right, then right again, following instincts that he thought to be galvanised, instincts that had kept him alive this long. The radio sang to him stories of screen doors and thunder roads and pumped his blood south, just where he wanted it, and for a moment there was just David, the road, and the wind. The world was his, and everything was good, and everything was golden. In the distance, past yellow M’s and off ramps, he saw the sky, purple and sparking, rolling in, consuming itself. Becoming the song. Becoming a storm.

Ahead of him David saw a burst of red steam and smelled the bitter strike of brake fluid in his filtered air. A road traffic accident. He slowed down and drove by. The scene was silent except for the hissing of gasses, unseen so far by anyone but him, the universe holding it in stasis, waiting to show someone what it had done. Two motorcyclists had united in a fatal collision. Their handlebars and collarbones were knitted like antlers, carburettors and aorta fused, conjoined twins sharing their steaming hearts. Dead bodies and dead engines pumping their last thick liquids into a slick, lascivious puddle in an orgy of metal and meat. He slowed down. He salivated. He wanted to get out and kneel in that mixture of man and machine. He wanted to lift up those battered helmets and see their black eyes in their broken faces and kiss their purple lips. He wanted to writhe in their cooling entrails and add his own fluids to this cocktail of effluvia, but over his shoulder he felt the pressure of those red and blue lights again. His glance cast back. It wouldn’t be long till they were here too, flashing over the scene, seeing into his soul and stealing his future, so despite his driving sex and his lusting blood he drove, he drove, he drove, but with each wrong turn the world around him became less and less his own. The heavy light pulled him on, David’s foot pumping diesel, his hands stroking leather, while lust fought loss behind the eyes that ached in his head. Pictures played behind those dispassionate globes. He thought about his brother, about Patrick, a man too soon. He remembered the wiry hair that grew on his legs and chest. Paddy was one of those boys who got wide and hairy sooner than most, a taut bomb of brawn and bone, threatening to explode out of his school uniform and into manhood at any minute. He thought of the floor boards of Paddy’s bare bedroom, those hairs still deep between the cracks, the dust he left behind, his skin and hair leaving a trace of him in somebody else's home. And he remembered looking through another crack, the crack in his father’s door. Through it a fist of meat and muscle, made of three men, flesh churning, grinding, eating itself, sculpting new forms, square and hard. Fur beaded with sweat and tears, knuckles and teeth clenching and gripping. His own breath leaving him. A song playing behind all this, a song on a cassette he recorded from a VHS tape. A song from a movie made for TV, the ads chopped roughly out of it. A woman’s voice calling up to him, singing to him, a melody of fear through layers of analogue hiss.

There it was, across the cross roads, the industrial park that his distribution centre backed onto, and beyond that his way home, zigzagging across the city like a path worn in dry earth. From where he was he could even see the top three floors of the office, tall and grey above the factories and sheds. Did he see lights on floor eight? Yes, yes he did. Human Resources must be working late. His heart made a fist. What if they saw him drive past? Maybe Helen would leave at the exact time he was pulling round the corner. He'd told her he was away fishing. If she saw him she'd wonder why he was still in town so late, and she was friends with Lisa on Facebook… He would have to wait. He would have to wait there in the relative dark for that solitary light to go out. The idea angered and frustrated him, but he had no choice. He wrenched the van to the side of the road, choosing a place between two streetlights, and sat in salty stillness, chastising himself for getting so settled here in this loveless grid of concrete and rust.

Time passed but the light in the building he worked from still shone out, looking for something to see in the amber dark. David’s big boot tapped out his impatience on the rubber floor and his brain felt like the space between radio stations. The minutes took their time, moving like melting wax, and while the blood in his veins raced under his skin, his breath stalled in his chest. If he could move, he could breathe. But he couldn’t move, and he couldn’t breathe. He turned his impatient fist and rapped his knuckles on the plastic interior of his van, the way his own father had on those long nights when her absence forced them into each other’s company. David looked over at the ghost of himself that haunted his passenger seat, seeing himself sat small on those ancient nights, thin arms, short shorts and bone pale skin. He felt the presence of his father riding wide and silent in his own worn chair, each of them staring through the glass at their own dark world, each begrudging and ambivalent in their own lonely way. He pictured the lay-bys too, black notches of road where he'd sit lonely in the cab, listening to the bushes rustle till his Daddy came back smelling of sweat and shame and secrets. Now what a man does in the shade of his own shadow is of no one else’s concern, David reminded himself, not father, not son, nor mother nor wife. The flesh wants what the flesh wants and to deny it is to deny what makes a man a man. Dad had told him as much whenever David asked too many questions, and age had only taught him that his father had been right. He’d had seen too many men fall apart that way, choosing lace curtains from a rack, blunting their tusks pretending to care which couch they died into. Let a man be a man, Dad had said, and let a woman do whatever it is that women do.

Eventually the last light blinked out and for a moment the building was as dark as he wanted it to be. Then something flickered. The automatic fluorescents in the stairwell shuddered on and off, one after the other, following the lone, late worker as she descended the building and made her way to the car park. David's breath pushed against the inside of his chest and time hardened around him. Come on woman! Get out of the fucking way. Finally, the gate rose and fell and the last car left the park. At once he became one with his square white vehicle and sped away fast - too fast - fast enough to attract attention, so he pulled his foot back a little, fighting the muscles in his big leg that wanted to stamp the ground flat and turn the world vague with his speed. Carefully he drove right onto the street outside his building, then left onto the dual carriageway that cut the city in two, and finally he was moving and he was breathing and he was swelling in anticipation. He carved through the dark, then crested a hill, sick with a sodium glow, and slid down the other side, streetlights darting past like fireflies, embers pocking the night sky over the jaundiced macadam. The yellow light reminds him of a static sunset and for a while he daydreams. He daydreams of seasides and suicides.

David’s daydreams and detours had taken him to the edges of the next town over, where an abandoned shopping complex stretched out over the black land. How had he ended up here, he wondered. This was the wrong place to be for anyone, especially a man like him on a night like tonight. He was too close to her out here, too close to the lives they lived and to Lisa’s sister’s house, where she was spending the night doing whatever those girls did when he wasn’t looking. Their proximity gave him chills and he shivered as he rumbled past the petrol station they stopped at for fuel whenever they were in this neck of the woods. At least he thought it was the same petrol station. They all looked so bloody alike. Something itched in his brain. Was he even where thought he was? He looked through the mirror, back down the road at the sleeping mall, but it was gone. In its place was the shape of a church and a graveyard, only a shade darker than the sky, row upon row of sandstone saints and marble Marys made simple by night’s black veil. He blinked red eyes. Where was the shopping centre? Had it gone? He was sure he had seen it, but perhaps it had just been a trick of the light. No, the shopping centre was definitely here. He knew it for a fact. He’d been here before. The strange shape cut from the sky behind him was the just the way it looked from this angle, twisted and distorted through his mirror, he told himself, then the church bell tolled three times. He felt himself hot. Not in the slick, tight way he had planned for later, but from a feeling he hadn't had in a while. Hot from the fear that he might be vulnerable. It was the kind of heat that formed a cold sweat. The paradoxical kind. He unbuttoned his shirt a little and turned up the fan. “I should have taken that bloody sat nav,” he thought. “Sometimes a man just needs a little help.”

The van came to a stop at the side of an alien lane and David killed the engine. He leaned forward in his seat, his tight sweaty chest brushing the back of his white knuckles where they gripped the wheel, and scoured the bruised night for something to see. There must be something out there he could recognise. Some landmark or signpost. Some trail of light to follow, but there was nothing. Nothing but the road in the dark. His breath fell shallow and his skin prickled. He had to get himself together. “Come on David. You're a fucking man. A big fucking man, with a big cock and bigger knives. Don’t let this shit hole get the better of you.” His empty sentiment came back at him from the curve of the glass windscreen and above him galaxies spun in a vacuum. He took one deep breath. The cab smelled of man. Of cedar and saltpetre. He blew it out of him and his used air left a smudge on the windscreen. The key turned again in a square fist and the lights copied the engine as it rattled back to life. He would take his cues from the moon, he decided, go north, follow this snaking lane through these black woods and back waters and eventually he'd get to the suburbs, then it was just a little way further to his house and his lockup on the lake, where the houses were a little lonelier, the trees a little thicker, and the sound didn't carry so well.

3/4

The moon led David to a railway track. He took a right and followed it with no little relief. The trains round here all went through the big station, just two miles from his home. He knew if he followed it eventually he'd be back on track, or close enough. He shifted about on the vinyl seat and it creaked and complained under the clammy bristle of his hard backside. Yes, this was better. For whatever reason he had lost his way, but he’d be ok now. He'd be ok. He pressed the pedal. Moths terminated against the windscreen, a pop of blood, a broken wing, an extinguished light. David thought about Patrick, a man too soon. He remembered how he’d scruff his hair when David was knee high to him, looking up to his seventeen years. He saw his white boxer shorts blowing on the line bigger than his own, making a promise to him somehow. A promise he didn't keep.

Eventually David grew tired of the radio screaming so he spun the plastic dial till the sound faded out then opened the window a crack so he could let it all out of him. The night was cold. It bit at his ears, and he liked it. And with the cool sting came the sweet hush of water breaking, the unmistakable snare of sea meeting sand. At first it didn't register as unusual, he just enjoyed the nostalgia that it swept ashore. Him and his brother at the beach, just old enough to take the train themselves, topless and carefree in the low summer sun, and later, under the pier, in the shadows, secrets. And sure enough, just over the other side of the tracks was that dark and endless sea, rolling in and out of itself. No, that can't be the sea. It can't be, I'm many miles inland. That's impossible. Yet there it was, all black and ambivalent, foaming and breaking against the grey sand despite him. He stopped the van and looked out through glass sprayed with rain sent ahead by the purple storm in the middle distance. Boats littered the shore like discarded toys, some broken, some raised for painting, while all around warning lights flashed weakly on beached buoys. There were people, he saw. Three of them. Two adults and a child. They held hands as they walked up a ramp and onto a pier that jutted out like a broken jaw over the black sea, a sea that roiled and rolled madly beneath them, beating the pebble shore. Through the rain they people seemed to him to shimmer in and out of existence. The taller of the two adults stood looking out to sea. At what? There was nothing to see out there. Nothing to see but the seething sea. Not even the stars broke through. It reminded him of a song his grandfather had sung, his grandfather on his mother's side.

Your father went to sea, sea, sea.

To see what he could see, see, see.

But all that he could see, see, see.

Was the bottom of the deep, dark sea, sea, sea.

The taller adult bent down and spoke words stolen by the wind, his face strict but solemn. The child regarded his feet and nodded. Did David see hope in those eyes? No. There was no hope to see here. For a moment they all stood in silence, searching the sky for a horizon, then the two big people each took a tiny hand in their own and swung the child back, then out in a single, damning arc, letting go at the top of it, sending his fragile form spinning out into that impossible sea, eternal and turbulent, smashing him into its liquid glass, his tiny bones breaking, his meagre body swallowed by the riptide. The adults wasted no time, said no goodbyes, they just walked away briskly, the way a couple might approach a waiting car in the rain, then down the ramp and into the shadow of the rusted hull of a listing ferry. A shadow from which they didn’t emerge.

The lightning lit the night, bruised in fire and light, all awesome and terrible like a fight in the sky. And with each crack an image flashed through David’s windscreen. The back of a hand across a purple face. A swollen eye. A burst lip. And then it pealed, the skin came back and David saw inside them, inside the people who terminated in his basement. He felt and heard the eternal stinging echo that rang through them as they bled out, slipping under death's beautiful anaesthesia. It didn't matter. They didn't matter. It wasn't about them for fuck’s sake. It was about him. Fuck them. Fuck their feelings and their lives, no doubt wasted on bad TV and take-aways. He slapped his face. This was no time for sentimentality. He was an animal for fuck’s sake. A big fucking buck with incisors and a hard on. Fuck them. Fuck the world and this rain. Fuck the dead mothers and the potential fathers and the unborn children they’d never meet.

Under the hood of the van cogs whirred and gears clicked. The refined remains of long dead organisms burned hot and bright in controlled explosions, their precious energy propelling him further and further into an uncertain future. David didn’t care. He didn’t care about anything other than getting those two back there into the basement of his lockup before the drugs wore off, then refilling his imagination with their hard bodies, muffled screams and gleaming wetness. Once it was done he could be himself again. He’d dissolve the mess of flesh in the acid bath then burn the bones in the incinerator and enjoy the numbness that saturated him, for a while. That was all he wanted. All he craved. All he had ever needed for sustenance. Bodies. Open. Screaming. Dying. The thought steeled his stare and curled his lip and raised his blood, and all the weirdness of the world fell away.

Distracted by his racing mind and aching balls David almost didn’t notice the mist that crept out of the night and coalesced around him. At first it was no more than a wisp. No more than the steam from his hot engine and his burning urges. Soon though it rolled in thicker and denser, like phantom fingers feeling the dark for him, and when they found him they gripped him, and he had no choice but to slow down in its cloying gloom.

He chugged along. To his left a building materialised from the murk. A long, low shed, all battened and patched. Then another on his right. Then another beyond that. Long, low lean-tos, half submerged in the mist, grey and featureless but menacing at the same time. What were they? He had a memory of this place, he was sure of it. Hadn't his father taken him to places like this? His mind wandered as the van navigated its way slowly through the cotton grey. A sound cut through the cloud that clogged the air.

"SQUEEEEEEE...."

Yes! He knew that sound! It was the sound of a stuck pig. These must be abattoirs. Killing sheds. They were the same as the ones his father had taken him to as a child, packing meat into his own van, before taking that dead flesh somewhere. Everywhere. David remembered waiting in the old man’s van, waiting for him to do whatever he did in the cabins round the back. He remembered going to look for his Dad after waiting too long for him to return, picking through the shadows over plank and iron to the place where he could see through the cracks and onto the killing floor. Pigs, lined up on pointed trotters, bristling and fearful. To this day he could still remember the smell of their frightened piss. It was different to normal piss. Better. And he could remember their eyes catching his own through the gap in the wall, wide then pleading then dead in their heads. Ah yes, how could he forget? He saw God through those eyes. He had been there in their fear and in their final squeal. Stood there at the exit of their lives David had glimpsed inside eternity.

The squeals grew louder. How many were they, these pigs? Maybe a thousand per shed in sheds this size. And how many sheds? He'd passed a hundred if he'd passed one. So many swine, swine now squealing in the mist, riling up at the sound of his engine, whining and scratching and butting the sheds. They creaked, the sheds, he could hear them creak, so he pressed down on the pedal, knowing the damage that many angry pigs could do to his trusty vehicle and his precious cargo. Faster. The van careered through the city of sheds, sharp left, sharp right, tipping and jostling to be free, taking each turn only as the mist allowed it, not sure where the next might be, or when the end might turn up dead. Faster still. Wood splintered and fractured behind him as trotters pounded the ground, pounding in their thousands, getting ever louder, ever closer as the swine surged forward. They were everywhere, all around him, squealing their accusations. He stamped and stamped his leather boots, pedal to the metal, tyres spinning filth into the air, crashing through fence and gate as he hurtled toward the only thing he could see, a single, solitary light, swinging lonely in the distant fug. He crashed through one more fence and then the pigs fell back. They had chased him far enough it seemed, and now they merged into the murk, leaving him freewheeling alone toward the only light he could find.

The light grew and the fog thinned and the van idled to a stop, exhaust pipe coughing into the pallid mist. He wiped the steam from the window and it showed him a bare bulb hanging a few feet ahead oh him, swinging gently from a wire that ran above a courtyard. He was parked on a flaking orange grate that spanned the square, ginger troughs running this way and that. The grates gave off a heavy metal scent that seeped in through the air vents and made his eyes sting and his mouth water. It was quiet, startlingly so given the racket that had chased him here. Quiet except for one noise.

Knock.

Knock.

Knock.

The fog dulled the echo, but he saw where it came from. There was a man, naked but for a leather apron, his features vague in the gloom. He was knocking nails into a structure of wood. Big, square nails. The old kind. David watched. Had the man seen him? He seemed oblivious, or perhaps he just didn't care. David couldn't see the leathered man's face, and he didn't want to. The man climbed up, nailing two-by-four to two-by-four as his creation grew into the mist, swaying sightly with its lack of planning or symmetry. Up and up he went, knocking and climbing, as if he was building his way into heaven, or out of hell. Eventually the man reached his peak and the hammering stopped. He took out a big hook and, with several bent nails, nailed it to the cross bar. Then, with big, tired arms and a heavy heave, he climbed up and sat on his lonely perch. His feet swung idly like a child’s and he looked down at them, sadness running off his chin, raining down into the rusted dirt. David noticed that the feet he stared at were shackled together. Had he been a slave, this weary man? Had he slipped his cuffs to slink away from his chain gang? Walked many solitary miles to find this freedom? Or was he made to build this leaning structure by some unseen warden, somewhere out there, somewhere in the mist? No, David decided, this man was no slave. He was acting as he wanted, no gun to his head, no whip at his back, just all that deliberate knocking and building and climbing. David felt he should call out to the man, ask him what the hell he thought he was doing here? Shouldn't he be tending to those damn pigs back there? Those nails and that hammer would be better suited to repairing those rickety fucking sheds that were not fit for purpose. Did he know anything about gutting a pig? A pig'll fight back, given half a chance, and they can be strong. Damn strong. You've gotta pen them fuckers in tight. David wound down the window to shout out to the man on the edge of his shaky structure, but before David could scold him for his ineptitude the man settled his ankle chains into the rusty hook that hung at his feet and threw himself off the cross bar. He swung upside down in a great arc, loose limbed and languid. The leather apron flapped down over his torso, exposing the naked body beneath, his grey genitalia hanging over his abdomen, lacerated and pathetic in the anaemic light. David shouted, "Are you fucking mad, man? What the hell are you doing?” but before he could pretend to take the action his words implied he might the swinging man pulled a long, dirty knife from the belt around his waist and thrust it into himself two-fisted, then jerked it down, carving a valley through his body from navel to throat. “What kind of abattoir was this?” David thought, “Where the swine ran free and the butchers butchered themselves?” David’s eyes hadn’t left the crucified man for too long but now even he had to look away, and as he did he saw that the pigs hadn’t gone anywhere, they were congregated in the mist, huffing their prayers at this alter of disembowelment. Their rapture rose up, a steaming chorus of trotter and squeal, whining and screeching like ailing infants until they were stampeding once more, hurtling toward him, a rabble of pink and brown.

He had to get out.

NOW.

Eyes wide, brow wet, David stamped down and the engine screeched out of gear. He fought the stick into first and drove forwards, kicking up dirt, no idea how to get out of this schizophrenic place but determined to leave if it took everything he had. He revved past the man on the hook, who convulsed as pipes of his shit and bags of his gasses fell out of him, down over his face, collecting in the steaming trough beneath his makeshift gallows. David ploughed away from him through drifts of angry pig, their hog bodies smashing against the white of the van, testing his metal, popping and bursting and tainting its whiteness with their pork blood and their stinking manure. If he had to drive through acres of pig and shit to get out of here he would, he knew. He would not die here in this twilight zone. He would not die here.

He would not die here.

THE MACHETE MAN

The Machete Man. That was the name the news had given him, for reasons obvious enough. In the boring peace of the eighties the public needed a new monster and he had been only too happy to oblige.

THE MACHETE MAN STRIKES AGAIN

Police report that four more bodies have been found in the Preston area with wounds matching those by other victims of the notorious serial murderer the press have labelled “The Machete Man”. The victims names have not yet been released, and the killer remains at large. Police are warning the public to remain vigilant.”

“MAN SURVIVES MACHETE KILLER ATTACK

A man named by police as Graham Wright is believed to be the first survivor of the crazed killer known as The Machete Man. Mr. Wright, aged 33, was found naked at the side of the A483 near Chester at 2.15 am on the morning of the Sunday 16th January, badly wounded. Our sources claim that Mr. Wright’s feet and eyelids had been severed and that he appeared to have been drugged. Mr. Wright managed to identify his attacker as The Machete Man before being taken to hospital where he remains. Mr. Wright is said to be assisting the Police in their ongoing investigation. The Machete Man remains at large.”

Oh how he loved those headlines. The notoriety was intoxicating. It made him feel God-like. Invincible. The sudden infamy adding fuel to a fire that needed none. There were many, many more victims in those slap dash years, but there were more survivors too. Those that escaped pieced him together to the police, a crowd-sourced composite of torn up paper and skin that became hundreds of his own sunken eyes staring at him from the newsstands. “The Machete Man”. It was a good name. He liked it. Honestly it was all he could do not to get t-shirts made up. Take a look at him then, so cocky, so young, and so sloppy with that big brutal blade of his. Too excited to tie them down or to chain them up or bolt the doors. Too eager to give in to his urges, an opportunist, there in the shadow of his old school on those streets he knew so well, and oh how he loved the struggle. Their wide white eyes and bulging blue veins. It was so primal. So animalistic. He loved the fight, the challenge, and back then he was strong enough to take the risk, but they had gotten away too often, with tales on the tongues he didn’t cut out. Later, as he scrubbed their matter from beneath his nails he’d laugh to himself picturing the pathetic way they hobbled away on stumps as he lay spent on the floor, glistening trails of their own vitality leading back to him, back to the places they lost something of themselves. Alleys where they lost their feet. Warehouses where they lost their souls. They must have thought they’d won by getting away from him. Some victory! A lifetime of PTSD and reconstructive surgeries. Ha! That’s no achievement, he knew. A survivor’s life is no life at all. It had amused him then, and it still did. If he was a younger man, a stronger man, he’d still be swinging those blades with reckless abandon, but life had got in the way. It was disruptive to have to move towns so often, and Lisa asked too many questions at the best of times. And of course a new town meant a new set of rules. A new mask. A new weapon of choice. In the nineties he had been Johnny Five Knives. He made that one up himself. He was sharper by then. Keener. A wolf. Johnny Five Knives tied them all up and split them and slit them with an array of beautiful knives, rolled out in a human leather attaché that he carried with him to this final day. Scalpel, surgical saw, razor blade, utility knife, and, his favourite, the rusty cleaver. He clutched the knives that slit with fists that hit, slicing and bursting, slicing and bursting, till the meat hung loose on the racks and he couldn't tell bowel from brain. No one escaped Johnny Five Knives, no one, but someone did see. He watched the whole damn show. David had known the boy was there from the first incision, crouched in the shadows, a delivery man perhaps? Of course David had seen him squatting there, nineteen if he was a day, trembling, rigid and awestruck. He saw the light catch the boy’s wide wet eyes as he pulled on his mask, a rough-cut sack with two big holes to see you through, and a big red smile to eat you with. Yes, he had seen the boy, so he took his damn time. He hacked and slashed and took off his clothes but for the mask and pressed his flesh and bones into holes both old and new, his audience of one only adding to the theatre of it all. He added acts, chapters and verses, and by the crescendo the boy was shaking so much David could hear his teeth rattle loose in his skull. With the body on the rack and the length between his legs gone limp, David, bare except for the mask and the blood, unchained the door, turned to the cheap seats, metal glinting silver and red, and said,

"I'm Johnny Five Knives. Tell them my name".

The kid ran out of the building, which David was already dousing with petrol, and as it burned in his rear-view mirror, he was already on the carphone to Lisa.

"Sweetheart, I've been offered a job up north...."

Then all he had to do was make that true.

David never wore that mask again, but he saw it one more time. Months later and miles away David lay prone on the bed of a cheap hotel, a little drunk and a little tired after a weekend of corporate team building bullshit at the new job he had charmed and chopped his way into. The TV news told him of an anonymous report detailing the crimes of Johnny Five Knives, a killer police estimated had killed eleven times over five years and who had just killed again the night before. An approximation of his old hessian smile burned out of the cathode ray tubes. Good boy, David thought, picturing the kid in the overalls and the look in his eyes as he ran out of there. Wide. Blank. Hungry for more.

The police never even got close, fixed in their naive assumption that a killer couldn’t change, adapt, survive. After Johnny Five Knives he learned to never leave a pattern. Make one murder ritualistic, and the next look like a robbery gone wrong, and the grunting little pigs would never join the dots. They could try and figure out his motive, his “psychological profile”, but what they never understood was that his only aim was to kill, and keep killing, and he did. And he did. But age chased David toward the finish line. He was getting older and the pursuit just wasn't what it used to be. In fact it rattled him a little, truth be told. But despite his waning bravery the need still remained. Even after all this time. For years he stagnated in that little box of hers, wanking himself off to fading memories of his own ripping vigour and gripping strength, the screams that echoed around his vacant skull getting quieter with every ejaculation until he was forced online to refill his head with other people’s terror. The movies wouldn't do, all that syrup and schlock, they got so little of it right. The victims all gave up too quickly, or not quickly enough. They forgot the pleading, the part where they collapse into childhood, sucking their thumbs, calling out for their mummies. Then the reasoning, how they knew he needed help, and how they could get it for him if he’d just untie them. And then the bargaining, offering up their mothers or brothers or cars while their morals exited through their backsides. And they never showed those who wanted it. The way their bodies betrayed them, swelled up, dripped wet. He heard rumours on reddit of videos of men dying in alleys, pleading for their desperate lives in Baltic languages, videos that showed people being shown through Death’s door by men wielding hammers and sickles. He found those videos in the darkest parts of the web, and they helped, but as luck would have it, there, lurking amongst the black ones and zeroes at the end of the world, he found the Company.

DARKBOT79 - What are you down here for?

FVKNVS88 - To get off.

DARKBOT79 - And is this enough?

FVKNVS88 - Is it ever?

DARKBOT79 - We go further.

DARKBOT79 - We can make it real…

DARKBOT79 - …for a price.

FVKNVS88 - Show me.

DARKBOT79 - Not here. This is as far as we go online. You will need to provide a PO Box number where we can deposit further instructions. You will need to prove yourself once. Just once. Of course the risks are real, but we’d wager you like a little risk...

Twelve days later an unmarked envelope was deposited in the box he chose. Inside, in pressed ink on plain white paper, were these words.

IN PO BOX 18963 LEAVE THE RIGHT HAND OF A CHILD

He stood in the post office and looked up at the big white clock watching him. It was three p.m.

School was finishing for the day.

1/2

The broken clock in the dash said it was 13:72 in blood red light. The fuel gauge hovered, half full, or half empty. David flicked the clock with a dry finger. How long had he been driving? Had it been days? It felt like days but it couldn't have been, could it? Back there, back in the mist with the pigs it was grey like twilight, wasn't it? Had the sun been and gone behind all that cloud? It couldn't have left him without saying goodbye, could it? Back there it had been dark, but not as dark as here, wherever here was. Here it was so dark. So, so dark. Just him and the lonely road. A road that led where? He didn't know anymore. Had he ever? He looked down his damaged arms towards battered hands that gripped the wheel like it might save them. He had too many scars. Too many distinguishing marks. The nicks and punctures from the years he worked in that oil slick factory. The shiny jagged tear on his wrist from the time he caught his hand in the mower because she was too damned lazy to lift a finger. The scratches and punctures wrought by his angry little pigs. Notches on a bed post. Evidence of a life lived hard. His foot pressed down, as if speed might erase all those marks. Maybe more space and more time could make him new again. Maybe. Go faster. The whirring metal in the engine rose in tone and tuned up to a crescendo as the cab rattled and the dashed marks on the road became a streak. Come on, he thought. Come on, show me something. Take me somewhere. Anywhere. I just need to get out of this van.

It was as if he had hit a wall. A force slammed into the front of the van and the windscreen shattered like a firework. His foot found the brake and the tyres rubbed the tarmac till they smoked. There was a thud in the back, and then everything was still, and the stillness reigned. Not even the owls in the trees dared twitch. In the sudden calm David’s flint eyes burned through the lenses of the window and the twisted mirror at his side, and then backwards into the pool of red light behind him. In it the body of a girl. Dead? No, not quite. She was moving. She was shifting and shaking and she was getting to her feet. At first he felt relief, but it was a fleeting comfort. Yes, she moved, but she fractured and fell, dancing a strange, dislocated dance, as if pulled and plucked by some morbid puppeteer. And when he had to look away David saw why. Her head was on the floor in front of him, paler than the white light, her black hair all greasy and slick and stuck to her face, juices draining out from a hole beneath a curtain of skin where her neck ought to become her breasts. He saw her slack, broken face, so wet he almost saw himself reflected in it, but there was no time for contemplation because the body behind was getting closer and closer, dancing its terrible dance toward him, a jerking headless seduction.

She was coming.

She was coming for him.

He wound tight. My God, he thought, could she see him? There was no way. Without a head the body could see nothing. He knew this. He’d proved it to himself time and again, but still she came. "I'm sorry!" he shouted as he padded around, locking the doors. "I'm sorry! It's dark! I didn't see you! I didn’t know you were there!" He barely noticed that she was in her twenties, or that she was bound in a dirty, thin hospital gown. Guilt bled through his chest. Why? Why was he worried about killing this stupid little girl? He had killed and killed and killed. What did it matter? Just drive over the bitch’s dead head David and get away. Leave that spastic body to its ugly dance, but he was calling out, “I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry”. Into his fists he spoke the words, “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to hurt you. I didn't mean to kill you. It was an accident. I was trying to get out of the dark. I was just trying to get out of the dark!” His breaking voice betrayed him. He covered his face with his criminal hands and blotted her out as he begged and willed her away with all his might. He insisted to himself there was no head and there was no body.

There was no body.

There was nobody.

It worked. With one last, wet slap the sound of her bare feet on the slick tarmac went away. He breathed through rough hands that smelled of salt and spit and after a couple of shallow breaths he dared to split his fingers, letting a little light fall into eyes that had taken too much.

She was gone.

There was no head and there was no body, just like he'd asked. Someone out there still gave a shit, he thought. Someone out there still listened to his whispered prayers, even after all he’d done, even after all the blood he had spilled. He kissed his calloused knuckles and his heart settled itself in his chest. He’d killed a girl. So what? He’d killed lots of them. Hers was just one more broken body to add to the pile. He’d thought he’d seen her get up and walk, but it was probably just his imagination, or a trick of the light. Maybe the dying body was just going through it’s death throes and it had looked as though she was getting up when really she was just thrashing her last. He’d seen it happen before. Whatever. She was gone, and that was good. His head shook. You fucking idiot, he thought. He rubbed his yellow eyes. You're too old for this shit. Maybe tonight should be the last time. Get home David. Just get home and get it over with. A needle point pressed out of his pelvis. He needed to piss, had done for hours he realised. No doubt one of the reasons he'd got so edgy, he convinced himself. He'd been too distracted by this twisting night to notice, but now he really needed to let himself go. He considered getting out and pissing into the wind but the image of that headless body, as hallucinatory as he was sure she was, still played too clearly in his mind to let him pull on the handle. No, he'd do it like a real trucker. Like his old Dad. He found the empty coke bottle kicking around in the foot well, uncapped it, and thanked himself for buying a supersize. He unbuttoned his jeans and slipped his hand into the hot, damp, musky place between his thighs. Feeling his hand between his legs he remembered why he was going through this. It was all about that feeling. Getting inside them. Getting wet with their juices. He pulled himself out, pushed the tip of his dick against the sticky opening of the coke bottle, closed his eyes, and let himself go. On and on it went, gushing and glugging as the bottle gagged on his piss. He shuddered in relief and as the feeling ran through him he was reminded of the sound of his Dad pissing onto cracked porcelain in the morning. The walls were too thin in that house, so thin he could hear his brother’s jaw clenching and his knuckles fighting the bed sheets. And he would hear his father too on the other side of that same wall, breathing, gripping, gasping, making sounds he understood only enough to know they were secret. Sounds that excluded him as much as they excited him. He listened for as long as he could, then, when he could take no more, and although it was already too late, David would bang on that wall in protest.

BANG!

BANG!

BANG!

That desperate sound still bruised David’s mind.

BANG!

BANG!

BANG!

There it was, that same sound, knocking against his skull, an echoing accusation. But this sound wasn't only in his head. It was out there too, out there on the side of his van. “Patrick? Dad?” he asked the glass, forgetting his place in space and time as his dark yellow piss continued to flow out of him, filling up the fat plastic vessel and stinging the air with its tang. He looked out of the driver’s window, squinting into the night, and at first it was just the night, as empty and cold as it'd ever been, but slowly, out of his nightmares and up into his view, came the black hair and white skin of the dead girl, sliding up the side of the van and across the glass, leaving a trail of her blood and snot and spinal fluid, dead eyes forced open by the glass. David gasped but caught no air. His muscles hardened, rigid, turgid, and his face became a map of his veins. The bottle of urine spilled in his lap but the piss kept coming, his limp dick spraying his fear all around, darkening his jeans and tainting the air. He stood up wet, hunched over in the cab like a broken man, pushing himself out through the roof, out through these walls, out to anywhere else. Anywhere but here. Anywhere but here. Outside the girl’s smashed pale face snaked back and forth, smearing herself all over the glass, eyes burst in her head, her black tongue patterned with the marks of her own teeth, teeth that rattled loose in the bottom of her gaping, broken jaw. Behind her the body stumbled about, holding and dragging its precious head by the black hair those same hands had once washed and combed and cared for. I'M SORRY! FOR FUCK’S SAKE I'M SORRY", he said, pressing himself away from her and into the ceiling, "WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT FROM ME?" Frantic hands clawed at grey felt as David tried to scratch his way out of the constricted cab, turning his nails back, letting his blood up from beneath them and sickening his stomach. It ran down his hands and picked out his scars, his seat warm with fluids both red and yellow, and the air sharp with his vulpine scent. He was a rabbit. He was a deer. He was a flock of fleeing ravens. The world was a hunter and he was its prey. An instinct blew through him, the devil in our DNA. He must survive. He must survive. He found himself inside that ivory box of fears between his ears, dropped down into the wet seat and screamed, “NO! THIS IS MY LIFE. I TOOK IT FROM YOU. YOU CAN'T HAVE IT BACK. STAY AWAY FROM ME. STAY AWAY FROM US”. His spit sprayed venom onto the windscreen and once again his foot found its seat and the van swerved off into that forever night. He didn't care where; he only knew where he didn’t want to be. Away from her. Away from her broken body. He didn’t even look where the road was taking him, his eyes never left the spectre in his mirror. The severed girl fell onto her knees and was swallowed by darkness and distance and time, and just like before, like so many times before, he was alone, and wet, and covered in shame.

He drove because that's all he could do. No, that's a lie, because he could also shiver and shake and mutter to himself, so he did those things too. He ran red lights and broke black limits and he let himself feel the shame. All of it. The shame of yellow bed sheets in the loveless mornings, and a dark wet patch on his short grey pants. The shame of being the last on the bench and the bottom of the class, and the shame he felt when his teenage fist became his first dirty lover. A shame he had found hidden behind his victim’s dead eyes, and in the backs of their hollowed skulls. The same shame he lived with for killing his own innocent mother on his first day on earth, already guilty as a newborn. Shame that had lived inside him all these years, curled in his belly, his only real company, dormant only until he forgot it was there. His square knuckled shoulders shuddered and dipped as he let it fill him up. It was too much. He had consumed too much of the stuff. Years upon years of it. A man can only conceal so much. Nauseous with all that shame in his stomach he felt a wave and a lurch behind his guts. Something squirmed deep inside him. Something he’d had enough of. He brought the van to a halt and held a hand to his stomach and a fist over his mouth. His trembling eyes watered and he clenched his teeth. A thick snake flipped and turned in his belly, greasy and hard, like a pipe of muscle. Something was coming. Something was trying to get out of him. It swam up through him between his wet organs, pushing them aside, belching its way up his throat and gagging him with its width, pressing on that soft flesh button beneath his brain stem till he retched thick spit. His arms animated, biceps testing the strength of his shirt as he wound down the window to let it out, his life unspooling with each revolution of the handle. The window dropped, dousing his face with cold air, but the heat in his throat only rose faster up to meet it. He threw his head over the thin metal that kept the black at bay, bulging veins carving vascular canyons up his red neck till he could hold it no longer. He erupted. Steaming sludge came up like a rope cast out of hell, a rope made of hot vinegar flesh, a torrent of bile and badness. More and more it came, gushing and spraying his venom into the dark, pulling up the middle of him, emptying him out until he was just a pale, spent shell of a man. A dry cocoon. An empty vessel. He heard the last of it slide down the side of the van and hit the floor, a dead wet weight.

For a while there was silence, and in that silence he felt the holes. The hole left inside himself by that slithering glob that had just bubbled up his throat and slid down his door. The dead hole he was torn out of. The secret hole he buried his brother in, the one wreathed in flowers for the mother he never met, and the hole in his father that no amount of men could fill. The holes he had bored into the people he had buggered and butchered, killing and killing and killing until there was no one left to forgive him. Holes that he had stood on the precipice of and poured his fury and rage into and watched in horror, as they got wider and deeper than a human can imagine. Holes so deep, so lightless and so endless. The same kind of hole that this road ran into, he was sure…

The van followed a thin white line down the long black road between two bright red lights, chugging and shaking and rocking him like an orphan baby in a broken crib. This road wanted something, he knew. It wanted to take him somewhere, show him something. And it would, he was sure. He went limp to his fate and as he slid down its back he heard someone behind him say something that sounded like, “Laska budʹ laska. Vidpustit, budʹ laska"

THE COMPANY

It was early spring when he chose them. The directions he’d been sent took him to the thick docks of a northern coastal town, misty and windswept, but otherwise uninteresting. He arrived dressed in the courier uniform the Company had posted to him, carrying a parcel and drinking the Cherry Coke they said he ought to. Overhead seagulls spat their ugly squawk and the air smelled of seaside and cyanide. He breathed it deep, and he smiled. Today would be the first day of the end of their lives. He picked through the docklands of this unfamiliar industry, drinking the Coke, whistling an idle tune. Hi ho, hi ho… Blue collar workers passed him by, some giving him more than a cursory glance over. Maybe they liked him, these oily men, maybe they didn’t, he knew what went on between these sheds after dark. "Parcel for Kevin Jones in Purchasing", he said into the intercom at the front gate, marked with a plain blue sign that read "Wellington Ind." Last time they'd been Omnitech Group, the time before General Logistics Plc., just some sputtering capitalistic nonsense no one would ever bother to remember. The sign beneath it read, By appointment only. Please ring the bell.

“Mr. Jones will see you now", came the response. Cameras above him whirred into position, pointing at his head and blinking red. The gate buzzed once, then clicked. He pushed through it, letting it seal behind him, waiting to hear the magnets re-engage before going any further exactly as the note he had burnt had told him to. Concrete steps ran straight down from a tin shed office adorned with only two stand chairs, a plastic lily, and a stack of papers on a folding table. David left the parcel of unmarked bank notes and the Coke on the table, signed a fake name with a shake of his gloved hand, then started his descent. He followed orange arrows sprayed on white walls and above him the cameras swivelled like inquisitive owls. He couldn't help but jog a little down the well-lit corridors through rubber strips and swinging doors, leaving only his sweaty scent in the air and a digital ghost of himself on some distant monitor. He could hear the pleading already. They said something that sounded like, “Laska budʹ laska. Vidpustit, budʹ laska”

He arrived in a concrete cavern. Lights hung above like flowers growing underground. Cages lined up forever. People inside. Some well fed, some not so much. Some weak. Some strong. Every shape and size. A veritable buffet of bodies. How did they find these places? David marvelled. Every time a new one, every one deep underground. Hidden. Perfect. Had it been some kind of military bunker? What did it matter? He just wished he could stay down here forever with an endless supply of these writhing things. But who could afford it? He could only work so many extra hours and re-mortgage the house so many times. No, this way it was special, and, at his age, better than hiding in shadows.

"I hope they are to your satisfaction 7206", said a disembodied voice over the speaker system. Yes, they were good. So good his blood boiled. He nodded.

"I want to touch them. I want to touch them before I decide". He bit his lower lip to keep it from trembling.

"Yes, we understand that from our previous communication 7206, and we understand you want two this time?

“Yes. Two.”

“As you please. Narrow your selection down to five and indicate your choices using the cards provided. Once you’ve made your choices we will release those cages and let you inspect them more thoroughly.” David looked down at an ornate little table. It had been carved from walnut and had a leather top. Five red cards fanned out on its tan surface, numbered from one to five. "The Products are chained but are neither sedated nor gagged, as requested. Please exercise caution when handling them, 7206. They are prone to biting". David looked down at his hands. Yes, they could bite all right. He prowled the aisles, thrumming the five red cards between his granite fingers. The sound echoed through the concrete hanger under the place where England became the deep blue sea, and in that subterranean place he made his dreadful decisions with a smile stretched across his face, and a bulge in his greasy work-wear.

Before him a cage, one of many, but now one of five with open grates. The inhabitant was chained into a star shape, limbs stretched so wide the skin went white and all the body's secret places were open for inspection. A sign above read £5000. He could see why. It was a beautiful specimen. David's head hung low and he breathed in the deep, slow, rhythmic way that a lion might in the tall dead grass of the savannah. The air smelled of places like this, of metal and bleach. His square shoulders rose and fell with each lusting breath and a wire ran behind his dilated eyes. David stepped through a square hole in the metal grid, and approached his prey for the first time. May I have this dance? he said, and laughed. Chains rattled as the person in the cage whimpered in a strange language, the body trembling as the words ran through it, as if those ancient prayers could change anything now. David's mood hardened and his hand tightened, thick ligaments pulling his battered fingers until his fist was a rock on the end of his meaty arm. It shook in elastic tension. Anger and lust spiralled into each other, combining vapour and static to create an electric instance that became the crack and the bolt at the centre of an ancient storm. Violence was born here, right here in this moment, and in this clashing of elements there was a spark of creation, because David knew nature's dark secret. He knew that it needed men like him. Men willing to do the things he did. Men with holes where their hearts should be. Men with rage where their love should be. With a fist where a kiss should be. Without him, without this tension in his arms and the destruction they wrought there would be no empty spaces to fill. No rot from which to grow new fungus. No clay with which to sculpt new forms. Tear them down, build them up. He was a force of nature, Goddamn it! He swung his arm out, wide and fast. His fist kissed the jaw of the jerking, rattling body in a mist of blood and spit. He felt the skin split and the bone crack and the sound of it rang out through the chamber, setting off a harmony of high-pitched prayers in many languages, an orchestra of ultra violins. He smiled at the music of it. Fear. Beautiful, honest, fear. The most infectious condition known to man, or woman, or child. And that's why he was taking two this time. So one could watch, and both could beg.

David heard the speaker system crackle.

"Please 7206, try and restrain yourself when handling the Products. We understand your.... enthusiasm, but we can't sell bruised fruit."

He grunted to himself. He got it. They had to be perfect, or what was the point?

"I want to know if they're screamers", he said, looking down at his feet like a scolded child.

"I like the screamers"

1/4

The van wove through the broken white line on the black road like a drunken mother stitching. The two in the back, conscious and scared and somehow ungagged, told their tales to the night while David tapped a cigarette from the pack. He flicked it up from the bottom, the way his father did. David wasn't a smoker, not since he was fourteen years old, except for on days like today. Nights like tonight. Nights that had to fade into a nicotine dream. His dad had smoked forty a day, head shrouded in a permanent mist. As a kid David would have to squint to see his own father’s features through the silver smoke that clung to him, like a cloud concealing a mountaintop. He remembered the night the smoke cleared. David stood in the middle of his twenties, his father leaning over the kitchen sink, the only true words ever to have left his mouth still filthy in the air. Words that David couldn't hear. Three words that David wouldn't hear. And then he remembered his knife entering the place where his father's neck became his father's head, piercing his brain, coming out of that same mouth the truth had just fallen from, beautiful thick plasma following those words down into the Sunday suds, making rosé in the sink… So now when he killed, he smoked. A tribute, you might say. Say whatever the fuck you want.

The cockpit of the van filled with smoke and the dirty tar in his veins weighed him down, sick and heavy. He kept the window up and hid in the obscurity. The question of where the van was taking him receded in his mind. He didn't care. He knew it was going down. Down, down baby, down, down. And for all their mumbling protest he was taking the two of them in the back with him, no matter how many Polish prayers they spat.

Rain fell out of the absent sky, thick and viscous, while the cloud he exhaled into the cab made the world outside the windscreen seem like an abstraction. It played games with his eyes. Tarmac and line paint refracted through rain, glass and smoke, and shapes seemed to form through this fractured kaleidoscope. At first they were vague, the way shapes are in clouds when you lie back with your big brother on a playing field, the rough mown grass scratching at your sun-smart skin, but he harder you looked the more you'd swear you saw a spaceship, or a tiger, or your mother’s silhouette, and you'd feel all the awe and the fear and the sadness. And then you’d watch as they dissipated, bled into each other, changed to the next thing, and the next thing, and the thing after that, dying and dying and dying, and the feelings would die too as the clouds came apart, for you, but not for him. He would take them home with him. Take them to bed with him. And you'd crawl in there in the night when you heard his agony through the thin walls, heard him gasping into his fists, curled up, foetal, and you can't be his parent in her absence and you can't wake him up when he takes those pills, and you can't stand to read the words on that note, not beyond that he wants you to bury him behind the house, under the tree he planted for her, and to never breathe a word of it to Dad or anyone. He'd packed a bag. He asked you to burn it. Make the things in it go away. Make it look like he ran away into the night, the way a man might run to a woman, and he did, he ran away that brother, but to nowhere on earth.

David drew on the hot, short butt of the cigarette and it scalded his lips. He winced once and wound down the window. In the dim light he caught his face in the broken mirror. For a second he saw them reflected back at him, his brother, his mother, his father’s empty eyes, a rain slick portrait of too much loss and lust, then the wind blew them all away and he flicked the little burning bullet out into the night. It arced away from him, a firefly, but instead of disappearing in the night like it ought to, like he expected it to, it exploded in a shower of sparks, illuminating what seemed to be a wall of some kind, set back a little way from the road, and sliding silently by. But it was like no wall David had ever seen before. He caught only a glimpse but it seemed to him to be ridged pale pink and wet with juices. The thick hairs shaved short on his neck stood to attention like an army of men marching down his back. In the sputter of that dirty little firework did he see it react? Did he see it contract? Pucker and retreat like branded flesh? What did he see? What did it mean? He leaned over the wheel and frowned at the road in front of him to see what he could see. What was that out there? In the darkness it could be nothing good. Nothing good existed in the dark, he knew that, and it occurred to him that perhaps the blackness out there wasn't a limitless void after all. Perhaps it was a tunnel of flesh. Perhaps it was an ingurgitating throat, he thought. Perhaps. David looked at the road with suspicious eyes and where his two lights fell the surface of the road started to look less like pitted tarmac, and more like the back of a giant black tongue.

LISA

He met Lisa by accident, at night, in a bar. She was hiding there in the blue shadows, where women like her stalked their men. She appeared to him through the dry ice, light both red and blue catching her shallow curves while the fog did its best to soften her features. She showed no caution as she approached him because she didn’t know what we do about him and his lust and his fury. To Lisa David was just one more opportunity, and the beat of the music just a ticking clock. She danced.

"Oh Darlin’, them’s worker’s hands,” she said, running a finger over his scars, dipping and slithering up and down him, hitching up her denim mini skirt till he could read her pink lips. "I like that. Reminds me of my Daddy..." Her practiced voice trailed off becoming 2am vapour. She wiped the remnants of her last line from her crusted nose with the back of a shaking hand. David didn’t care for drugs, but Lisa loved those white lines, those lonely little lines that left ghosts of themselves on her glass table and a space behind her eyes. Cut. Suck. Out all day. Up all night. Hers was a life lived in negative. David didn’t care. He didn’t care what she did to that threadbare body of hers as long as she didn’t look too hard at his.

Synth music blurred the air through broken speakers. Bars, smoke and Fleetwood sleaze breathed out of her, making promises he didn't want her to keep. But she was persistent. Even in those first few moments she was a ball breaker. She liked his hands, and she liked his hard thighs, and a man in a checked shirt. She liked anything she could touch, then she liked him in the bathroom stall and when he finished in her dry mouth and her long dark hair the fire went out of him, and somehow she got his number, written in red on the back of her right hand.

After that she called and called, the phone clattering in its plastic cradle. She needed help moving, then so did her sister, who needed more help than that even. Then she needed someone to pick her up after her knee operation and water her plants while she was out for the count, and before he knew it he was staying there at weekends, and it’s not like he got nothing out of it. The sex was fine. Like having a wank in company. And her place was nice. Nicer than his. He liked the sound of the breaking sea and the lights that shone in from the building across, cracked pink flamingos, and of course an alibi was always useful. Gradually he let her build a life for him and so this was how Lisa fell in love with a bad man. A "Bad Man”. One of the worst. Every day she lived from there on out was a gift he gave her. People would remember his masked versions as merciless, but they would never credit his real face for the daily mercy he showed that dehydrated signet, and sometimes that injustice would wind so tight in him that he would slink into the shadow behind her, his butcher’s knife glinting in the Saturday sun as she talked her shit into the kitchen sink… But somehow over time those words that spewed out of her filled up the space between them and became a cushion that surrounded and protected her, a barrier through which his knives couldn't penetrate. Once her knew her too well to like her, he knew her too well to destroy her, but still, when he sharpened his knives, he sharpened them for her.

But then she got pregnant.

THE SNAKE

David wound the window up tight and quick. The smoke that had kept whatever was out there in the dark hidden had escaped and he found himself alone with clarity, his elusive muse. She arrived in his mind like a shock of salts, bright and sharp. The siren held out gleaming porcelain hands to him and in them, on her silken palms, were a pair of new eyes. So white. So blue. She offered them to him. “Thank you,” he said, “I got so lost. I took so many wrong turns, but these will help me. These will help”. “Thank you,” he said again, but she was already gone. He fisted the pearls she had given him into his tired sockets, rubbing them into place, then opening them for the first time. At once he saw anew. He had been blind, but now he could see, he could see the road for what it was, finally. It was a slick black tongue writhing down a hungry throat. A throat that was gagging on him, choking him down a pipe of flesh. A tunnel that terminated nowhere good. His breath caught in his own narrowed pipes and the engine in his chest faltered and skipped as he realised what had what was happening. He was headed into the belly of a beast. His own beast. A beast that had lived inside him all those years, gestating, growing. Making him hard. Making him weak. A beast whose hunger he had finally had enough of, one that he had regurgitated after hitting that girl. A beast that had exited him by the throat and slithered down the door of the van and away into the obsidian night, growing into something huge, something massive, something vengeful and hungry. Something that had stalked him silently since then and tricked him into driving into it’s gaping maw. David needed nothing more. He didn’t need to see any more of what he knew waited for him out there slinking through the dark. He had to take his life back. He had to get away from this nightmare creature, back to the safety of the bed he shared with his wife, behind a door he’d locked and bolted. With forgotten vigour, his booted feet, and his battered knuckles he smashed at pedal and stick and wrestled the wheel out of fate's hands. The vehicle jumped and bucked and he heard the two in the back hit the metal sides and cry out as he threw the van into reverse and sped backwards, back up that tongue, back up the throat that was swallowing him, and toward the imagined light at the end of this Godless tunnel.

The engine squealed like a stuck pig as it retraced the line he had drawn through space and time. The last light to find him was from the red lights he ran after tearing that girl in two and his moment with Clarity had told him what he ought to have realised for himself. Those weren't traffic lights at all. Those were eyes. The eyes of a monster that he had lived with since he was a little boy, maybe longer than that even. A monster he had kept inside of himself all this time, keeping it at bay with his bloody rituals and their tears and screams. A monster he had finally rejected, casting it out to live alone in the lonely night. But it had tricked him. It had grown and it had tricked him in the blinding blackness and he had been driven distracted into its gaping maw. If he hadn't got wise when he did he'd be soaking in its gastric juices by now, fizzing and corroding and coming apart. Outside the rewinding van he could hear the great snake hiss, its thick spit raining down, tapping on the top of his rattling metal box. He put on the wipers to clear the shattered screen but a terrible belch buffered the van, coming up at him from the pit he was escaping, all acid and steam. Then something clawed at him, a hard green arm, split fingers like dried veins swiping at the furious wipers, tearing them off as the road or tongue or whatever it was buckled beneath him, sending the van up and over it's erratic terrain, smashing into an oesophageal wall, sending sparks this way and that as metal bent and mirrors shattered and broke. Unable to see behind him or in front of him without his mirrors or his wipers or his sense he held the wheel square, said a prayer that wasn't heard and kept the pedal to the metal. The backward speed made his head spin and his stomach turn but then there they were again, those watering red eyes, full of malice and hatred, burning through the streaked and star struck windscreen, rippled, winking and evil but getting smaller and smaller as he pulled away. He was out. He was out. Thank God he was out, but his arms and legs stayed rigid and took him speeding away faster and faster from those diminishing red eyes, until he hit a tree with the van, the wheel with his head, and the world went blacker than black.

THE BOY

A black and white boy emerged from the static, not yet tuned in. Lisa stared at the snowy screen with a face that had never been so soft while a dumpy nurse slid a plastic scanner all over his wife’s taut belly. David looked through the monitor at her insides. They looked just like everyone else’s. His nostrils flared and his fingers ached in old fists, but then David saw him move, his son, trapped in a plastic bag. He watched with wet eyes as the tiny boy wriggled vague and alien in that choking amniotic fluid. He had an urge, a new urge. He wanted to grab a scalpel and cut him out of that suffocating sack. Give him freedom. Give him life.

"Isn't he beautiful sweetheart?" Lisa said through chapped lips.

“He's got his Daddy's big hands."

David looked at his son’s developing hands, too big for his thin arms, clenched in fists like hammers made of new flesh.

"Let's call him Patrick, after your brother."

That night he lay next to her watching her chest rise and fall. It was a hot night and the moon caught the dew that formed on her swollen breasts. A subtle light seemed to emanate from her, as though the life growing inside her were contagious somehow, causing life to take hold where there was none before. He shut his eyes tight against it. Life, unbounded, verdant and copious, proliferated in his own bedroom, despite all his efforts to stem it, despite the decades of war he had waged against it. His eyes ached like a bruise as he hid from all that bounty, but behind them, in the space between his retina and his brain, grew an image of a new shoot in tarred earth, indelible, and provocative.

THE PLAN

David dissolved back into the world. His head on his hands on the wheel, all three covered in his thick spit, and the black blood that dripped from the burst skin of his beaten brow. Beneath that brow his eyes crossed as he swam through his mind, stitching together a tapestry of events from the patches of memory that fell through him. He saw stuck pigs and dead kids. He saw white lines and shattered glass. He saw lights and eyes and a sack and a snake. Yes, the snake. That Goddamned snake. He had got himself out of that massive greasy python but he wasn't safe, and he knew it. Maybe he never had been safe. Maybe he never would be. Not while that thing was out there, slinking through this never-ending night. It would be back, of that he was certain. If he knew nothing else he knew that one thing. The dial in the dash caught his attention, a white finger dithering in the dark, pointing at a red “E”. He was running on empty. He cast around, looking for a solution. His hand found the spare can of diesel in the foot well of the vacant passenger side. The lid was loose, but it was still full. It still had fuel left to burn, even if his own flames were dimming. Come on David, he thought, you can do this. You've got a bag full of knives and a spare tank of diesel. You’ve never had a problem you couldn't cut and burn your way out of. You can kill anything you set your mind to. Now what did he know? He knew how to kill a human. Watch them, read them, learn them like a language, then, when the time was right, when they were dozy and distracted, lure them away from the light making alligator promises till they were alone in the shadow of something, then strike with all the lashing anger of that ravenous animal. But this was different. The snake was different. The snake loved the dark, thrived in it like a plant in the sun. He needed to do the opposite. He needed to lure this monster out of the dark and into the light. Now what did he know of this snake? Of his snake? He knew it wanted bodies. It always had. Ever since he'd felt it writhe inside him for the first time when he was thirteen years old, that's what it had wanted. It had gaped up at him, swollen, angry, hungry. And, as luck would have it, he had three of them. One of his own, and two that he’d bought with cold hard cash, screaming and hollering behind him as he dragged them down with him. So a plan was formed. He would take the van and his bait out into the open and wait, wait for it to hear their screams and taste his dripping salt on the air. It wouldn't take long. It knew his taste well enough, and he its. The snake was hungry, and when it was hungry it was demented, and it knew David and his offerings were out here, somewhere in this dewy pine absence. It would find him, and when it approached, just before it swallowed them whole, he’d dash the van with diesel, light it on fire, then dive out of its way, burning it from the inside out, taking the beast down, slaying it for once and for all, and freeing himself from its raging appetites after all these screaming years. Yes, he decided, it was time to cut this off at the head.

It was time to kill the snake.

E

The van screeched to a stop at the top of the curve of an empty overpass. David turned the key towards him and pulled it out. Under a clear sky and a full moon the engine died for the last time. He got out of the van through a creaking door and stepped onto solid ground for the first time in what felt like many years. Decades. Four and a half of them. This was it. This is where it would end. He strutted and fretted across his concrete stage, his knees trembling with a fear that shook the ages. The eye in the sky looked at him through the empty blackness, and he felt her gaze. She was ashamed of him. He was ashamed of himself.

He held onto the cold hard barrier and waited. A gale blew through his tired old soul, just a cobweb between his aching ribs. A single drop of rain fell and caught his cheek. It wouldn’t be long now. From the top of this greyscale rainbow David looked out over the jagged landscape. Far away he could hear his snake screech as it carved through the trees searching for him, its blazing eye burning away the night they shared, and getting closer all the time. He thought of Lisa, the light that shone out of her murk. The way the combination of their genes had made something new, something that seemed to be healing her from the inside out. Something that had no right being so good, coming from two so terrible. And he felt something grow inside him. A new part of himself. A part he'd never had before, as if he had grown a second heart. This new organ swelled in his chest and it was good, oh it was so, so good, but there wasn't room inside him for so much machinery. No room in that crime scene chest. He felt a pressure build, forcing his vital fluids in new directions, pricking behind his eyes and tugging at his lips till he was crying like a new-born. Pathetic, helpless, honest. Then the gravel between his boots began to shake.

He’d been found.

The overpass shook with an unearthly rumble as in the distance David’s snake rattled its tail and cut through the landscape, light and noise fighting each other to bring the serpent to him sooner. Its vicious hiss pierced his ears, slicing through his brain like the sharpest of his knives. The long one. The one he used on his father. And then it turned toward him, its single, furious eye blazing and ravenous and trained right on him. It bleached the darkness, exposing him, seeing into him, into his soul, white hot and phosphorous. The very earth quaked in fear of it. He didn't have long. He had to exact his plan now, and he had to get it right. He had this single, solitary chance. He had to get it right. The snake was coming for him and for his two friends in the back, and he would give it two thirds of what it wanted. Rain pattered the van as David spilled the pale blue fuel around the cab, his hands shaking even before the familiar fumes made him any weaker. Here it came, the Great Snake, the monster inside him outside him, thundering ever faster, ever nearer, screeching like a burning child as it hurtled forward, thrusting, inevitable. Don't let it smell the diesel, he wished, hoping the wet wind would keep him one last secret. A noise beat out of the van, the two in the back had smelled his crime on the air and now they shouted into the roof of their makeshift crematorium, kicking the walls, moaning and pleading and praying all over, but the sound only brought the snake ever closer, and their fates ever nearer. The sound gave him a moments regret. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. Those were supposed to be his noises, not the snake’s, but there they were, howled at the moon, wasted as bait. He swallowed his lust for the last time. Snap out of it David, he thought. This was no time for regret or histrionics. This was it, his one chance to terminate the interminable. He steeled himself, the snake was almost upon him, massive and hard, its one bright eye unblinking. It was time to light one fire, and douse another.

“EAT THIS YOU FUCKING CUNT!”

He struck a match and flicked it through the open window onto the fuel soaked plastic of the van interior. From nothing to orange blue heat. The flames licked the floor and walls like a grateful lover. He stood behind the incandescent van. The snake would have to eat all this if it wanted him, or them. "Take your fucking medicine you bastard!" David shouted into the air as the light from his one eyed monster blocked out anything that wasn't its own sight or sound. But just as it ought to swallow the van, just before David could dive out of its way, the snake dipped beneath him, under the overpass, burying its head and letting its tail follow, tunnelling away, then bursting from the ground behind him with a thunderous roar and running off into the night looking for a new hole to hide in.

“COWARD!” David shouted. “YOU FUCKING COWARD!”

He knew where it was going. It was going to find Lisa and that little blank boy inside her. It wanted to swim up her and into him, eating them both from the inside out, her all at once, him over years and years. No. NO. He couldn’t let that happen. He could be anything, that child. Anything. If only David could keep his demon away from his boy. He looked down at the attaché wrapped round the knives at his feet. Stained human leather. Tired old skin. The ground rumbled as the last of it ran beneath him. Only a sliver of opportunity remained. He grabbed the first knife his hand found then jumped over the concrete barrier and onto the cold thrashing back of his demon snake as the white hot van exploded on the overpass, taking two more tormented souls not gently into the blinding light. David paid them no mind, he rode that bucking snake, flogging and flaying its cold, hard armour, his hands and feet scrabbling through the spraying rain at the slick surface of its metallic back. Of course the snake fought back, turning and writhing beneath him, trying to fling him out into the darkness, rattling and shaking and loosening his teeth. He bit through his own tongue and it split. Blood, spit and wind. "DIE YOU BASTARD" he screamed into its constant neck, beating and stabbing at it, slicing and screaming at it, speed and storm forcing his fluids out of his face and up his sandstone cheeks. He plunged the knife down. Down, down, down. It didn’t slow, but at least it screamed under him, a thin metal scream full of steam and venom, and then it dipped down, dragging him down, its fat, greedy, cowardly head aiming for a hole that yawned ever wider in the distance. A hole of pitch black, growing, closer, here. "NO! NO! YOU WON'T GET AWAY FROM ME" he screamed. "YOU WON'T GET TO THEM", but the head was already in, worming its way towards the only love he'd ever felt, towards its new home, deep in the heart of his unborn son, deep in the belly of his unloved wife. His knife carved crude words into the thing’s back. If he couldn't kill it he could mark it, warn them. "He's coming for you boy! He's coming for you! Don't let him in! Don't let him in. Don't be like me. Don't be like your Daddy!” he screamed, but the snake was already almost gone, sliding thick and wet into its uroboric orifice, only its tail remained above ground with David clinging to its back, black against the sideways sky. He held on to those last few seconds with his sharp knife and his fragile love until he arrived at the horizon of his life. The snake dragged him screaming up to the hard rim of that deep hole, then pulled him down for the final time. His head met the concrete of the speeding edge and he is at home in a deep bed, and he is at the beach at a low tide, and he is back in her womb in the dark.

Forever.

Never.

Always.

EPILOGUE

A flash of light, brilliant and eternal, bleached the scene. Everything that had ever been, gone in an instant.

"Where am I?" David asked. His words left him like golden arrows, slicing the white light, light that vibrated kindly and sang back to him.

"You're everywhere now David."

"Who are you?" he asked.

They laughed a gentle laugh.

"We are your victims David."

He spun around on feet that didn't exist, squinting into the light with delicate muscles that were nothing more than a web of memory.

"Mother?" he asked.

"Yes son. I am here."

He felt her presence, a serpentine goddess.

"I am your mother. I have always been your mother. I will always be your mother."

"Oh Mother," he said. "Oh Mum, Oh Mummy…” he cried from notional eyes and the tears floated away from him, blinking blue, iridescent motes on an everlasting breeze. "Did you know me? Did you know me at all?"

"I know everything David."

"Oh I spilled so much blood Mummy! It's all over my hands!” he said, and looked down at hands that had ceased to be.

"I saw it David. I saw all of it. We all did. We watched you through a billion eyes. Those aren’t stars in the sky…"

"Oh Mummy please don't be mad!” he pleaded. “I just hoped they'd take me with them! I watched as they fell out of their eyes and I screamed for them to take me with them! I wanted to go with them! I was just trying to find my way back to you!”

“Shhh, child. You showed us the worst of the world David, the places you went with your knives, the things your father did to your brother, and you helped us make an important decision."

He could feel her leaving, a familiar feeling. He could feel her slipping away.

“No! Don’t go!”

"Do you forgive me Mummy?"

"DO YOU FORGIVE ME?"

She disappeared down a dark tunnel, and she was gone.

She was always gone.

The light fractured into a million shards, each inlaid with a complex pattern, like the roots of an ancient tree wrought in a mother's pearl. And with that David contracted down to a needle point, the atomic essence of him. It dropped down to the earth alongside his headless body where it lay beside the tracks, at the place where the train he had mistaken for his own self-hatred had disappeared into its tunnel.

From the eternal light David brought with him a sphere of vision. It showed him a dome - as above, so below. He could see up into the heavens, and down into the earth, and he could see back and forth in time, into and out of all the pain he inflicted. Up or down, which way would he go? There was only one way David could. He felt the little of himself he was left with begin burrowing, down, down, deep down into the fetid dirt. He wriggled and wriggled between clay and grit towards a beautiful light. A network of stars. A constellation deep underground. It was vast, he saw, spanning the continents, larger than anything he'd ever seen. The largest thing on this planet of earth that he had reaped with his scythes and his sorrow.

The mycelium glowed blue and phosphorous, welcoming him.

“Come to me”, it said, and he did.

They touched.

They decoded him.

A new disease was born, and the end began.

ANGELA

ADAM M BOOTH

CONTENTS

TWO BIRDS

IN BETWEEN

THE GRINDSTONE

THE PITCH

SHE'S LEAVING

NO ANGEL

A BAG OF BIRDS

TIME FLIES

HE'S HERE

LEAVE

THE ROOK

OFFICE HOURS

SECRETS AND LIES

AN ANGEL

SHE IS SUSPENDED

FROM THE HEDGEROW

IT BURNS LIKE AUTUMN

THREADBARE

LET US PRAY

THERE IS A MAN AT THE DOOR

THE READ LETTER

A BURNING BIRD

ONE HAMMER

THE DITCH

For all the Angelas

From The Other Place I sing this song.

A starling song of love gone wrong.

TWO BIRDS

Angela was one of only two people to go into work on the Thursday between Christmas and New Year. Christmas, as ever, had been a solitary experience and when she’d been asked if she could perhaps make it in to do the mandatory reports one morning between the two holidays she agreed, but did her best to make her answer look reluctant. Yes, she said, she should be back from a delayed Christmas dinner at her cousin’s house in Newcastle and would probably be able to make it in. She had sighed and grunted about it all afternoon, and the people with whom she sold health insurance to the great British public understood how greatly she had been inconvenienced, but there would be no Christmas dinner. There wasn’t even a cousin. There was nobody, and Angela had been hoping they would ask her to do this for months. As the bearded spectre of Christmas loomed up at her out of autumnal hues she had clutched her chest and begged the night for it. For someone. For anyone.

She arrived to the wide empty office and, from a grid of switches, turned on just the lights above her bank of desks. The stark lights clattered above her as they warmed up and the comma of a moon that punctuated the sky outside illuminated nothing, leaving the vast room almost completely black, except for the cold pool of light she settled in. She arranged her desk, and although it was cold and dark out there, Angela’s heart kindled its own flame and beat like a flaming bird in a cage of bone. She waited.

Veronica had never been late, not once in almost four decades. In fact she was never less than fifteen minutes early. It was one of many ways she managed to stand proud in a crowd, catching the attention of light and men with such casual ease. Angela couldn’t help but admire her, and she couldn’t help but be cast into her shadow. It was a darkness that Angela had come to love after years in its comfortable shade, but back when the light was anyone’s for the taking Veronica’s extreme earliness had forced Angela to arrive earlier still, or feel second best in too many ways. So began a silent competition that spanned an age, each shaving precious seconds off their shrinking lives, throwing them on the pyre of time that burned them away, each trying to prove themselves keener to the powers that be, before Veronica had become Manager of the department, when they were still equal, in one way at least. It was an ugly dance, full of waste and pride, and in truth Veronica’s eventual trophy life, with the title and the husband and the swan-like grace, had less to do with her timekeeping and more to do with the shape of her body, a competition in which Angela just couldn’t compete, and, if she was honest, was the same reason she went to the bathroom and applied a smudge of lipstick to her thin dry lips while she waited for the object of her affection to arrive. Maybe, she considered idly as she smeared herself in red grease, she had even been complicit in Veronica's win, her adoration contributing to the consensus, but as much as she resented it, old habits die hard, and so here she was, very old, very hard, and very, very early.

Veronica arrived at 8:04 a.m., and to Angela she was as beautiful as she had ever been. Her fifty-nine years had made their mark, that couldn’t be argued, but Angela saw through the lines and looseness and liver marks to the tight little thing that used to strut back and forth around these same desks all those years ago. In those heels. She remembered those heels, those slicing, spiking heels, her legs so long and lean…

Veronica joined Angela in her pool of light and her eyes ate her up. Gold rings and clumped mascara, coal on spider legs; her body draped in a sequinned black dress that hugged her hills and caressed her valleys, and a pair of pink rimmed glasses, perched on her perfect little nose. Angela recognised the dress. It was from Next.

“I like your dress,” Angela said. Veronica nodded, as if her adoration was a foregone conclusion and her sequins winked in sequence as she drifted by like a tired old peacock displaying threadbare plumage. She was overdressed, and she knew it, but she had always liked to let a glimmer of her dinner party lifestyle leak into the nine to fives. Still, Angela marvelled at the display, and as Veronica walked around her to her own desk, she noticed a whisper of the elegant grace that hadn’t completely left her, despite being on her second hip.

They said their hellos, complained about the TV over Christmas and began their work.

“How was your dinner at your cousin’s?”

“Fine. It was fine. The potatoes were dry.”

Their shared history echoed between their small talk and over time’s barren planes. All the meetings and supervisions. The birthday meals and office parties. The leaving do’s and redundancies, like crystal sculptures that only they could see.

Once all those numbers had been entered into those black and blue screens Veronica packed up her belongings and told Angela, sat alone, that she had to nip to the loo but then she’d have to be leaving because her boys were waiting for her to eat. Angela blinked and nodded then stared into the space Veronica left behind. She considered following her into the little pink bathroom and holding the door closed, holding her down and doing the things she’d dreamed of so many times, taking what she had never been given. Trembling, she blinked twice more, waited for the bathroom door to swing shut, then grabbed her bag and trotted to the front door as quickly as her short wide legs would carry her. She fell out into a wind and the pale blue street, wiping a scrag of black hair out of her small wet eyes, then took the waiting train out of the ice grey station and was home before the lights above her vacant desk had cooled. She slammed the front door shut, ran upstairs to the second bedroom and I watched through a tear in the celestial cloth as my daughter put two nails through two small, blue, birds.

IN BETWEEN

It had been a grey Christmas in every way imaginable. Snow didn’t fall, bells didn’t ring, and the empty hours yawned in her face, begging to be filled. She did her best. She bathed in the static of the TV and the gentle wind from the wings of the many birds in her second bedroom. She wrote lists of things she didn’t really need from town, and from time to time she let her mind into the life of her friend from work, who would not think of Angela at all. She pictured Veronica cooking and cleaning and undressing for bed and, finally, seeing behind the clothes she hid in and into the rawness beyond. She smiled at the thought and looked out of the wide kitchen window at a sky that wasn’t so much a sky as a ceiling.

In the very early hours of New Years Eve Angela dressed in a pair of old jeans, a woolly jumper and an anorak. She packed an orange and one of her small metal cages into a black leatherette trolley and set off into town, where the sun rose only a little into a space slightly outside of time.

She went the long way, through the gloom, along the path and up into the park on the hill. There was no one there. She’d been counting on it. And anyway, even if there had been others, the kind of people that made it out at that time could only see themselves. She got up to the high point of the park, where rooks wheeled overhead like flying black daggers stabbing the sky. There she bent down and removed the cage from the trolley. The birds in the trees swivelled their heads, their black diamond eyes glinting cold and knowing. She dragged herself and the rattling cage into the shade between shrubs and bushes then clambered through them, through the deep shadow of the trees, feeling her way through the murk along the ground back to the damp soft place where the fence of the old estate behind the park began. She set the little Larson trap on a small shelf she’d nailed up years ago, filled it with seed, then made her way out. Back in the light she brushed herself off and walked down into town where she sat on a green bench, ate her orange, and waited for the shops to open. She needed margarine, glue and disinfectant, and she made herself think about all the beatings she took as a child.

She took so many.

THE GRINDSTONE

On the first day back in work Sheila called in sick so Angela had to do the work of two people. She spent the morning grey in resentment, her face pressed against it, warping her features. Veronica asked her how the rest of her break had been and Angela told her that she’d been bored, but that really only scratched the surface of the monolithic truth which was that every day spent in the house with only herself and seventy-two strangely silent birds was like sinking into a sea of black oil, endless and viscous. Veronica guffawed at the revelation. “Bored?! I wish I’d had time to be bored! The boys kept me so busy I didn’t get two minutes to myself!” Veronica’s beautiful voice went on and on, singing of parties and people and places Angela would never see.

“Well I finished my puzzle book, and my birds keep me busy”, Angela interjected.

“You and those birds!” said Veronica, smiling and tutting all at once, and Angela understood that in every way she was less than the woman with the devoted husband, loving son and designated parking space.

The weeks drew on and nothing much happened. Angela spent as much time as she could in the company of her birds, her beloved little birds, sat in their midst where she whistled Alouette with the world just a square of sky on the other side of a roof window. Amongst them, locked in the second bedroom of her semi detached suburban box, she felt understood. I remember the first bird. It was the day before I left her. A small brown sparrow flew in through her bedroom window. She pulled the window closed behind it and the little bird never left. That night she sat on Angela's stubby little finger and chirped for her mother as Angela looked into her little eyes and pretended the insistent song was for her.

“Angela!” Veronica shouted, and Angela blinked an inky blackness from her mind. She was back in the room. “You might want to answer the phone.” Veronica pointed a knuckly ringed finger at the chirping beige box bound to Angela’s head by a curly black wire.

“Sorry”, Angela said, “I’ve had a headache...”

“Well take some tablets and get on with it! I don’t want to be back in there with you next month”, pointing that same finger at the private office at the end of a long, dark corridor. Veronica leaned in and whispered, “Maybe if you lost some weight you’d feel better, wouldn’t get so many headaches. Are you still going to Weight Watchers? I think it would do you the world of good. Get you out the house. Meet people.” Angela lied with a nod and answered the insistent little box tied to her head, and although her mouth shaped words and her own crooked fingers made things happen on a screen in her mind she was flying through the night, tears stinging cold in the wind, with sharp claws and a razored beak.

THE PITCH

It was a Saturday and Angela took the train to the place where I would take her as a child. It was just a grassy embankment overlooking a football pitch where a team with no name would play games that didn’t matter on Saturday afternoons. I’d take her there with sandwiches and she would sit away from me and eat them so gingerly, always watching me. Always watching. It was as though she knew I would leave her. It was my way of saying sorry, you see? Sorry for the things I hadn’t done yet. Sorry for the things I had.

It wouldn’t be enough.

On the train my grown up Angela listened to a woman speak about the death of her infant grandson in that bleak way that only women of a certain age and from a certain part of Liverpool can. Her words were quiet and slid out of her like wet slate under the grey sky.

The train pulled into the flickering station and Angela stepped off it into disinfectant, diesel and tobacco smoke. The walk from the station to the grassy knoll took twenty minutes between semis and garages and when she got to the pitch the grey rain began and she ate three jam sandwiches in the same spot she had all those years ago, with her anorak pulled up over her head. No one played football. No one passed her by, and ninety minutes later she retreated down the same path, and boarded the return train.

From the window of the train from Liverpool to Preston she saw a body in the shrubs at the side of the track. Grey skin. Blue jeans. Face down. She mentioned it to no one and now somehow, in death, he became hers.

SHE'S LEAVING

Janet was leaving. Twenty-three years after walking through those doors for the first time, she was leaving, and she wouldn’t be coming back. Angela had been there on Janet’s first day. She’d shown her the fire exits. She’d even shown her to the office on the day of her interview, but now it was over like it had never begun. With a condemned solemnity Janet cleared her desk into a cardboard box she’d brought from home and once she’d emptied her last drawer there would be only a broken seat and brown finger stains on a beige keyboard to prove she’d ever been there at all. Angela thought of Janet often. She was a kind but quiet woman who had learned to keep herself to herself. In her younger days she had been attractive, in her own way, and Angela had always had the impression that she was the kind of woman who would have liked to have children but wasn’t able. She had a propensity toward heavy knits and denim skirts, which didn’t work together at all, but the combination had become unmistakably hers over the years. When Angela learned she was leaving she walked over to her desk and asked where she got them from, the jeans and the wool.

“I’ve had them years Angela”, she said, her voice quiet, dry and trembling like she held a moth in her throat. She had got them from a shop in Leeds many years ago. It was where she was from, and where her parents still lived. She gave her the address and when Angela took the train there the following Saturday there they were, still hanging on the racks, like pieces of Janet. She bought two beige jumpers and a long denim skirt. At home she placed one jumper and the skirt in a cardboard box marked “JANET 2014” on her bedroom floor, and wrapped the second jumper in metallic red paper and a bow, and that was it. Janet was leaving, and that night there would be a meal to see her off. Another loss. Another ghost in the office. Another box in Angela’s bedroom.

“Are you coming tonight Angela?” Veronica said over the box files.

“Yes, yes, I’m coming. What are you wearing?”

“Black”

“So will I. I’ll wear black. And what time?”

“Um, say a quarter to eight”

“Ok, see you there”

“Yes, see you there”

Angela stood in the murk of her home. It was 7:15pm. The birds had been fed and she had shovelled the days crust from the plastic floor in the second bedroom and started to get ready for the meal. She picked out the black dresses from a slanted wardrobe and threw them on the bed before her, where they lay there like sad, empty people. She critiqued them all. Too wide. Too short. Too old. She picked one, the wide one, and dragged it over herself. She let it cover her face for a while and looked through the fabric and sequins at the room beyond. The boxes stacked around the bed shimmered through the fabric and glitter like a haphazard city. She thought of Janet dying. Surely she would now? The cancer had come back twice already. She couldn’t have long. Was she scared? Was she filled with regret? Or was she free, finally? Would she just fly away between crystal towers on brilliant white wings?

Angela pulled on the dress and a pair of purple heels and the combination made her look like a frog on stilts wearing a bag. She looked over at the boxes, just boxes again, and felt the old ache return. She climbed up on a little plastic stool and took a box marked “FIONA, 1987” from the stack. She lifted the hair net from the top of the bundle of clothes and held it to her face. It still smelled of her.

She arrived at the restaurant at 7:40pm and heard their laughter before she saw their faces. They were stood at the bar, all of them, twenty five of the people she works with, their drinks two-thirds empty, their cheeks too flush to have just arrived. They saw her over the room and Veronica did her regal little wave, beckoning Angela to her side. She made her way over through their shoulders and backs to Veronica's side, to the place where she is most comfortable.

“Veronica, I thought you said quarter to eight?”

“Do you want a drink Angela?”

“Yes, I’ll have a Bacardi and Coke please Veronica.”

“Diet?”

“Yes, Diet Coke, thank you”

The room crackled and hummed as workplace dynamics reorganised themselves through alcohol and repression into something vaguely dangerous. She sipped sweet black tar through a pale pink straw and watched. Their laughter made their eyes wide and their lips curl back. Angela saw white teeth and white eyes, fingers pointing here, there, everywhere. Jewels of sweat form ed beneath the sequins in the folds of her back and she felt them coalesce and run in rivers down her canyons, tickling and shaming her till they soaked into her tights. The smell of her own fear rose up, bitter and shameful, kissing her face while a sign shone in red above a fake door, telling her that it is not an exit.

“I need to visit the ladies, Veronica”

“Excuse me, can I get past. I said excuse me, please I just need to….”

In the toilet cubicle she hitched up her dress around her neck and dabbed herself off as best she could with what tissue is left on the roll. It is too hot in there. She hates the heat. She hates it. The music from the bar rose and fell through the opening door as girls came and went, touching up and talking and peeing, their young, high voices full of malice and life.

“What is that hair about!??

Laughter.

“1988 called. It wants its dress back”

More laughter.

That could be about anybody, she told herself. It could be about anybody.

Dried off and rearranged she arrived back in the bar, which was almost empty apart from those couples out on a Wednesday night for whatever reason. A girl with kind eyes asked, “Are you with the party?” from behind the bar, and she said yes, and wanted to cry. “They’re through there”, the girl said, and pointed round the corner to the dining area at the back of the building. Angela noted her name badge. Maria.

Ah yes, she could hear them again. Their voices came to her around the angle.

Move it! I don’t want her!

Do you want her Sheila? Aaahahahahahaha!

Veronica you have her.

No, I have her all bloody day! Jeremy?

Fuck off!

Hahahahhaaaaa Ahhh, Jeremy…

NO WAY.

Ok fine, put it here next to me, I’ll have her, AGAIN! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA…….. .

It took effort for her to turn that dark corner, away of the relative peace of the bar area, with the quiet couples and down turned eyes and into the unbridled electric maelstrom that boiled just out of sight. She considered just going home, but made herself stay. Yes, it hurt there, but it would hurt at home too, and at least there the voices she heard weren’t pre-recorded, or in her head.

She turned the corner and pretended to be looking in her bag as they pretend not to see her and tumbled on with their rabble and rouse.

“Janet”, she said. “Janet, I was in Leeds last week and got you this. I know you’ve got one but…”

“Oh, thank you Angela. You didn’t need to do that but thank you.”

“Not sure it’ll be your size. Probably too small for you because you’re quite swollen up these days aren’t you?”

The room went quiet, betraying the implication that they were paying her no attention.

“You’re here with me Angela,” said Veronica, saving the moment, and pointing down at a piece of folded card with Angela’s name written on it.

It was stained with wine.

NO ANGEL

I was twenty-three. I was working on the docks when He came to me. I had been given the job by a friend of my mothers who had pitied me enough to take me in after she died. She had found me destitute on the cobbles behind my mother’s terraced house and lifted me up from my morosity with a kind condescension. To me she was a shimmer of ecclesiastic light, cutting through the shadows with delicate authority. I had never seen anything like her, and I never would again. She died that night, in a sleep I helped her find.

I had never been a strong man, I had never built or brawled, but I had my voice, and it was all mine. Too lilting for a man of substance perhaps, but I was no man of substance. I would sing my aching song and the birds would come from all around and sit on the windowsill and whistle along, my balsa wood bones reverberating with the pleasure I brought myself. Mother would say I had the voice of an angel, and then cry herself to sleep stroking my jet-black hair, her sharp nails tracing the scars on my scalp.

You’re weak, she said as she drifted away. Weak like your father.

And she was right.

It was the fifties and the newspapers sold me dappled monochrome images of palm trees and distant beaches and I felt the cold north repel me. My dream had been to get to a beach in Spain before I lost the use of my legs, before I went the same way as my mother. Hereditary, they had said, and I knew it to be true. As I sat in the waiting area at her first appointment I could already feel the ends of my fingers and toes dipping into the same static sea that eventually washed her away. I had to do something with the life I had left, before I was just a broken twig of a man, bent up and salivating.

So I took the job down by the black estuary. I worked hard and late with all the strength I had. I just needed to earn enough to take the ferry out into those wild curling waters, away from that isle of men like me, across the channel, to where I could use what remained of the power beneath the tremor in my legs and the breath that shook in my lungs. I would busk and hitch until I saw those blue waves break on that yellow shore, and then maybe I would too. That was my only goal. To see the blue sea and let it take me. My reason to run. My reason to live a little longer.

I had never wanted a daughter, nor a son, and I had certainly never before wanted to watch my own child grow in the stomach of her wretched mother, caged and screaming, but then one night, despite all that, there He was.

I felt Him before I saw Him, a stab in the chest.

Outside.

Go outside.

Go into the rain.

The black sea curled and slapped the dock walls. I looked between the sheds for the man in my mind, and He was stood there, where I feared He’d be, shocking my marrow, blacker than the night but darker than that even. He wore a coat of feathers; black feathers that seemed to reflect and remove the light all at once. And behind the feathers, the face. That face that burned me, burned my eyes and my soul and scorched the earth. He beckoned me over with an arthritic claw that clicked as it curled and I stood in His presence for the first time, but I knew then that He had been in these shadows all along. Ever since I was a little boy. He had seen me through my bedroom walls with those eyes, both red and black at the same time. Please know that I wanted Him out of me, every part of me wanted that, but the knowledge that He was a part of my life, indistinguishable from my blood and shit, for now and for always, saturated me. I was, no, I had always been His.

“Yes Father?” I said, through the night that separated us and through the rain that streaked my face.

He answered me in images. They flashed behind my eyes like epilepsy, taking my sight.

The street.

The girl.

The deed.

The cage.

The knife.

The flames.

That night I dreamed but didn’t sleep. I saw Him before my brain, behind my eyes. A suit of feathers. A hole in His face, and that tongue. No man should ever have to see that tongue; even inside of a dream no man should see that. It is enough to separate you from your sanity.

And it did, in the end, it did.

A BAG OF BIRDS

It was Monday, it was always Monday. At lunch, in the canteen, Angela overheard a conversation between two mothers, one saying how much she wanted to go to the south of France during the first week of August and the other how she planned to go to the Algarve during the second, taking the children, flying away from this nameless northern town on stiff metal wings. Angela, dirty with jealousy, threw the crust of her sandwich in the bin, went down the corridor to the office with a heavy tread and booked both, taking the two weeks for herself, and taking the opportunity away from her colleagues. In the afternoon she listened to the two women talk about her. They had seen her name go up on the tired corkboard that hung above them and knew what she had done. She didn’t care, but the air was thick with her crime. Eventually one of them said, “So where are you going then?” over the grey felt partition between her desk and theirs.

“Isle of Man”, Angela said as she typed.

The women complained about Angela for the rest of the day. She heard them remind each other just how rude she was, how terrible she looked, that lazy crazy bitch, and when she went to bed that night those words echoed around the warehouse of her bedroom, stacked high with boxes with women’s names.

The next day she woke to find that three little chaffinches had died and one of the two magpies she had been keeping for good luck. She knelt on the plastic floor of the second bedroom and held their lifeless, flightless bodies to her chest. She cried for them, and then for herself.

The dead magpie sat in her sweaty palm. Magpies were such beautiful creatures up close, more iridescent blue than black, like a nocturnal rainbow in a white night sky. She wasn’t ready to let him go, she wanted to appreciate his beauty a little longer. But of course one magpie would only bring sorrow, so she placed the dead bird at her feet and walked over to the one still living, perched on the chest of drawers. “Come on”, she said quietly, and wrapped a stubby hand around its body, restricting its wings. The bird’s head twitched this way and that, trying to get a look at its dead friend, who Angela collected from the floor. She held one in each fist and took them to the hallway where the walls were lined with bird bodies and their alabaster bones. With a big hammer and a long nail she pinned them both to a clear patch, somewhere between neat rows of starling skeletons and the big soggy owl she caught last summer and who had died on the previous Tuesday. She sat on the dirty carpet, her back to the wall, and watched as the wings of the living bird strobed black blue and white as they flapped furiously, then weakly, as the last of its life drained out of the hole she made in its chest. Even in death she appreciated their beauty and she looked forward to watching them rot and smear down the wall, leaving their delicate bones exposed, all white and beautiful. She stood up and regarded the mesh of bones and nails and broken bird, faded in patches from the bleach she sprayed at it when the house got warm and the smell became unbearable, a high contrast display of all the loss she had felt. She had known them all, and loved them in her own way, but now they were as hollow inside as she. She looked at them and her wall of death and said, “All beauty must die”.

Life was loss, and with the magpies gone Angela knew she needed more things to lose. With resolve she went to the bedroom and took a box marked “NATALIE, 1998” from the piles that surrounded the place that she slept. She set it on the mattress, opened it, and pulled out the items bundled within. Laid out on her bed were the ingredients for someone else. A long curly red wig, a padded bra, brown jacket and black boots. Natalie lay deflated on the dirty duvet. She had been a nurse at the gynaecologist. She wore a lot of makeup and had three children from two different men, and tonight after work an approximation of her would be taking a train to Chester to buy as many birds as she could fit in her big black bag. Last month it had been Sandra from the chemist, the month before, Kirsty from the tearooms.

In Chester the grey day did its best to conceal her, but Natalie’s red wig made it seem as though the shadows were bleeding, and she just couldn’t escape the sideways glances and side street whispers. She went from pet shop to pet shop buying the saddest looking birds she could find, concealing herself in toilet stalls and wrapping their little bodies in tissue and elastic bands, before packing them tight in her big black bag.

By 5:45pm the bag was full and she was tired. Sat under the heavy sky on damp grass that framed a dirty black church she opened the bag and peered in at the little twitching bundles. "You won't all make it, no you won't, but it's not my fault, you see? You shouldn't have been in those cages in the first place. You should have flown away when you had the chance. You should have flown away” She rocked and flapped her imaginary wings, oblivious to the red wig that sat skewed on her head and to the stares of the crowd that had formed around her.

She was at the train station. The sky had blackened and the free birds had fallen out of it. On the train home she cried to a version of herself reflected in the glass. A little girl pulled away from her nervous parent and said, “Are you ok lady?”

Angela's wet eyes looked into the clean little soul speaking to her and managed to say “No”, before the girl was tugged away.

And they didn't, the birds, they didn't all make it.

TIME FLIES

Days and weeks passed, and Angela sat in the same three chairs, the one at home, the one at work and the one on the train, and as the months ticked by the air got warmer, and with the heat came the smell. She brought in the fans and fresheners and kept the velux in the second bedroom open a crack, but still she had to bleach the walls and disinfect the floor every day just to keep the stench from filling her throat. It was work, but then wasn’t everything?

The two weeks off in August had felt so distant from February, just a notional wisp in her mind, far, far away. She had only booked them to prove to those two women that she had things to do too, that she had people to see and places to be. A life to live. But the truth was she didn’t, and now here they were on the horizon of her life, like an exit through which the scant few people forced into it by shared employment were queuing up to leave. The prospect of so much empty time began to hollow her out. She could hear the call of an owl echo inside herself. It asked,

“Who? Who? Who?”

She tried to hold it back, tried to go back on her idea to take the two weeks off, but she was too damn proud when the people were there. Too proud, too afraid and so lonely.

She cried in the bathroom when the clock said 2:47pm and she told it to stop but the hands kept spinning and time slid away from her like water on glass.

Then it’s June, and the TV plays between the days and the birds don’t sing and she never sleeps, and then it’s July and she cries at night and catches more birds because so many have died, and when the sun goes down she wears red wigs and in the twilight she could be anyone.

And then it’s August.

HE'S HERE

On the night before the last day Angela almost woke into a thousand nightmares. The red LED alarm clock blinked 03:17 through the silver darkness and she had a feeling she was not alone. Was there someone there? Yes, she thought, yes there is. She thought she saw a shape of something dark stood at the foot of the bed, easily six foot tall. Something with wings. Was that the red light from the alarm clock reflected in its nightmare eyes? Panic clasped her chest closed and painted images behind her eyelids. In her sleep she gripped the mattress with bleached fists.

“Just wait Angela, you have to wait until He’s finished. Don’t struggle. Remember. You were always so good at this.”

I tried to say this to her from the bottom of this terrible place, through the bars of my abstract prison. I could feel her pain. All of it. It was deeper than the sea.

She went limp on the bed.

Could she hear me?

Could she hear me all this time?

And then I was with her. I was in the bed with her again after all this time, almost invisible in the pale blue light. The moon saw the three of us between the curtains and gave the phantom bird a silver stripe until he opened His wings wide and blotted it out, and then, there in the shadow of His own wings, our God loved His children.

Then it’s the last day and she works and leaves and no one says hello, and no one says goodbye.

LEAVE

Angela woke on the first day of her two-week leave with dread sitting on her chest and time hollow all around her. She dragged herself out of that grubby bed more through habit than desire. The summer heat was close and cloying, her sweat coating her like cling film. She ate a breakfast she wouldn’t remember then turned on the TV, the radio, and the washing machine. Their sounds combined into something approaching company and she sat in the garden and imagined there were people inside the house.

For the first few days she filled the light times with television and the dark ones with her own gentle touch. Both helped her sleep, and she did, here and there. She dressed as the women in her boxes and talked to a mirror about the things they had done and the ways they had been loved. She put birds in her hair and learned their songs. Sometimes she was Veronica, in a black sequinned gown. She hated how pathetic she was, that girl she kissed in the glass, a messy amalgam of a beauty lost by decades. For hours she stared into that mirror of lipstick, just dust and shadow beyond, a self-portrait of her loneliness. Many aching hours passed. Stop crying you silly bitch, Angela said into an hour far, far away, slapping herself across the face with a full hand. It stung and her ear rang out like a bell, so she did it again, and again, and again, until one side of her face laughed, while the other still cried.

Day became night became the oily sea, and her sanity slipped beneath the surface. Panic filled her lungs, testing their strength, dragging her down. Her mind thrashed in the riptide, trying to find land, trying to find something to hold on to. Where was she? Where was up and where was down? Was she east or was she west? She could have been nowhere or everywhere. A map. She needed a map, and one night she found one between her boxes and her birds. A map of the Isle of Man she took from me as a child. It anchored her in space and time, her eyes eating it like it was a cake with a key inside, like it could show her a hidden way home. But she trembled at its impermanence. What if she lost it? What then? She might find herself so adrift that she would never see anyone ever again. She would copy it, she thought, somewhere she couldn’t lose it. Somewhere she would always see. She scrambled through her fading kitchen taking a knife from the drawer, and began to scratch out a scale drawing of the island on her kitchen wall. It started accurately enough, but by the end of the third day her blistered hands were wet with sweat and too much of her sense had ebbed away. She marked places on an imaginary cove with words such as “The Dark Place”, and “This is where they hurt me”. Over the final twelve hours the Isle of Man became much, much more. It became so much more that it was necessary for Angela to extend it up onto the ceiling, standing on a squat three-step ladder to reach and craning her short, wide neck back at perilous right angles to her square body. And when the fluorescent strip light blocked the progress of the detailed drawing of the island in her mind she decided it had to be removed, tearing it from it’s housing with a wrench of her claw hammer. Awake so long and so abandoned on her distant island, she had lost the sense to know that the bulb was still burning and as her hammer destroyed her light she was showered in glass and sparks, and darkness flooded in to fill the space the light left behind.

Contrast brought her home. In the dim living room light that made it through the door she looked around at her fractured kitchen with new eyes. This was the edge of her sanity. She had walked up closer to that ragged ridge than she ever had before and dared to peer over at the limitless black sea that looked back and told her only that there was so much further to fall.

The following night she woke from her sleep choking on the sheets bunched up in her mouth, as one part of her tried to kill another. She pulled the fabric out of her in ribbons of spit and ran out into the street where there was nobody else and shouted, “Please! I can’t take this! I can’t take all this loneliness!” but no one heard her. No one listened. The identical houses lining the street kept their windows closed and their mouths shut so she went back inside and sat by the phone. She gripped the armchair until the sun rose and the phone lines opened at work, and when they did she packed her nose with tissue and called and called and complained in different voices about insurances she didn’t have. She complained about policies and prices and her polycystic problems until her throat was dry and her eyes rolled back in her head.

“Put me through to your manager. Put me through….”

Her colleagues feigned the support she never had in life and eventually she fell asleep listening to them speak, holding their voices to her face, feeling their vibrations against her cheek.

“Hello? Are you there? You’re through to Veronica, can I help you?”

THE ROOK

It was the day before her leave left her, and when she slept she dreamed of a shaking cage around a beating black heart. The summer sun found her through the curtains and she woke with a picture behind her eyes of the Larson trap she set on the shelf in the dark of the trees.

He was here. He had returned to her.

Dressed light in the deep blue morning she tiptoed with as much grace as her inelegant frame allowed through shrub and thicket to the secret place she would run to from her uncles, the place that she now found her cage rattling with an inhabitant. The cage held a little black rook. No older than a few weeks, his wings still so meagre that Angela thought it was a wonder he had made it in there at all. His head swivelled to the side so he could regard her better and she had a strange feeling that she was late. And what was this? Behind the little rook was the jerking remains of another, bigger bird, plucked and boned almost to death, but not quite. The rook’s black eye caught hers and then looked nowhere. She knew what he’d done, but he had only done what he must to survive, hadn’t he? The dying bird was so big, and he was just an infant. He had been defending himself, surely? The rook sat and waited as the life left the bird at his back, and Angela didn’t even put on her handling gloves, she just opened the door and he ducked under the lifted gate, took a slow, deliberate step out onto her hand and gripped her finger tight. She looked down into those black diamonds in his head and saw herself in so many ways. Angela opened her jacket and fed him into the warm place between the light beige lining and her big, low breast. He didn’t flinch; he just gripped the fabric with his little black claws and held still. On the way home he pecked at her soft skin till she bled out onto his oily black feathers and she gripped the sleeve of her jacket and let Him.

On their first night together an unseasonable wind picked up and shook the house. The tiles rattled on the roof and in the garden the fence panels fought their cases to fly away. Inside the second bedroom the light flickered and the birds flapped and panicked, their beady eyes spinning and wide and their beaks drawn open, showing off strange little tongues that poked at the air. Every one but the rook. The rook just sat under the sloping eaves of the rattling house on a stack of old books with the same stillness He had in the rattling cage. He let His eyes reflect his new home with ambivalence. Was it ambivalence? Angela regarded Him from behind the mesh door and lace curtain that hung over it, making the scene a mosaic. She felt the change. She wanted to go in and feel the soft wind from their little wings as they flew around her and landed on her shoulders and nestled in her hair. She wanted to smile as she fed them from her hands, but not that night. Not anymore. The room was His now, and when she closed her eyes to sleep it was as though she was at sea. She could feel the spray on her cheeks and the salt on her lips, she felt herself corroding, but a light pulsed to the right of her vision like a lighthouse.

She was almost there.

OFFICE HOURS

She woke to find herself naked on the beige bed linen. Warm yellow light cut under the blue curtain and to her bleary eyes it was a shore. She was washed up. She was home.

She looked through the crust in her eyes at the tall pile of neat washing. Work outfits cleaned and pressed dutifully called to her like a beacon. She wore them enthusiastically and left the dankness of her home for the fluorescence of work with a spring in her stomp, the hint of a smile at the corner of her lips, and a cold sore. She boarded the train and found her seat and overhead the cuckoos flying south scrawled a “V” in the sky.

At work Veronica asked how she’s been and she was too happy to see her face and hear her voice to answer the question honestly. “I’ve been great,” she lied, “Great. Got a lot done.” Veronica asked if she enjoyed the Isle of Man with the ghost of a smile on her lips. “Yes, thank you,” Angela said, thinking of the imaginary isle that has swallowed her kitchen. “I saw a lot of wonderful things.”, then she was swept away by a calming tidal wave of paper work that cleansed her soul of the dirty black bird who filthied her mind and heart and second bedroom.

Beyond the dusty office window a charm of finches spiralled through blue sky. She felt the salvation and it tasted like honey on her lips, like a salve on her soul. But the day drew on and the phone didn’t stop ringing and Veronica wouldn’t look her way. Then the sore on her lips began to sting and she felt His damp decay creep back in, tickling up her veins, nerves stuttering on and off like a dying light. She held the arms of the chair with hands that buzzed with a static that seemed to interfere with the picture on her screen, which smeared in front of her, an electric mess of blue and black. She felt Him swarm through her brain, turning parts of her off, turning parts of her on, and she wanted to touch herself and she wanted to scream, but she didn’t. Her lips trembled but she didn’t scream, but the people looked over at her anyway, their faces full of holes, and then she was lost again at the bottom of the deep black sea.

The week drew on, Tuesday becoming Wednesday becoming Friday, and sleep, Angela’s oblivious mistress, left her aching alone in the dark with only the memory of her embrace and the taste of her beautiful oblivion on dry, angry lips.

In the night He called to her, He pecked out a message on the floorboards and she lay trembling in His pervasive presence, trying to decode His Morse code. On the third night she thought she did.

It seemed to say, “B….U….R….D…G….U….R....L”

SECRETS AND LIES

It was two in the afternoon when she realised something was wrong. Lunchtime had finished and the familiar clackety clack of keys being tapped resumed after its brief reprise the same way it always did. It was a day like any other, all these days were the same, so when Veronica didn’t come back to her desk at 1.58pm exactly, as she always, always did, Angela knew that something was amiss. An electric dread crept through her bones. Was she dead? Had her hip given way on the metal steps that lead up from the car park? Was she now lying prone in the spiked shrubs, helpless? What if Angela discovered her there, so in need? She’d be so grateful to see her! So beautiful, and vulnerable, and indebted. Angela could save her, lift her up in her short wide arms and carry her home where she could undress her and nurse and nurture her. Of course she would have to silence the birds and move the boxes from the bedroom, and she’d certainly have to take the bones off the walls, but she could always cover her head to get her upstairs, and she could keep her unconscious, if she had to.

At seven minutes past one Angela could take no more. She called Veronica’s mobile. Tap tap tap, tap tap, tap. It was ringing. No one answered but Angela noticed that the arm of her boss’ chair was vibrating. Her jacket was still on the back of it. So had she not gone into town? She said she was going into town... It was cold outside. She wouldn’t go without a jacket... Angela checked the pockets of the little black jacket and sure enough there were her car keys, a hair band, and her phone. She was in the building. Angela flicked through Veronica’s year planner where it lay on her desk. The space between one and two o’clock had been coloured in with a red pen. Something was going on. Someone was hiding something. Someone was lying. The office had been built in the 80s during the boom and the company had expanded with all the gluttony of the period, and when the sequins and shoulder pads and cocaine hangovers faded so did the revenue, leaving vast swathes of the building empty caverns of faded commercial endeavour. There were three unused floors in the building, one above and two below. Angela knew them all, in fact she’d worked in most of them over the years, and further to that, she still had the keys. “Downstairs” said a voice in her head. She made her way down the back stairs that led into the corner of the building where HR had once existed, before process had bitten off its own tail and they had outsourced themselves. She got out the keys and unlocked the door as quietly as possible. She shouldn’t be here, she knew it right away. The air down here was different. It was still and cold and... sorry, somehow. The blinds were down as they always were and through them the afternoon sun drew parallel lines over rows of empty filing cabinets. Angela crept between the banks of desks, trying not to disturb the air but failing, motes spinning around her, stars around her barren planet. Silence. There was no one here, just Angela and the flecked dead skin of old employees. She had been wrong, there were no secrets here, just dead dreams, dust bunnies and abandoned venture. She went back over to the stairwell and let her daydream die too. She’d found nobody, so many times. She berated herself for having hope when there was no hope to have. She had been a stupid little girl. Stupid girl. Stupid, stupid girl…

But wait...

What was that?

Was there a sound coming from the disused bathroom past the old meeting room? Yes, yes there was. It sounded like carpet being scrubbed. Was it the cleaner? On a Wednesday? Why would they clean an unused toilet in the dark? She moved back through the room, stomping now, swirling the air, more curious than afraid. The sound got louder as she turned the corner, turning her wide back to the striped sunlight and looking down into the area outside the men’s toilet, where natural light did not reach and no artificial ones were lit. On the far wall was the door to the toilet. It was open a little and, yes, inside there was movement. Beige shapes moved in the dark, and Angela knew that perfume. She didn’t recognise the salty note that came with it, but she recognised the huffing and the friction. It had been a long time, but she still recognised it, so out of place here in this beige box of bureaucracy. Angela adjusted the blind just a little and one of those stripes of light crawled along the floor and up a foot and onto the exposed, naked backside of the person she was hoping to save, of the boss she was hoping to hold, of the friend she dreamed she could love. She stood transfixed, her senses open like a broken tap, frigid information gushing all over her, slapping her face with a frost bitten hand, filling her with fire and ice. There it was, the thing she didn’t know she never wanted to see, an image of Veronica, getting ruined on all fours by a hunched man with knuckled hands, a pale white devil made of cartilage and lust, rapacious and carnivorous, devouring her love from back to front.

Angela baited her breath, then turned and left the scene of their crime as gracefully as she was able, her immediate grief an infinite empty universe. She walked up the stairs then out of the front door, away from the office and the questioning eyes and down the tall dark alley behind the building. She crouched between the refuse and brick and pressed her nails into the palms of her hands as hard as she could, letting the tears that fell from her chin and the blood the dripped from her fists bloom in the dirty brown puddle at her feet. She had never seen love, but she knew that what she saw in their darkness was not even an approximation. She could love her so perfectly. Veronica, you are better than that cold toilet floor. How could you let yourself be degraded like that? If it was degradation Veronica desired then Angela could give her that. Yes, she could degrade her in many, many ways. And what about her? What about Angela? If she had never even had the privilege of being handled roughly in a disused toilet, then how far was she from love? The gulf was so great it spanned the ages and her heart sunk to a new, deeper fathom. The lowest yet. A seagull dropped out of the heavens so far above her, onto the black plastic sack of shit to her left. She regarded him through the shattered windscreens of her eyes. She had never liked seagulls. Dumb, squawking, awkward creatures. In fact she hated them. She realised now that she always had. Her little eyes glinted once then she leapt out of her squat shadow, grabbed him by the neck, and, with her own torn hands, shredded him in a frenzy of bird and blood. His open throat made a noise nevermore.

She found herself at home, in dull grey feathers and red. Sat at the kitchen table she listened to the phone ring ring and the birds upstairs beat their wings and sing a panicked song. By the evening the phone had stopped and the blood had dried and she remembered herself, and her situation.

Oh yes, I was supposed to carry on working, wasn’t I?

Oh yes, yes I was. It was probably work on the phone.

It was probably her.

The world outside her window went black. Angela pressed herself up from the stand chair and on a weary frame staggered across the kitchen to the drawers. She opened the second drawer down and pushed aside all the tiny pale bones and directed her clawed hand toward the candle she knew was there. Taking the matches from the windowsill behind the sink she lit it and in its tiny sphere of warmth she stripped down and cleaned the grimy blood from that dirty seagull off her hands and face. The light flickered over her naked body, which wavered like a broken table as she prepared her clothes for the inquisition she knew she would face the following day. And, as the candle faded, so did she, and she slept the sleep of the damned there, on the torn linoleum floor.

AN ANGEL

I knew her name before I saw her face. Even in the darkness He brought into my life I could see it burning. I could see it when I closed my eyes, indelible, like it was the only light I had ever seen. The name He chose for her.

“Angel”

“An Angel”

“Angela”

A joke, surely? His laughter echoes through the cruelty, through the ages, that awful guttural squawk. She would be no angel; she would never be an angel, coming from where she did. From such atrocities. How could she ever hope to ascend? No, she would endure the same slow slide underground that I did, and my mother before me. How far back did it go, this curse? Who had let Him into our blood? I’ll never know, He keeps me alone down here, but when I breathe, when I breathed, I felt not blood in my veins but his dark flock.

Let it end.

Let it end with her.

SHE IS SUSPENDED

A new day. She was up with the birds and saw the first light through the branches of the dead tree that forked out of the front lawn. Her sleep had been short but thorough and she had woken with a rare resolve, and a new realisation. The boss that would be so mad when she got into work had no power anymore, she had left it all over that dirty little bathroom floor, and when she whisked Angela off to the meeting room for what would no doubt be a disciplinary meeting regarding her sudden and unexpected absence on the previous day, Angela would drop her bomb, and a new order would begin. One in which the Formica tables had turned, and one in which Angela would finally, finally have the upper hand.

She arrived at 8:17 am and she was first, as always. She made up her desk, returning the incomplete reports she had abandoned the previous day to the Pending file, then sat with her coffee and a crooked smile, and waited for the game to begin. Here came Veronica, walking stiffly into the room, her coat pulled tight around her and her bag held closely to her body. The coat was new, Angela noted. Where did she get it? Was it from Marks? Angela let herself picture Veronica on that bathroom floor, glistening and shameful. It was no wonder she walked funny, Angela thought, and bile rose in her throat, acrid and astringent. “Morning,” Angela said, but Veronica just removed her coat and bag and walked away from her desk in that clipped, nervous manner that Angela had seen so many times leading up to the termination of someone or other. Her belly flipped at the prospect but she settled herself with the knowledge that she had the upper hand here. She would only have to hint at what she had seen in that dusty department downstairs and Veronica would be as helpless as a bird in a cage. She loved her family so much; Angela had listened to it so many times. They were her world. He was her rock, the boy her little soldier. She would do anything to keep them. Anything.

The others had begun filing in, one after the other they walked by, their eyes flicking over her, wondering what happened yesterday; bored, hungry minds picking over carrion for scraps.

“Can I see you in the office please,” came Veronica’s voice from behind her.

This was it. She stood up and followed the aged harlot to the cold back office where she would take one more telling off, then get everything she’d ever wanted. She tingled in a V shape, down into a point at the bottom of herself. On the long walk to the back of the building time stretched away from her, like a wave retreating from shore. Angela planned her attack. She would let Veronica do her spiel, list all the things she had done wrong, and then, when she passed her the document to sign, just before her ink stained the paper, Angela would ask Veronica if she enjoyed her “new position” in HR yesterday. Angela grinned her thin grin and realised she was salivating. She wiped her chin.

The door swung open and what she saw hit her across her ruddy face. Rather than the cosy little scenario Angela had pictured in her mind she was presented with a committee. Senior Managers all in a row, each with an identical piece of paper and with their faces twisted into expressions of concern, with varying degrees of success.

“Please, take a seat Ms Hanrohan. It is ‘Ms’ isn’t it?”

What was this? This wasn’t what she usually…

“Angela,” said the one wearing the most convincing mask, “How are you today?”

“Fine,” said Angela, trying to find her feet on shifting sands.

“Good, That’s good to hear” replied the suit. His eyes narrowed into a smile for a child. “We take the well being of the staff very seriously, as you know, especially those that have been with us as long as you have.” He nodded. She nodded. What else could she do? “But we have some concerns Angela. Concerns about your conduct, and your reliability. Does that come as a surprise to you?” Angela blinked and shook her head. Because it didn’t, but...

“Can we talk about yesterday,” said Nicola from Finance. What was she doing here? Why would… “Angela, after lunch you were seen coming back into the office and you sat for a while at your seat like everyone else, but according to reports from your colleagues you appeared to suddenly become angry. It says here,” her eyes flicked over a stack of shuffled papers, “…that you banged your hands on your desk and were heard swearing to yourself. Can you explain what the matter was?”

“No I didn’t,” said Angela, her wide white forehead gridded with lines and beaded with sweat as her mind showed her pictures. Maybe she did hit the desk but… “I was just wondering where she was,” Angela said, pointing a crooked finger at the woman that had deceived and abandoned her in ways she couldn’t face. “She was late and I was worried…” but she couldn’t go on. To say more would be to expose her secret and sacrifice the only thing she had left. If she said those words to these people they would lose their power, and despite her predicament, that power was still the only thing she cared about.

“Why should you be worried where Veronica is? What concern is it of yours?” said a suit with a man in it that Angela didn’t recognise. Who was he? Was he from another site?

“Well I just wondered and...”

“You “just wondered” where your line manager was and thought you’d leave work for the day?” said the man, all air quotes and cocked brows. “Angela this is most concerning. As far as we can tell you came back from a perfectly normal morning at work, flew into a rage for no discernible reason then left the building, leaving your jacket and handbag, and then didn’t answer our phone calls, or the door when Veronica called at your home after work…”

“What?!” she asked, “she didn’t come to my house…”

“Yes I did,” said Veronica meekly and without meeting her gaze, “at six fifteen. I knocked and knocked and you didn’t answer. I could see the TV on.” She was lying, and both women knew it. Angela hadn’t had the TV on. Veronica was hedging her bets. She must have been with him again, that angry white devil. Defiled twice in one day... my God she was a filthy little bitch, she thought. Filthier than Angela had dared dream.

“No!” said Angela, shouting now, unsure where to start, unsure how to defend herself. “I was, I was sick and I, I hadn’t slept well, I don’t sleep well, the birds keep me up and…. I’m on my own you see...”

“Angela, calm down, please,” he said, and all their eyes sang along, birds on a wire. “It’s not just yesterday is it? This is the second time in two weeks that you’ve left early without explanation and quite aside from these unauthorised absences we’ve had growing concerns about your conduct for a while now, documented here in your private meetings with Veronica, who, by all accounts has really struggled with you Angela.”

Bitch.

“I’m afraid we really have no choice but to suspend you for a period of six weeks to allow you time to rest.” Angela could feel herself start to ice over. No. No, she couldn’t be alone for six weeks.

“No, please,” she started, but they just looked down at their papers.

“And furthermore we must demand that you do not make contact with the office nor your colleagues during this period, even if you are pretending to be someone else.” Veronica caught a snigger in her throat and busied herself scribbling.

Ok. Ok. Angela saw what was happening. She dropped her defence and let her face hang loosely from her soft bones. She signed a paper with an angry spike, turned on a callus heel, and left the room. She took her bags and jackets from the silent office then left the place as laughter began to build like a tidal wave behind her.

Angela sat at home in a kind of terrible waking dream, with an image in her mind’s eye of her desk and her phone and her workstation at the bottom of a black and white pit. She brought in an old office chair from the garage and sat at the kitchen table and tapped at imaginary keys with variable degrees of accuracy and despite her best efforts her thoughts drifted upstairs, to the rook in the second bedroom. He had grown so big, so quickly and the larger he got the darker his greasy wings became until it seemed like there was no light left and the birds that he didn’t kill spoke of nothing, but their empty eyes said they had no more hope to lose.

She was eight. There was nowhere else for her to go because I left her so alone so she lived with her uncles. My brothers. Twins. They were all that was left. They never married. They had our father’s eyes, and his fists. They called her “Burd Gurl” because of her strange little nose; turned down and sharp like a beak. She didn’t ask for that beak, but she had it. Her mother had it too, but I could never tell her that. I never spoke of that woman because some secrets are to be whispered, like these I am whispering to you, and some are for the void, never to be spoken, even in our final moments. Even at the end of everything I would never say those things.

FROM THE HEDGEROW

The darkness rolled over her and she hid in it. The birds in her brain sang their maddening song and, as the last lights blinked out in the street she lived on Angela grabbed her black mac and, wrapped in plastic, made for the night.

She zigged and zagged over puddle and cobble and they reflected her back as she stamped on her own warped image, and by two in the morning she was out of town and at the bottom of the winding lane that lead up to Veronica's house. Even from the bottom of the lane she could see that one downstairs light remained on. The kitchen light. The same kitchen Angela heard so much about every day at work. The kitchen where this woman played out what Angela now knew was just pretence of perfect domesticity. Button the shirt. Glaze the pastry. Pretend to be happy. Fool us all, you bitch. Well now here they were, with one comfortable in her shadows and the other exposed in her prison. The light came through the bushes into Angela's little black eyes, which darted around the scene. She was looking for something, hints or clues to this dirty hidden life that both fascinated and appalled her. And she missed her company, the scent of petals that emanated from her. She wanted more of her. More secrets. More power. A reason to end it. And there she was, in her shabby pink dressing gown, sat half on a tall breakfast barstool taking big glugs from a glass of pink wine and propping her rose tinted glasses on the end of her nose, tapping out texts, all fingers and thumbs. No prizes for guessing to whom, Angela thought, and gagged. It was late, maybe 2:30 am, and suddenly Veronica was moving. She was getting up and putting on her shoes and she was leaving the house! Still in her dressing gown too.

“What kind of madness was this? What kind of maniac goes out at this time?” Angela questioned, wiping tears from her eyes.

An engine purred up Veronica’s lane and Angela began to understand. It died in the night and two shadows met on the black lane, then went together through a hedge and up over a field into the deep blue night. Angela knew only too well the scene that would play out over that copse and she had no desire to see that again. She had stolen enough secrets. She made her way away from another agony, past the dark blue Mondeo that had arrived while she squatted in the bushes. The car window was open and the air moved toward her, bringing with it the smell of men, of leather and diesel and sweat. She stuck her arm in and tugged the handbrake sharply up and down. The hunk of steel lurched backwards a little, moving slowly at first but getting faster and faster, churning up gravel and verge. She took the next left and walked back towards town, and as she did she heard the car tear through the bushes and drop down the embankment, crashing into the river, metal and glass meeting rock and water, elements fighting in the night. The sound wrapped itself around her and she smiled for the first time in weeks.

A plan began to form in her mind.

Yes, said the rook in her head.

Yes.

IT BURNS LIKE AUTUMN

Autumn encroached into her vision. Cell by cell the world around her started to die, and she found comfort in it. Summer would vibrate at too high a frequency for her, it is too unstable, too unpredictable, all that heat and light. She was better surrounded by its charred remains. She was born in them after all, on this same day, in a graveyard, in autumn.

She took a walk through it, through the death, through the decay. The leaves burned in the trees then flaked away, falling in spirals around her giving shape to the wind, leaving their branches alone and complex and beautiful.

Skeletons.

Varicose veins.

She stopped on an overpass and leaned over the barrier, looking down. She could feel the sky at her back and it felt like the end was near, and it was. A crow sat on the power lines that sliced across the sky with something squirming in its beak. It dropped an infant rabbit on the Tarmac. Cars zipped over the body, crushing its bones and oozing its purple tubes out of it, onto and into that nasty black highway. The bird jerked its head left and right then hopped down off the bridge and into the open entrails, bouncing and picking at the spoils between all that metal danger.

I remember her birth, in that burning ring of fire. The chanting, the awful chanting rang through me for years. Whenever it was dark, it was there. I only had to close my eyes. I knew not the words but the intention was only too clear. In the end I jumped from a bridge to stop that evil hum and yes, the sticks and stones hurt her mother, I saw the wounds and welts as they formed on her pregnant belly, but none hurt so much as those words, forged in fire and ungodly ritual.

I can still hear them now.

The way they cut her out, held her up to His face…

No father should… I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.

No father should let that happen.

I see Him. I see HIM through the back of my head! He’s behind me!

Oh Lord, He’s behind me!

My God it’s so dark here.

My God….

THREADBARE

Time blows through us, leaves us threadbare. It echoes across the cracked earth, a God and a monster. A prison and a desert.

Three, six, nine, twelve. All those wasted moments thrown into that booming black hole, a black eye wide in the dark. Loneliness replicates, creating more of itself, her reflected solitude birthing cogs and numbers.

Her hands spin backwards. She’s aching and creaking, then she breaks. The sands blow out of her shattered hourglass. She mixes it with the saline that streams from her face, kneading and fisting with broken arms. Chemicals react. A structure forms. A church. The heat of her wasted love cracks its fine walls and screams at me across the plains of this Other Place and I reverberate forever in its stinging wind.

Now you are nowhere in a cathedral of your own loneliness. The wind carries your song to me over time’s scorched veined terrain and, yes, it reminds me of you, but more than anything it reminds me of me. A version of me. A terrible version of me.

And though no one else ever did, and though it’s too late to save either of us now, for all it’s worth, I loved you Angela.

LET US PRAY

Suspended in time Angela's life became a spiral, a curling downward movement that forced the blood away from her brain and loosened the ties that bound her, setting her adrift. She had never had company, but she had never been so alone. She missed Veronica and work and sleep’s blind embrace, and the time and solitude they left behind ate into each other, becoming an echoing cathedral, a place to worship my legacy, and the madness I left her.

Beyond the voile curtain that webbed the front window the lights in the houses that lined her street blinked out one by one, then, once the last had been extinguished Angela rid herself of her clothes and went outside, into the night, down to the bottom of the garden to the dirty earth beneath the big tree. She fell onto her knees and took it into her hands, smearing and pressing into herself the very earth she came from. The stars above winked while the moon looked away and when she went back inside she was wild eyed and alive and infused with the power of the negative light. In the second bedroom she pulled the door shut and fell once more to her knees. The big black bird bounced from foot to foot, ducking and weaving his head, His dark wings taking so much light from the room Angela could barely tell if He was there at all. “Which one?” she asked and waited for an answer that never came. She would have to choose for herself. She got to her feet, pushing herself up on fat white knees clad in earth and went over to the birds she tried to love in the daylight, all huddled together in the corner of the room amongst piles of the most sapphic Woman’s Own from the nineteen eighties. With hungry wide eyes and a clawed white hand she plucked a brown sparrow from the flock.

“Is this what you want?!” she shouted at the rook. He didn’t blink. “Is this…” she tailed off, shaking. She looked in his little sparrow eyes. There was a universe in there.

She chewed the head off the little brown bird, who offered only the smallest bit of resistance as her teeth separated his tiny vertebrae. The air became a frenzy of beak and bird. Wings flapped and claws clawed and blood dribbled gently down Angela’s hand. She knelt again before her dark black master and painted red circles and lines on her low belly with the stump of its neck, thrashing her head and thrusting her hips, her blood pumping her dirty urges, chanting words from another place into a billow of down and dust. Feathers flew and sparrows shrieked and Angela lay back on the clay white floor and put her fingers inside her wrinkled wetness. She opened herself and picked a floating plume out of the air then stroked it over her tender swelling beneath the cloud of chaos storming above her, the black rook calm in its eye. “Tell me. Tell me you want me. Say it.”

“I want you,” He said.

“No, say it in her voice.”

“I want you,” Veronica said through a black bird’s beak. Angela’s legs bucked, rigid and restless, and her body wracked until it could wrack no more. Then she seized, then fell still, fevered, clammy, and spent. A thick energy filled the room, coming out of her, filling the room that smelled of sulphur and the sea. What had she done? What had she conjured? What had she asked of Him? Her blood pooled cold and she held herself in panic and regret.

The birds fell silent and lined up all in a row. Their feathers still hung in the air but the room was pregnant with expectation. Then it began to shake, the air tight with a terror from beyond this place, and it brought with it a sound, a distant friction, like knives being sharpened in a chasm. Louder and louder it got, until the sound became like a band around her head, getting tighter and tighter until she squealed like a pig on a spit. Her scream fought the air and forced the feathers out of it, saltpetre to their bullets of lead.

BAM

BAM

BAM

They hit the plastic covered boards hard and heavy with a furious pelt and she covered her face, protecting herself from the buckshot, while sixty-six little beaked heads looked away from her where she lay naked and addled in the grime of her crimes. The last feather hit the ground with a splintering crack and at once the birds stiffened as if stricken with the same rigors that had seized her only moments before. Their heads turned toward her, cracking and clicking like a terrible ratchet until their beady little eyes were all trained on her, all one hundred and thirty two. Then their beaks began to open in perfect synchronicity, but they opened too wide, far too wide, so wide she could hear fine sinews separating, coming away from keratin and cartilage, mandible tearing from mandible until they were all screaming the same silent scream. Then a whistling began again, emanating from their awful yawns, like the wind between the eaves, and with it came a voice from The Other Place. It said, “I WILL SHOW YOU WHAT I WANT.” And with one loud crack every one of their precious bird necks snapped into a right angle, the wrong angle, and they fell to the floor for the last time, broken and lifeless. She crawled through their dead bodies, out of the room, pathetic and sobbing, cursed and cursing, and pulled the screen door closed. At 4:30am she fell asleep on the worn hallway floor, the carpet wet with her own regret. She woke when she heard the alarm rising from the adjacent bedroom and pushed herself up into a seated position. She looked down at her badly daubed body art now dry and brown and then back at the second bedroom. The rook was stood on the floor at the other side of the screen door.

He had watched her sleep.

THERE IS A MAN AT THE DOOR

KNOCK KNOCK.

There was a man at the door. She could see him from where she still lay on the floor, her naked body raw on the rough weave of the old carpet. She could see his black shape through the textured glass, wide, tall and motionless. “Go downstairs,” said the rook in her mind, so she did, and she held her hands over her breasts and the dark triangle beneath her painted belly. “Open the door,” the black bird said next, and through the glass the man at the door seemed to grow wider and taller. She saw his fists swinging by his wide thighs and her head began to shake.

“No. No I won’t,” she said.

“But I brought him here for you,” He replied. “Love him. This is what I want.”

“NO, no I can’t. Please don’t make me,” she said into her hands. She could feel the intentions of the man at the door, boring through the glass, penetrating her flesh, trained on the circle she painted in blood on her belly.

“Take him into you. Take his seed. This is what I want.”

“NO! Not that!” she screamed. “Anything but that!”

He shrieked a response she couldn’t decipher and it peeled the paper from the walls, and the man knocked again,

KNOCK

KNOCK

KNOCK

The swirling carpet seemed to undulate beneath her feet. She ran from it to the kitchen, out if the man’s sight, throwing herself back against the wall, sobbing and fearful while the cups rattled on their hooks. Then there it was again, the knocking that seemed to come from the walls, no, from the earth, insistent and furious.

KNOCK

KNOCK

KNOCK

With each quaking knock her world burned and the white light dimmed until there was none left and the world rotted black on red. The mirror on the wall rattled and through it she could see the man at the door, still cutting the same square silhouette, but now from a blood red sky.

“LOVE HIM” The words tuned through her bones, vibrating her till her lips tingled and her fingernails felt as though they might come loose from their pale pink beds. She thrashed through her kitchen and opened the door of the cupboard beneath the sink with stinging fingers, dragging out bottles and brushes before forcing herself into it, bending herself into its tiny space like a dog broken into a suitcase. She pulled the door closed and held it shut with nails that bent back, then broke off. The Rook sucked the light from her eyes, punishing her for her insolence. Blood pours into her vision and it grew like red trees through her mind. They needled into her brain and she fell into the shrieking black pit He opened in her soul. Terror consumed her, pure, endless. She opened her mouth to scream but it was not her scream that came from her constricted throat but His caustic call. It clamped open her jaw and tore through her throat. She covered her mouth, revolted at the sound that echoed out of her, but her hands scratch her face. She felt one with the other and they clashed together in a way that sickened her. They were not her hands at all. They were claws, hard and sharp. Her stomach bubbled with disgust and she gagged and coughed, but her windpipe was clogged with something. Feathers. They filled her throat and packed her sinuses and lined her mouth. Spitting and thrusting she thundered with revulsion as her body tried to expel Him. She hit out at the walls of the cupboard, fighting the present moment with everything she had, as though she could tear her way out of His grip with those new hands and her hate and her fear. But the terrible shaking only built and built and she had no choice but to scream His scream and hold on to her wretched life with those angry claws, and she knew that to survive she must open herself up to Him, let the man and the bird into her sacred places, let them fill her up with that flock of doves.

“TAKE ME THEN! TAKE ME!” she said, but she said it in her mind because her mouth was already full of Him. In the darkness of the cupboard beneath the sink she saw nothing but the air seemed to swell at her surrender and the walls became turgid flesh, pulsing and hot. Her knees hit the walls of fevered flesh as her legs were forced apart. She felt the air move fast and fluid as a dry bracken wind blew between them and into her. Pumping. Belching. Filling her up. Testing her extremities. Testing her seams until she was filled with a plasticine width. Her eyes bulged forth from her face, threatening to burst, threatening to leave her blind and hysterical with only her aching sockets filled with their relative void as proof they were ever there at all. She wanted to push them back into her head but with those claws they would surely pop like balloons so she grit her teeth and waited while the walls sweated salt and bristled with wire and swelled even further until there is no room left between her and the cupboard at all. She breathed out and her chest fell and the cupboard swelled once more to take up the last of the space, then, in one black minute, it stopped as though it had never begun. The door swung open revealing her own kitchen floor. She fell out onto it, onto all fours and into the white light that had spilled back into the room. She heaved out the torture thick and bitter onto her kitchen floor and her hands stroked the normality of the lino through it, leaving trails in her own black bile. The rook upstairs went RATATATAT and she looked through the dirty mirror on the kitchen wall and gasped. Not at the man who had darkened her doorway, who had since vanished from the scene, nor at the nail-less tips of her bloody fingers, nor at the whites of her eyes now a deep blood red, but at her belly, distended and swollen, and at the claw marks and rivers of blood that streaked her inner thighs.

THE READ LETTER

Dear Veronica,

I know I’m not supposed to contact you at the moment, or anyone from work for that matter, and I’ve tried, really I have, but things aren’t good here. My birds, they’re all gone. All gone. All except for Him, and He’s very angry. I think He’s done something to me, I don’t know… I don’t know but I’m scared. I’m scared and I need a friend Veronica. Please be my friend Veronica. Please.

Please.

There are things I need to say to you and they can’t wait.

I know, you see? I know what you’ve been doing. Down there in HR.

And if you don’t come I’ll tell.

I’ll tell everyone.

11:30 pm.

Come to the back door.

Don’t bring the car.

All my love.

I miss you.

Angela

x

A BURNING BIRD

She was eleven when she killed them. Three years to the day after I left her alone in that pile of bricks and secrets. They kept her in the attic, between boards and felt. Between bags and boxes. A girl in storage. Early mornings, late nights. Cleaning and cooking around car parts and canisters. Scrubbing away her own evidence. That was her life. She was nothing to nobody, even then, but she had her birds. She always had her birds. They came to her through a gap in the eaves, drawn in by the tune she whistled into the wind. A tune I taught her. A tune my mother taught me.

…alouette allo, allouette. Allouette…

The hole in the wall brought her the stinging winter but it also brought her company, and the birds took refuge from the storm outside, perched around her in their uneasy alliance. Her uncles worked in the yard behind the house, cutting cars in half, grinding and welding in a spray of sparks and oil. They never left that house and when she was there, she was theirs.

After school it was always the same. They tied her to the kitchen table and stripped her and struck her and shattered her teeth for the things she hadn’t done, and for things she had. I felt every blow. Every touch. Down here. Down there. And behind the blows, behind the crack of the whip, she heard angry wings beat the air and on it she smelled petrol and revenge.

“You ugly little bitch. You ugly little burd gurl”. Slack and northern. Words kept by time.

Months went by and her child’s mind made a plan. She would do it on a Saturday morning. They drank the most on Friday nights and wouldn’t wake until noon, all angry and numb. She would go into town early, like she did every Saturday and get them their bacon and tobacco but she would take a bird. Her most loyal, the one that perched on her finger, and who always came home.

It was the night before. She had cleaned the kitchen before bed, arranging cups and saucers and exhausts and ratchets on the worktops, and lining their petrol canisters up along the wall in the way they told her she ought to in this house of cog and oil. They had fallen asleep in their armchairs like they always did, empty beer cans strewn across the threadbare carpet, oily men with dirty hearts. They looked so small in their unconsciousness. Vulnerable, with chins as weak as their desires, and for a moment she felt pity; stood in the room between them, dim light from the fading fire licking her side. Then she remembered her broken jaw and her eyes raged red in the dark, pure with an ancient hatred. A shadow grew out of her and formed on the ceiling above, like a bird drawn badly in soot, and she made a promise to them, and to the night. She dragged her finger across the sharpness of her shattered tooth, letting her bad blood bubble up, and painted a crossed out circle with it on both of their brows, marking them, then leaving them to their final slumber. In the attic her bleeding finger stroked his little sparrow head, following the gentle curve, bones so light she could hardly feel them. She cried for the last time the tears of the innocent, and then fell out of the world.

Angela slept a blank sleep until the morning came and peeled it off her. It was time. Time to change everything. She dressed and took her bag and the meagre money they left her to do their shopping with and went downstairs, but not before she took her best bird friend from the perch at the foot of her bed and dropped him in it. He looked confused, but then, he was just a bird. Tip toeing through the kitchen she was careful not to wake her snoring uncles, her torn red leather shoes padding quietly on the cold flagged floor. She opened a window and let it swing on its hinges then decanted a little petrol into a jar before lowering the canister onto its side, where it quietly vomited its contents. The thin liquid darkened the grey flags and she pulled the door behind her, sealing them in, and sealing their fates.

The day hit her face. It was sunny but cold and she walked through the back streets to the one behind the butchers and knelt there in the shade. She took the bird out into the thin blue light. He had changed during his time in the bag, as if he had learned something in the dark. He didn’t resist when she dipped him in the petrol, and he didn’t flinch when she struck the match, and when she lit him on fire he seemed to know that he had one last job to do and flew up into the air, burning wings leaving a cough of filthy black smoke in the clear blue sky as he made his way home. Little Angela ditched the empty jar in the undergrowth and was ordering Sunday’s chicken from a man in white when the house around the corner exploded.

ONE HAMMER

She was in the corner of her life. The light from the candles she lit touched the edges of the things she’ll miss when she’s gone. She sees a beach, tastes the salt.

“Knock knock knock”

It’s 11:25pm. She was early, of course.

Through the texture of the opaque glass in the uPVC back door she recognised Veronica’s shape, though she was torn at the edges. Angela patted down her short, dirty, nightdress and opened the door to let her in, and to put her back together. There she was, whole again. My goodness, how’s she’d missed her.

“Come in”

“Do you want a cup of tea?

“No, I don’t. I want to get this over with and I want to go home to bed”, Veronica said. Angela was surprised at the tone in her voice. Didn’t she realise what was at stake?

“And let’s put the bloody lights on shall we?”

“No!” Angela said, leaving her seat and getting between the woman and the switch.

“No. I don’t want the neighbours to know I’m up.”

“Sit down, please”

“No, I prefer to stand.” Veronica held her hand to her crooked hip, “I’m not staying Angela. Now, what have you got to say?”

What did she have to say? For all her planning she had thought very little about how this might actually play out, and she hadn’t expected her to be so touchy. She expected her to be at least a little happy to see her, ask how she’d been doing perhaps, but that definitely wasn’t the case, and it was clear that she wasn’t in the least bit interested in Angela, her life, or her loneliness.

“Well, I saw you the other day. The day I left work early”, she started. This was awkward. Angela didn’t have the words to describe the things she saw in that grubby little cubicle without showing some emotion and playing her hand.

“Ok. And what did you see?” Veronica's tone was inquisitive, mocking almost, as though it was Angela who was on trial here. As though it was her who had put her own filth and lust over everything else, and there, in the wilds of Angela's kitchen, Veronica's mask was slipping, and Angela found she was afraid of the person behind it. It scared her to see there was fire behind those tired eyes.

“I thought I knew you!” The words left Angela's trembling lips and the energy in the room changed around them. The candles flickered and upstairs something went RATATATAT.

“Oh Angela stop this stupid bloody game. We get it, you’re lonely but I’m married and I’m not into….

RATATATAT

“I don’t think of you…”

RATATATAT

“What is that bloody noise?”, Veronica broke off, wandering away from Angela, towards the stairs, towards the…

“No”, Angela said. “Don’t go upstairs.”

She considered running ahead, blocking her way, making an excuse for the noise upstairs but Veronica’s words still reverberated through her, clawing at her soul, pecking at her heart. No, she would let her see. It was time for her to meet Him.

She heard her foot fall on the first tread.

“Angela what is all this…?”, and Angela knew she’d got to the wall of bones. She’d already seen too much. Angela picked up the hammer from the bottom of the stairs and started up behind her. “Oh Angela! Hahahahaha”, Veronica laughed. Laughter? What was she laughing at? Not the remains of her birds, surely? Not her friends, all dead and pale and beautiful. She would take shock, fear even, but humour? No. There was no humour to be found there. “Angela! What is all this!?” she laughed again. How dare she?!

The curtain dropped.

“Angela you filthy cow! How could you? I knew you were bloody mad but really?! This?! Ha! Now I know why your clothes always smell the way they do! Bird shit! Everywhere!” She spun around, taking it all in, seeing behind the lace, but not registering the rusty, blood-stained hammer that swung at Angela's cottage cheese thigh. “And what are these?, she flicked on the light. “Boxes? Is that my name on there? And Janet?” Her eyes were wide now, her teeth showing, all yellow and brown. She opened Janet and peered into her, lifting up the wig and the wool. “You’re mad Angela! Absolutely fucking mad! Oh my God, they are going to love this at work!” And then came the immortal line Angela just couldn’t hear. “Is it any wonder you’re on your…” But she didn’t finish the thought. The hammer entered Veronica's head from the right hand side and pushed her eyeball forward and dropped her jaw. It dropped too low and yawned a scream as her head came apart and her brain dribbled down her shoulder. She wheeled, spinning and moaning like a record playing backwards while blood pumped in big glugs out of the hole Angela had made in her head, painting her wall of bones with a streak of beautiful crimson. Veronica's remaining eye spun in its socket, looking for logic in this new world but the wretched woman got herself wrong, trying to sit down, trying to stand up, waving at the wall of bones, her brain of very little use where it lay on the floor. “Nooowwwww...” she slurred, clutching her broken face. “Angthlll…maaaiifffath…… ithhh wrrrrng” And Angela was here and there, happy and sad. Not quite bereft, but at the same time annoyed with Veronica’s stupid dance, which trailed and stumbled her about, rising and falling, choking and gurgling. She watched Veronica make one last pirouette, then, with a twist, a frown and half a smile, she knocked her in her wet head once more and the once beautiful girl from work hit the floor for the last time.

“Oh Veronica! OH Veronica! What has happened to you”, Angela said as she knelt at her side, swaying back and forth holding the hands of her dead boss, wiping the blood from her hammer and her hands on the pale blue nightdress that stuck to her clammy thighs. “Let me see”, she said, and took off all her clothes. There was no beauty left, just age and surgical scars. It was too late, in every possible sense. Life had gone by so fast. So fast. And here she was at the end of Veronica's. She had waited too long to hold her like this. It was nothing like she’d imagined in their twenties, or thirties, or forties. Sat there, in an expanding pool of the object of her affection she cried a deep cry, an underground cry, a cry from before there were words, and she wished she had understood sooner that beauty drains away with every passing day and the longer you hesitate to take the things you want, the poorer the reward when you do.

Days pass, the way days do, and Veronica became a space in people’s lives. The man she married presumed she has finally left him and so doesn’t chase her; he was too exhausted by his shame and suspicion. And the son she loved didn’t dare ask where his mother went, because what Angela couldn’t know is that his father was home to a terrible rage, and it was this that drove his wife into the arms and bed of that other man, a man that listened and cared and touched her gently. A man without blackbirds in his veins.

At home Angela listened to the radio talk of an epidemic. Airborne they said. She kept the windows shut, wore a mask. The smell of rot filled the house and eventually the six weeks of her suspension expired. Back at work she sat at her desk and listened to the people who still turned up wonder where Veronica was, but there were so many off sick that it didn’t seem as important as it once would. And besides, there was so much work to do with so few people that there wasn’t even time to think, and so Veronica was buried not by dirt in a churchyard, but by circumstance. The people who missed her at work couldn’t even imagine the truth. They couldn’t fathom that maybe her broken body was laid out on a trestle table in Angela's second bedroom, her arms spread wide and crooked like broken wings, yellow bones picked clean by a ragged bird with a dirty old soul. They couldn’t imagine the wig askew on her shattered skull, a wig that had been combed and trimmed in pursuit of a bygone beauty, or the way her grey flesh came so easily from her spongy bones. They could not imagine the deep obsidian seam that runs through the bedrock of families like ours, or the horrors that take place in the shadows at the edges of their boring gardens and on the other side of the walls we share, because the truth is Angela is not alone, and nature has a dark heart.

THE DITCH

MEMORANDUM

DUE TO THE ONGOING HEALTH CRISIS AND THE ADVICE OF THE W.H.O. THE SENIOR MANAGEMENT TEAM HAS DECIDED TO SUSPEND OPERATIONS UNTIL SUCH TIME THAT THE AVIAN FLU EPIDEMIC HAS PASSED. KEY POSITIONS WILL CONTINUE TO OPERATE FROM HOME AND CAN BE CONTACTED BY EMAIL.

THE COMPANY WILL PAY YOU AT FULL RATE FOR THE FIRST TWO WEEKS OF THE SUSPENSION AND AFTER THAT ANY OUTSTANDING ANNUAL LEAVE AND SICKNESS ALLOWANCE WILL BE USED UNTIL NONE REMAINS.

IT IS OUR HOPE THAT OPERATIONS WILL RESUME PRIOR TO SUCH TIMES.

WE URGE YOU TO STAY INDOORS.

THE SENIOR MANAGEMENT TEAM

Angela read the email and knew that it was over. She wouldn’t be coming back. The winter sun could barely look at her through the dirty office window. It knew as well as she did that today was the last day. She packed her desk. In the back of the bottom drawer was a stack of Christmas cards from Veronica. She flicked through them. 1978, 1985, 1999, 2008, years gone by. Years gone by. Her eyes fell on the empty desk to her left and she said she was sorry.

Goodbye.

She was the only person on the platform. A grey wind blew through it and brought an empty train. She saw the driver. He didn’t look well.

She was home. She felt His presence, bearing down from the second bedroom. She hadn’t fed Him in days, but it didn’t matter. He didn’t need it anymore. He never did.

“ACKACKACKACK”, that guttural machine gun. He was calling her. She climbed the stairs, her head low. “Please don’t”, she said to herself. Her hands found the wall and saw for her as her eyes filled with saltwater. I taste it on her lips. “Please don’t.” She stood at the top of the stairs between the two bedrooms in her macabre ivory church and looked through her tears and the screen door and the lace curtain. He was there, in the shadow of her crime, stood on the gleaming white skull He had made His nest, eyeholes and jaw stuffed with feather and straw, trimmed wig off to one side.

“Come in”, He said in her mind. “Look at her. She is beautiful again.”

Angela pushed the screen door open and stepped into him. The birds had all gone now, just their beaks and skulls remained, crushed and scattered about like a beach of broken bone, and in the centre, there she was. And He was right. She was beautiful again. Angela walked around the trestle table, taking her in. Veronica’s old bones were bright and clean and even the pale sun was compelled to look through the glass square in the sloped ceiling. She traced her outline with her finger, down her smooth tibia, past the metal knuckle in her hip and round the inside of her pelvis. Old curves. New beauty. She held the framework of her hand but it fell apart in her own. With the wrinkled skin gone she was new again. Reborn. Angela kissed the hand that wrote her disciplinaries, then the radius, then the humerus. She let her eyes close and her tongue felt it’s way between her ribs and over her clavicle where she could still taste the petals in her perfume, the same one she wore every day for thirty eight years, indelible on her ivory after all that time. Her face pressed into the place where the flesh of her neck once was and she imagined its resistance, its reassurance.

“I wish we’d danced”, she whispered into her spine and it collapsed away from her, taking her rib cage down with it, falling like a tired city. The rook opened his big torn wings and flapped them slowly, his eyes wide and deep and empty. The air moved and the bones fell some more until it was hard to make out the shape of the matchstick woman on the table. Finally Angela was bereft, “no, NO!” She held her up, realigned the balls and joints but the tighter she held her, the more she came apart until Veronica was just swirling dust and a pile of bones. Angela scooped them up in her arms. She had to take her away from Him. He didn’t love her. He didn’t love at all. He just wanted the pain, and He’d had it. He’d had it in spades. She took the bones downstairs in bundles and laid them out on the kitchen units and He watched through the walls as she went outside and began digging the ditch. The spade was cold in her hands and the force of her feet and the metal cut a rectangle in the tilted earth. The soil built up on either side as Angela sank lower and lower into the grave she was digging. She sliced through root and worm as they came to the surface, jerking blind and erratic. As she got deeper the soil became more cloying, thick and damp and dense, and she herself became more frantic, a new strength in her shoulders flicked the dirt up onto the pile. It coated her hands and stuck in her hair until her face was blackened and her eyes reddened by it. The sky went dark. A sound like a million rustling papers took to the twilight. Above her a cloud of bird, a smoke of starling, a shade of wings. She looked up at it, wiping a little fat hand across her eyes, clearing a streak of dirt so she saw through a white flash of moon pale skin. The birds above her came apart and coalesced, one, millions, more. The cloud was so big it came low and she heard through the fluttering paper to an anger beneath. Violence was at the centre of this. Nature’s dark heart. It swelled and pumped larger and larger and when it could hold no more it rained its weak dead element down on her, tiny ragged birds falling onto her, gored and bloody.

Beauty is a matter of perspective. From the right point in time and space anything can be beautiful and from the hill behind the house the birds formed a shape, circles and lines splitting themselves into twos and fours and sixes with their own perfect symmetry. A target? Perhaps. A symbol? Certainly. But beneath it, up close, where Angela stood, it was a scythe, slashing, spinning, shredding itself, beaks and claws tearing beak from claw. The shape hung in the air, over the town, over what was left of her life. She ran from the starling storm, taking shelter from it in the house she had called her home and stood at its kitchen sink as the kettle rattled in its cradle, barely containing the rage boiling within. Three heaped spoonfuls of glinting white rubble fell from a spoon held with shaking hands into the bottom of a tea-stained mug, her favourite. Princess Diana’s faded face smiled meekly from within a blue crest. Tea, water, milk and sugar did their alchemy and gave her what weak reassurance they could. She sipped it. It was too hot. It burned her lips.

A laundry basket overflowed in the corner of the kitchen. She tipped out its contents. It was Natalie. Wig and all. Dirty and stained, and beneath her was Janet, resplendent in denim and wool. She hugged them to her chest.

Girls. Girls together.

She pulled Natalie’s red hair over her own black mop and looked in the dusty mirror on the kitchen wall. She was her own monster. A black face, a sharp beak, a head of flames. Her eyes murdered her through the grime. Fear and solitude, all of it. All the world had to offer. She took Veronica's femur from the worktop and swung it at the menace in the mirror. It cracked a star that reflected her back in triangular elements, one part fire, one part dirt, one part bone. She took off her clothes and dithered into Janet’s wool and denim then looked out of the window, over the yellowing bones on the worktop, and out into the wild of the garden where the birds still circled their black sign over her deep dark ditch. She could see its maw - gaping, inviting.

Behind the circle of birds that blackened the sky the clouds rolled purple and blue over the sun’s burst eye. A tear swelled at the corner of her own and coursed a rosacea path through the dirt that covered her face, while the eye in the sky threatened to do the same.

The time was now.

It always had been.

Veronica's bones made morbid music as Angela dropped them into the laundry basket and she clutched it tight and went outside. She knelt in the soil piled up on the high side of the hole, piled around the lips of the dirty mouth that wanted to kiss her, wind and rain whipping their lash. She wiped Natalie’s red hair from her wet eyes and tucked it behind her little ears without looking at the birds and clouds that blackened the sky. She laid Veronica down in neat lines. Parallel. Organised. It’s what she would have wanted. The skull she held up to the sky, pulling the fuzzy grey feathers and straw out of its crevices, and looked through its eyes into the place where her love had lived. It was too small in there to hold all that love. Too tight inside that cracked cranium to hold all their experience. A strange purple light came in through the hole the hammer had made, Angela's entrance, and Veronica's exit. Veronica's old jaw hung low at one side in a long slur. She held it closed. “Don’t speak,” she whispered into the wind, and they kissed, finally.

A tear dropped out of the sky and ran down her cheek. Then another. And another. The twilight eye cried on her, its tears becoming indistinguishable from the storm in her eyes. “Let’s go to bed,” she said to her dead friend’s head, and it smiled back at her. She climbed down and they lay together in the dirty black bed she had dug for them in the earth, and she watched through wet and absent eyes as the span of the sky spun overhead, birds dipping low, rain falling through them. The water drained the dirt into their bed, filling it up, touching her sides until she could feel it in her ears, and the storm of starlings came so close that some fell in, kamikaze, filling in the gaps between her legs and Veronica’s bones. They fell into Natalie’s red hair and got caught in Janet’s woollen jumper, where they twitched then gave up as bird, dirt and water formed a calcium mud. It was thick and it was gritty and it covered her ears as the tempest above gave itself to her. Still more birds came. This could be all the birds there are, she thought to herself and smiled. They have all come for me. More birds dropped onto her, pelting her body, their beaks tearing at Janet’s denim and then Angela's white skin, and with more birds came more dirt, some washed in by the downpour, some flicked in by wings that skimmed the ground. Then she saw Him, sat in the tree at the end of the garden, His head cocked, one red eye on her black hole. “I’m leaving you.” she said and when He laughed his bitter laugh it burned her brain like battery acid, searing a white light behind eyes that watched him fly away, a diminishing V shape convulsing in the purple sky.

She bled into the filth through dirty punctures and the earth fell on her in sods, pressure building, holding her down. She didn’t struggle. She wanted this. Bird and dirt fell on her head and she lost the sky. She felt the strange weight of it all against her eyeballs and the sharp grit and twitching mulch fill her throat. She breathed in one last time and took the earth into herself.

She was underground.

They were quiet, those last few moments. Yes, her throat gagged and lurched in reflex and her heart pumped what oxygen it could find around the body she had been cursed into, but she herself found that peaceful place from before she was born, and finally the dark light died.

Finally she fell asleep, and it was the deep kind of sleep. The kind you escape into. The kind I’ll never know, because I see all this through His sleepless grid, where time meets space. Where they cut each other in half. Where things are made of knives and chaos.

Years pass. Grass grows. She rots a little, then a lot. Her cells become spores, become knowledge.

Nature eats her and reads her.

Overhead stars shatter and worlds end.

Heat unimaginable cracks infinite emptiness.

Hair, flesh, bone and feather. They spin through the screaming vacuum, clashing and fracturing, their particles forced together fuse into something else.

Something old.

Something new.

A cerise crystal, shaped like a rough heart.

THE END

Adam M Booth

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

EPILOGUE

For Lucy

There are things I never said out loud…

CHAPTER 1

This is where the end begins, here in the fluorescence of a supermarket petrol station on the fifth day of a bad week. I could not imagine a more mundane place for a story to start but it is always from here that I choose to begin. I don’t know why... Perhaps I find comfort in the illusion of safety its buzzing brightness cast about. Perhaps it’s just through honour for the last few moments of a shared humanity. Either way, in my mind, this is where it begins.

I stood caffeinated and fidgety in a queue of nine, swollen feet tight in high stilettos. Outside a pink sun was setting and the busy door batted cold air against hot as people who just wanted to go home grabbed beers and milk and bread. Racks of magazines sold cakes and cars and bras to the side of my face and it was ok, because we all needed to eat, and we all needed to dream.

Time hung in the air, and anxiety itched in my veins. I wanted to get out. I wanted to get going, but I wish now that I’d savoured my time there a little more. I wish I’d revelled in the normality for a while longer, but I could not have foreseen the sharp, neck cracking left turn life was about to take. Indeed, knowing what was just around that obtuse corner would have only banished me from my blissful ignorance sooner. Now I look back at this tiny beat in time with reverence. Not because it was unusual, but simply because it was so usual.

More queuing.

I stood now fifth in line, my right arm weighed down by a wheeled basket filled boxes of frozen brown things I'd never eat and the radio played a pop song about love and fame and need and I hummed along and sagged with exhaustion. Two days would not be enough, my bones needed more, but I knew that come Monday all those boxes would need to be ticked again and my many debts recompensed, so life's relentless march forged me onwards. For a moment I felt trapped by circumstance. It gripped my heart and stole my breath. It was feeling I’d come to know intimately.

To distract myself from the vice of responsibility and this eternal queue I focused on her, a glint of light in the pitch. Beautiful, distant, Lucy.

I see her in my mind’s eye as all the versions of her I have known. She is newborn and infant and adolescent all at once. I can’t make a distinction between these shades of her because she is all things to me. She is in the tick tock of my watch and in the moisture on my tongue. She is stars and sea and breath and blood, but at this point in time more than anything else she exists as a space in my life, absent as she is from it whilst at school in the countryside. I would try not to think that she chose to go there to avoid her remaining, broken parent, but I would never be successful. I hate myself for so many things but none more than the pain I caused her. It wasn’t meant to hurt. Quite the opposite. It was all for love.

And still we queued.

The man before me lurched two steps toward the checkout as a middle-aged lady shuffled down the line towards the sliding doors, dropping change into her purse. Her hands shook madly with the signs of what I assumed to be the early onset of some crippling degenerative disease. The one holding the purse was freshly bandaged. She was ashen grey. I took a step forward into the space left by the man in front and my arm dragged behind me, pulling the wheeled basket of artificial flavours, textured proteins and modified starches past a two metre tall cardboard cut-out advert for crisps. It showed a sun in a blue sky setting over a field. There was a farmhouse on the horizon. My mind fell backwards through time.

France in late August.

Lucy rolling in long grass.

The three of us feeding a horse over a fence.

Thick blood being coughed into a tissue.

Clouds obscuring the sun.

The radio broke in, ending a story with the words "....against girls, nine to seventeen.", before cutting to loud static. The cashier said, "Next", without feeling and lifted up the small radio, turning it over and around in hoary hands. It just crackled and spat. There was nothing she could do to make it sing again, so she killed the power at the wall.

I approached the till, chipped, pinned, then left for the forecourt. Outside I saw the curved blade of the red sun dip behind a spine of dead trees. They ate away at the fire in the sky as it turned away from us one last time, leaving only the ultra-bright petrol station and an encroaching absence of light.

I loaded up the four by four, got in and accelerated down the road away from the shrinking pool of light in my rear view mirror. The Sat Nav sprang to life, directing me towards her, down that tarmac, down the back of that that greasy black python, away from my life and towards the warm embrace of my own genes made flesh, to her company, her conversation and, eventually, perhaps, some rest. How I longed for it. How I longed to be with her. Safe in our space. Quietly within each other with only the hum of the fridge and the sound of her breathing and scratching and living.

Into the dark I drove. I drove for hours and hours until the last coffee had all but left me and fatigue hung heavy round my shoulders. For years I had existed in that narrow, edgy space, where caffeine clashed against fatigue. You know the place. It’s 4:17 pm on a Tuesday in January. It’s already dark outside and rain streaks the world into lines. You breathe the sour tang of hours old Columbian roast and burnt milk onto a stained keyboard you’re punching too hard with dithering digits. The muscles in your back bunch into bricks and they hurt, damn it, they hurt, but it doesn’t matter. All that matters are numbers on a page. Those numbers on that page. The phone is ringing, and the people on the other end of it hate you. Don’t look back Zoe. Just drink more coffee. Just drink more coffee.

I put on the radio to stimulate my brain into something resembling alertness. Radio 1 was nothing but infinite static, just like it had been in the petrol station back there. With an absent mind I padded and probed through my little brown bag looking for my iPod. Distracted by minutia I didn't consider what that static might mean. I didn't imagine that maybe somewhere the end had begun...

I tuned through the rest of the stations and got nothing but the same so I pulled over to the side of the road of the silent small town I was passing through and plugged in the iPod I retrieved from the bottom of that leather bag of detritus. Somewhere a siren sounded. I scrolled through my music collection, hit shuffle and sped off. Her music had been on my laptop. Two lives lived through overlapping eras, twisted together and told through music. Played at random they told a story of the truth in us. Our desires and secrets confessed in song by other voices. A stranger sang about blue skies and Saturdays into the intimate vibrating darkness of my beastly car. I didn’t know the words and the sentiment felt like a taunt. As our music played I raced down that open tarmac, road markings pulsing in my lonely light like arteries pumping faster and faster as darkness chased me into itself.

A pair of red eyes grew quickly out of the ink. I slowed for the traffic lights staring me down and the heartbeat of the road held still, as if in anticipation of the scene about to be played out before me. My headlights lit the stage. A man was face down on the pavement at the other side of the four lane carriageway. He was dragging himself along by his hands. Even from this distance I could tell he was injured. His blonde hair was slick and glinted ruby in the cold halogen light. My hand found the door and held it closed. His mouth twisted open as if he was calling out in slurred pain but I heard nothing through the aspartame pop song and deadening insulation of the car. It was duty, not instinct that instructed me to call for help and I dialled 999 with suddenly shaking fingers and thumbs. The hands-free cut out the music and I told the automated voice on the other end of the phone that I thought I needed an ambulance. I was transferred to an operator, my eyes flitting between the injured man and my dashboard. I tried not to see his face. The line clicked as it connected but instead of the efficient, concerned greeting I expected all that arrived was an ambient sound, like a faint wind. "Hello?". No response, just the movement of air. "Hello?!” I said again, shouting slightly this time. Only silence. I listened hard.

"Baagggagaagagagaaa......” gurgled a low tone. I shuddered as the noise exhaled down the line, filling the car. Unnerved, but mostly just annoyed, I hung up, and started to call back, but before I could dial the number I noticed the light catch a small group of people approaching the obviously injured man. A group of around nine. I saw and heard him scream once loudly before I disconnected and allowed the music to start up again, erasing his pain from my ears. They approached bent over, forming a messy circle around him. Arms outstretched, they appeared to slowly but deliberately administer first aid. My mind made quick assumptions...

All nine people must surely have mobile phones….

One of them would no doubt eventually get through to an operator who took their job seriously enough to actually take the call….

There was nothing a tenth person could do to help.

And so there, in the greedy excess of my unnecessarily large vehicle I made a selfish decision that allowed me to live an extra ninety minutes. The lights turned amber, then green and I turned left and drove off into the distance, the crowd of helping hands taking care of the injured man still visible in the rear view mirror as I ran away into the night.

That would be the last time I would see another human being and not try to eat the brain out of their skull.

CHAPTER 2

It was 7:30pm on a Friday night in late October and I was driving in the dark to collect my daughter from a remote train station, and bring her home from boarding school for the only weekend of the month that brought me any solace. Driving through that final night, singing along to the last music that would ever play, I had no idea that what I wanted, what I expected out of that day and the rest of my life would be replaced so soon and so finally with cracked bone, smeared gore, and eternal death.

I arrived at the train station and was glad to see that the car park was quiet for a Friday evening. The lights inside shone out through the plate glass windows and separated the dark night from the harsh blue waiting area within. The air was still and cold and I could hear a slow rhythmic click from some complicated piece of train equipment, the name and function of which eluded me, and would continue to do so.

I jumped out of the car with purpose and walked a quick pace towards the station building. The sharp heels of my stiletto shoes clicked and pecked at the gum stained paving as I half ran, half skipped toward the future. Double automatic doors slid open in a breathless yawn. I walked towards them and let them swallow me whole.

I stopped for a moment as the doors closed behind me, letting the relative heat of the foyer permeate my flimsy clothes. I was still wearing the outfit I had worn to work that day, a cream button up shirt, open at the top, and a knee length figure hugging beige skirt with the aforementioned heels and a pair of sheer tights. I was well aware that this was not appropriate autumn/winter work wear but Steve had been visiting from Head Office and I very much wanted him to want to have sex with me. I doubt I would ever have gone through with it but he had big arms, dark stubble and a knowing look that set alight a chemical reaction deep down inside me, down there where our bodies can’t hide their secrets. I looked back towards the doors I had entered through, remembering that I had left the warm jacket I had brought for the journey in the back of the car. A version of me looked back from the smooth, even glass. She was washed out in the pale blue light but looked trim and taut. Her breasts continued to defy gravity, sitting front and centre on her chest, just like the magazines said they ought to. The dark glossy hair I had dyed and dragged back tight into a ponytail helped old, tired eyes look bright, despite feeling anything but. Despite my best efforts life had carved its stories into my face. I hated the way they exposed me. I had applied all the petrochemicals they said I should, but those bastard lines still gave me away. I pictured Steve bearing down. Me, the woman in the glass, bent over the edge of my desk, skirt hitched up. Him, running a rough hand over the stretch marks she gave me, then past the scars on my inner thigh where their jean studs had torn my soft teenage skin. But don’t worry; familiar guilt bled into my mind soon enough, tainting the image. Like a haemophiliac, I could never stem its flow for long.

I walked out onto the platform, which was without anyone else. I was only peripherally aware of the people on the other side of the track, huddled behind the glass wall in the warmth of the cafe. The yellow dotted sign above me informed me that the train was due in at 8:45pm. It was now 9:03pm and I was cold and the sign was a liar. I went back inside to talk to the information desk to find out what the holdup was, only to find it unmanned so I returned to the platform and sank sulkily against the hard, uncomfortable arse high shelving that now seemed to pass as seating in public transportation stations throughout the land. Its metal curve felt cold against my thighs and I shivered as my heat left me. Across the track I noticed more bodies arrive and join the figures behind the glass, forming a small crowd. One of them raised a hand, and seemed to give me a slow wave. I smiled thinly at this rare train station camaraderie and gave an awkward half-wave back. The waving person, who looked to be wearing a torn t-shirt, dropped his hand, but still stared squarely in my direction, his head cocked to one side. Blushing slightly from the attention I turned away and propped myself against the wall of the platform. My mind meandered from Steve's thick forearms and well fitting suit to the inappropriateness of a torn t-shirt in October before finally settling on Lucy and her extreme lateness. And in between I saw blood. All the blood. My mind flickers like a slideshow. It's always been that way. At 9:10pm I decided I’d try to call her to find out where she was so lifted my phone only to see that I had a voicemail from my Mum.

The voicemail introduced her message to me. It was from seven forty-five pm.

"Zoe? Can you hear me?" she was breathless and hearing it made my heart seize, her panic a contagion that infected me through the phone line. "There are people in the house Zoe. They were on the lawn. They looked hurt so I went out to see them but...”, she whispered to me with an intimate urgency I hadn't heard from her since…

She had loved me so purely as a child that it was as though she had been made out of light. Diffused light, the best kind of light. The kind that finds its way to you through leaves. Sunlight through blonde hair and an embrace of pink musk. Fixed knees. Days with paint. But nothing stays perfect forever. Life will see to that. A clawed face, a kicked bin. A white knuckle trembling in the dark. He fixed his stare into the distance and took the best parts of her away with him, discarding them like they were rubbish.

Like we were rubbish.

He threw us away into that pit of his, that endless, lightless pit of loss where he thought we’d never find him, or her, or them, or us.

But I would find him.

I did find him.

And I only did what I had to.

A slow thudding emerged beneath her words. She heard it too and for a few seconds all there was was the thud and her increasingly laboured breathing.

"The young man bit me. The one with the jeans and the dark hair. On my shoulder. Do you thinkgllgg I shoulddd...". Her voice came as if spoken through treacle. "I don't know why g-g-g I callggglled"

Three thick, short breaths.

"Zoe, your Dad.......” she conspired, finally.

I heard her breathe in one last time. The message went on but all that could be heard was the thudding, which grew louder, then paused for a long moment before fading again into the perceived distance.

I blinked hard against the shadowing that crept in at the sides of my vision. My ears thrummed as my body tried to fix this sudden and complete mental anguish by flooding my system with a cocktail of hormones that made me shake and thump.

All I had ever wanted was to protect her...

The biggest gift I could have been given in that moment was oblivion but in what I wish I could say was a final act of cruelty my body kept me alert, clearing the encroaching ink and bringing my hearing back to full clarity just in time for me to become aware of a distant squeal that grew and grew and grew before adding a deep and increasing rumble to its suddenly terrible chorus. My eyes focused down the track in the direction of the noise which was now not over there, but all around me. My gaze followed the burning train as it tore into the station, tilted to the left, grinding metal against concrete as fire spilled out of broken windows. Orange flecks through a smoking metal hurricane. I spun on my spiked heel and watched the world end as the train crashed and twisted into the bend where the track exited the station, before becoming obscured by its own black emissions and an acrid smell of fused brakes and burning plastic. My reality became replaced by smudged abstraction. Through the black smoke I made out a shade of a man in a torn t-shirt on the same platform as me. The incinerating train threw sparks into the blackness and illuminated the approaching figure. I saw him stretch out his arms towards me, as he seemed to walk in slow motion through the surreal world I had been suddenly born into. A flash illuminated his face and he was smiling! Relief weakened me and I dropped to my knees and held my arms aloft to receive him.

CHAPTER 3

My mind has erased almost all of the time between my prostration at the feet of my shadowed saviour and the time I regained my consciousness, but found I had lost everything else. Only a few memories remain. I would say mercifully so but there is nothing merciful about the parts I remember, the first being the moment I looked up at the face of my smiling rescuer only to see that he wasn't smiling at all, rather the tissue of his cheeks was torn and flapped meatily at each side of his face, exposing his teeth right up to his ears in a humourless grimace. A black liquid leaked out of each side of his exposed jawbone and from a torn hole in his windpipe, splattering down onto my face and chest like the last rainy day in hell. I see him lurch forwards and he bites down on me and his teeth, those powerful, god awful, yellow teeth, connect with the arm I offered up to him. I smell his breath. It is gastric plastic.

I can remember a flash of bruising heat then a warm slickness as the teeth kept at me, slow but deliberate like a kiss that had gone too far. I came apart like slow cooked lamb as the meat slipped off the bone. My meat just slipped off my bone! “That's mine!” I said,  “Give it back to me!” Trying to cling to normality I apologised, “Sorry! No! Sorry!” excusing him mutilating me, before changing tactic, kind of crying, kind of begging for him to stop, ple-e-ase stop, please...

Then it's just me squirming in a pool of thick juices. Red and black and blue. I hear more than feel his teeth grind against my skull and then the images blur together, silent and vague with horror, like a Monet painted in bile and faeces. I make a sound like a goat, over and over and over again.

Into the blackness.

Somewhere my heart stopped and I wasn’t surprised. I had always asked too much of it. Then for a while there was nothing, just a deep emptiness. Not sleep, just a peaceful absence. I could perceive nothing at all just... the essence of me, only.... elsewhere. There is no better way for me to describe it. It was what it was, but that experience or lack thereof, proved something to me. That there is something more to existence. Something profound and beautiful and something that I would always be excluded from. Something I excluded myself from all those years ago. I had no idea what I was sacrificing...

After too short a time in that peaceful void I became aware of a light in the darkness. A stab of silver to the extreme left of what I gradually saw was an inky blue background. It dawned on me that the silver I saw was the curve of the moon and the inky blue background was a clear night sky. It was out of focus and blurred and I couldn’t connect to its beauty. To the left the dotted yellow of the train station display reflected in glass. The sudden familiarity brought a flood of memories.

That answer machine message.

Being attacked.

Then Lucy. Lucy!

“Where was she? Was she safe?” the thought ricocheted around my skull. How long had I laid here? I spun over onto my other side to see the clock that had mocked me with her lateness before everything had changed.

But I didn't move.

I couldn’t.

I remained motionless on the concrete, my eyes still transfixed on that supposedly beautiful night sky while my mind thrashed with urgency. What had happened to me? With haste I deduced that I must have been paralysed during the vicious attack by that deformed madman. My mind rang with fear and panic but physically I gave none of it away. To calm myself down I tried to hold my breath only to find that I had none to hold. I wasn't breathing. The realisation exploded inside me, an attack of acute panic so extreme that I imagine had anyone been there to witness it they would have seen sparks coming off me. But there was no-one there, and I was still just an inappropriately dressed woman led paralysed on her right side, with her bloody arm twisted beneath her. The panic continued with constant agonising intensity until the dark blue night became the pale grey morning. At some point after what I imagine was about lunchtime the fear in me dissipated and was replaced by ridiculous, hysterical optimism, the minds Plan B when faced with insurmountable bad news. I recalled in detail stories I'd read in cheap magazines of people who woke from comas after twenty five years, or who experienced temporary paralysis at inopportune times only to recover miraculously on their birthdays and managed to be buoyed by the recollection. I convinced myself that at some point someone would find me and fix me and take me to receive medical help. At the very worst I would spend six months in a wheelchair whilst receiving physiotherapy. Hours later when the possibility that I might never recover glistened into my cerebrum I retreated from it to the place in my head where pop culture got stored. I replayed whole episodes of Friends, episodes I didn’t know I’d seen; as my mind did it's best to insulate me. But of course worse was still to come. The worst was still to come, and my ultimate horror hung on the dark horizon of my life, dancing in its own grim inevitability.

CHAPTER 4

After many hours of Chandler and Rachel and fake Manhattan apartments I felt a single point of cold cut through the fiction behind my right eye. At first it was just a tickle, enough to draw my attention but no more. But soon the tickle was an ache and the single point was a golf ball sized orb of freezing agony that grew to encompass the whole eye and the right side of my face and brain. It was like an ice cream headache but without the ability to blink hard against it, and without the yin of the taste of sweetened cream to counter the yang of its searing neurological cold. I braced against it mentally but it didn’t recede. And I could only brace for so long, eventually I had to relent and as I did the white cold spread through my face and down into my arm and leg, making my entire right side awash with electric agony. The pain settled into its new home and I knew with awful certainty that it would not be temporary. The contrast of the numbness on my left and pain on my right was too much, each sensation reminding me of why the other was unbearable. I wheeled between torments, feeling the pain until I was a freezing furnace of suffering before escaping into the suffocating numbness where I huddled until I needed to feel something again. I repeated this insane internal pirouette for many agonizing hours. Everything we ever experienced was just an alteration between these two frequencies, one high, and one low. On off. On off.

I estimate that it was early evening of that first day when I felt the first movement. The pain in me began to vibrate at a higher frequency, building up to something. I found out what when it reached an electric peak and my right shoulder move tugged backwards, causing my chest to hit the charred tarmac. It was a feeling not dissimilar to the one you get as you’re drifting off to sleep, and then feel yourself falling and jolt awake. Violent and involuntary. Violently involuntary. An hour passed with me in this new position, hunched up with my face against the ground. My right eye open and the ball pressed against the rough hardness of the gum pocked tarmac. Then, an hour or so later the vibration began again and built once more to a nerve shredding crescendo, the peak of which brought my right knee up in a spasm. I was now half knelt up and could see through my knees, backwards down the track. On the flipped horizon a fire was burning. The vibration began again and my right hand was forced down into the ground, flipping me onto my left. With this the pain caught fire and burned through my middle and into the left hand side of me, eliminating the numbness for good. I remember being glad. I deserved all that pain. I knew as it tore through me that it was dissolving my organs and with a heavy liquid nausea I felt myself become hollow where once I had substance. With that the pain took control and with a spastic series of forced jerks and twitches, I was stood up. It dawned on me, as my dead body animated itself upright that I was no longer in control. Body and mind had split into two separate entities. Both ached in their own way, but only one had any control, and though I could still feel everything I was now just a passive observer. A witness to a changed reality. As my body shifted and lurched to gain a new kind of balance I felt my liquefied insides drop, then drain out through the now useless holes between my legs. The fluid seeped through my tights, leaving a black puddle between my stilettos and a cold cavern in my core. A cavern where a lustful eternal hunger would soon take up residence.

I stood and swayed in the darkness, all angles and awkwardness. My eyes swung loosely in their sockets as the world spun in orbit. I had no volition over them, but dutifully they continued to relay information to the brain in which I was now held captive. In and out of focus a scene painted before me, an apocalyptic version of the station I had arrived at a day earlier, blackened and shattered. Machinery still clicked and whirred. An automatic door kept trying to close on a chunk of melted train and sunlight, diffused through low cloud, broke over the rough grassy embankment. I felt its weak warmth but could take no comfort in it. Like an infant opening its eyes for the first time to find she’d been born in hell, I had no expectation. Panic and pain had stripped it from me. I only knew that everything was new and everything was bad. The thin light grew through grey cloud and I caught my reflection in an advertising board. The picture behind the plexiglass was of an old woman smiling whilst talking on a mobile phone. I saw my Mum in her. I imagined that black tar smile looming above her as it had me. I hope she died. Good god I hope she stayed dead. My reflection was rippled in a plastic frame. I was dressed as I had been when I arrived at the train station but now black and red lines ran down from a hole in my skull, streaking my face and blouse. My stilettos, still somehow attached to my feet, stood in the pool of the black gunge which had fallen out of me, and the arm I had used to defend myself hung stripped of flesh, the bone bleached white in the new sun. I was spoiled meat. Road kill. Dog food. As I looked at the old woman in the advert and the reflection of the new, putrid me a deep yearning for connection began where my womb once was. I worried about my mother and needed to find my daughter. I yearned for people. For my people. I felt a pull towards them spread out into each limb and give them purpose. I hungered to be with them, to hold them close to me, to know them completely and get lost in their warmth. It was such sweet agony and it bubbled up through me. As it got to my neck I heard myself groan pathetically, a thin moan, like a frail orgasm. It was a hateful sound. No sooner had it left my throat than my body lurched forwards, using my desire as its motivation. It took me stumbling down the platform and into the station; the automatic doors sliding open to receive us more graciously than our abomination deserved. Turning left out of the station we jerked and clattered down the long straight road. Far in the distance other bodies stumbled and fell, but all in the same direction, the fire on the horizon. The stilettos lasted till the end of the car park.

CHAPTER 5

Once in my sleep I saw her as a little girl, spinning in a huge white room, glossy walls reflecting fluffy pink clouds and little white coins.

Her face was frowning but she pulled her mouth up into a smile and I could tell it was hurting her, but she did it anyway.

In the middle of the room was a giant white dome, and I don’t know why but it was a nightmare.

CHAPTER 6

It took two cycles of the sun for us to reach the end of the road, and with each passing hour the terrible hunger for company doubled. Shuffling down that long straight road I imagined that perhaps when we did finally meet someone they would have the answers I was looking for. I fantasised that they would put their arm around my shoulder and say, “shhh Zoe, don’t worry. Everything's going to be ok”, and fill me with medicines that didn’t exist and clean me and cure me. Of course I was naive. I honestly thought that the maddening want for company was a natural human instinct brought on by the terrible sequence of events that had led me here, but I was about to learn otherwise.

At the end of the long road was a house. It was a wooden house with an upstairs and a downstairs. Upstairs a dim light flickered through twilight and a large, square window. The house was surrounded by a low wall. It offered her no protection. Quietly my body dragged itself forwards until it was up against the meagre stack of bricks, and then slid along it to where the gate hung ajar. Up the garden path we went and onto the decked porch where my foot kicked over a milk bottle. It spun and made that delicate distinct noise that a spinning bottle makes. A weak female voice whispered from upstairs, “Hello?”, “Is that you Eddie?” I couldn’t reply obviously but the body quickened itself and I felt the yearning shift into expectation and I was so thirsty.

The front door was open and swung on its hinges and we entered into a dark hallway. Four coats hung on a stand to the left and a small table beside it had a neat stack of letters and a cradle for a phone but no phone. The smell of a recently extinguished candle arrived in the air. I only wanted to hug her. I wanted to share her warmth. The stairs went immediately up in front of us and we lurched towards them, bare feet padding on the thick carpet. Leaning against the wall we made it up the stairs, stopping briefly to sway at the top before turning left down the hall. I just didn't want her to be alone anymore. There were three doors. One was open. I don’t know why she left it open. We stopped in the open doorway. I could feel her living and breathing inside. My empty core filled up with lustful thirst and I felt the black bile rise up for the first time, burning plastic and battery acid. It stung the soft tissues of my throat and filled my mouth until it drained down my chin and over my tits, mixing me into the pitch. With hope, she said, “Eddie?”, and flicked on a reading lamp with shaking hands, knocking it to the floor, this woman of fifty something crouched in the corner of her room clutching a leather bag to her cream blouse.

The light laid bare the truth to both of us. I was not her Eddie. And her expression, a silent vacuum of horror, let me know with a crushing, violent certainty that we were not there to make friends. The lamp cast flickering shades of us both backwards. They loomed over us and wrote her fear of me, and my threat to her, in bold on the walls behind us. My body took jagged steps towards her and she whimpered and begged, “No, please god NO no no NO, please please please don't PLEASE don’t”, but she didn’t move. I don’t think she could. Sometimes fear animates, sometimes it paralyses.

Terror held time still. Three, two, one.

I screamed inside for her but it came out as a gasping moan, like an emphysemic laugh. I wanted to tell her I was sorry, that I didn't mean to laugh, that I just wanted to hold her and know her and... My pale white arms reached out and grabbed loosely at her face and hair until they made purchase and as soon as they did they gripped hard and held her still. She stopped pleading when we held her tight and then the teeth started their journey through her, crunching through bone and chewing through cartilage for hours and hours and hours until she was all gone. My eyes were open the entire time.

I wish she’d never turned on that lamp.

We knelt in the wet area she left behind, the old woman now a ball of bones and brain scratching around inside me, and a thick pool of vital fluids on the old maroon and blue carpet. Images of the bleeding layers of her being stripped from her yellow skeleton strobed through me into the part of the brain that really, truly makes us who we are. The secret area where our worst deeds hide and where our proclamations of innocence hold no substance. That shaded corner where you cannot score out the things you did to your husband. The place that made me swap those tablets and that gapes abject terror into our nights. The images of her stricken face as its loose skin came away affect me more than the tsunami of gore that followed, so new to me was the red truth inside her.

My body wallowed in its first kill. It bloated and gassed and smeared itself with its own black effluence, rolling in her remains, staining itself with the heavy metal scent of the gore that had so recently been a terrified wife/sister/mother of someone. Then the teeth began to chatter, wracking my brain and we stood up with an enlivened sense of purpose. We made it down the stairs and away from the house, walking that shuddering walk through a thin hedgerow and across a playing field, past a blood stained playground and onto a dual carriageway, falling over the metal barricade designed by someone to keep wayward vehicles within its confines but now entirely devoid of purpose. We thrashed a little but soon found our feet and were back up and on our way, always falling towards the burning town less than a mile away. We passed an abandoned minibus and I saw in the reflection of the glass that I had a thicket of grey hair hanging out of my mouth and red neck, chest, arms and hands. There were no more cars on the road, no people in the houses, but there were people in the town ahead and I felt my belly swell black in anticipation of them.

I am sat at my desk. My face is bathed in cool blue light. Half a smile and one eye from your old face observe me between windows on my desktop.

It’s too late.

I will never be free of these coils of lead.

Don't jump Zoe.

Don't jump.

CHAPTER 7

The bones in my neck cracked and clicked as we jolted and stumbled without grace or equilibrium towards the town ahead, piloted as I now was by the gangrenous amateur who had taken me over. His presence violated me, his violence a pure, annihilating lust. As he shuffled, I moaned, through once familiar places that existed now only as a shade of a recent past. In my memory I see a tin of off brand baked beans roll out of an open door of a ransacked grocery. A step, a lurch. I hear the sound of water running and as my head lolls I catch a glimpse of a torrent pouring out from beneath the door of a dental surgery, the door and windows of which had been hastily, clumsily boarded over. We fall against a phone box, the handset hangs loosely and beeps an alarm, and I recognise the cliché as I see a severed hand holding a car key on a bench covered in blood. Little horror stories ended everywhere my gaze fell; a series of events that made up a life, then ended suddenly. Up ahead a car was jack-knifed across the road. As we got closer I noticed that the door was open on the driver’s side and the footwell was full of blood and bone and bile and blackness. Signs on the rear window said something about Essex and, “Baby On Board”. I regret so many things. I was only a child, how could I have felt so much hate? On the other side of the car I heard heavy wet squelching cut up with whines and moans. I slid around the back of the van, where three figures were getting shakily to their feet. One was a teenage boy, skinny and slight with fair hair and a blue hooded top, he looked like any teenage boy, except he had a space where his forehead used to be and a face streaked red. It looked like his brain had been crying and he whinnied like a foal watching its lame mother take a shotgun to the head. The other two figures did not appear to be faring so well. A man and a woman, both extremely overweight and almost completely naked except for some torn dirty rags bunched up around their middles. Heavy, grey, lacerated fat hung in rancid thick ribbons from the woman's guts, exposing purple and green matter and her yellow pelvic bone in full technicolour gore. She had no lower jaw and so her tongue hung out of a rough hole where her bottom teeth used to be and it convulsed erratically against her neck making a wet slapping sound. He had suffered a deep cut to the outside of his right thigh and the weight of the flesh beneath had pulled the tissue off the bone. It collected around his ankle like a baggy stocking full of pus. All three were smeared in black. My body lurched me into their midst. Their eyes were stricken and I cried out for them, for us, in a long high moan that asked for us to die, now, please.

But we didn’t die. No more than we had already. And then there were four.

We walked on through the suburbs toward the town because our stomachs knew there were brains there, the boy and I slightly ahead of the other two, who kept getting caught up on bits of the environment. Even a low curb caused them to drop to the ground and with each fall they would leave a smear of themselves behind. They thrashed and whined against their own ineptitude but still, the boy moaned the most.

Our tragic little group pressed ever forwards following streams of rats through the vacant streets and alleys, down a ramp into a car park, through its echoing chamber into a shopping precinct where they teamed in their hundreds, gnawing and chewing their way through the fabric of our society. The precinct gleamed with marble and chrome and up above daylight cast itself through a pyramid of glass onto the serrated teeth of an escalator, rotating downwards.

The fat man had been at the front of our group when we arrived at bottom of the descending mechanical stairs and his sagging girth blocked our access to its persistently temporary bottom step. For days we fell against him and it, as it bit at his thighs and knees taking chunks of him into itself until it was a turning band of the blood and bone and skin that his body seemed so willing to give up. The sun came and went, lighting us occasionally through the atrium above. During the daylight hours there was a certain comedy to the slapstick klutzing and we lolled and tripped like broken marionettes, but comedy was all too absent during the nights when all that was left was the boys crying and the wet sound of fat man smearing against metal. I don’t know why the lights were off and the escalator on. Maybe someone got eaten somewhere between the two switches. Eventually our serrated tormentor had eaten enough of the fat man and slowed to a juddering halt. Amidst the smell of fusing gears and melting man matter we fell and climbed over what was left of the back of him and ascended, finally.

It was dusk when we fell through the broken glass of a once sliding door and onto the street. My body scrambled and thrashed against the glass and tarmac and I saw shoes and legs and feet. Lots and lots of shoes and legs and feet. Some in white trainers, some in black boots. Some bare, some in torn socks. Some were green and purple and some were missing entirely and hobbled forwards on blooded, soggy stumps, and some were the feet of children, but all were going the same way and my body pulled itself up against them as we moved as one unstoppable sea of clattering teeth and whining hunger towards a two storey grey building on the corner of the street we occupied.

CHAPTER 8

I killed her dog. His name was Sam. He was old and I throttled him in his sleep. And it wasn’t spontaneous, nor an act of mercy. I planned to do it, and I did. You see, in the mornings I would see her look down at him in his basket with increasingly questioning eyes and she'd ask why he didn't go outside to the toilet anymore.

I could see where this was going and I couldn't answer. I just stood there, holding the tea towel with familiar white knuckles, waiting for the moment to pass, waiting for her to just stop talking.

When she was a baby she would call him "Dokk", and laugh, and he would be patient whilst she brushed his tail too hard with a little purple brush from that cheap doll we bought her from that toyshop in Spain. She came home from school one day and I told her he had jumped over the gate and run away but as my lie pierced her world the dead dog was wrapped in a rug in the boot of my car, flaking and leaking it's last onto the black felt of my grey estate and staining the air with my crime. She cried all night and most of the following day. Her misery was a cloying grey felt that filled me up. I was only trying to protect her. She’d already lost too much.

I want to tell you our dog didn't wake up and look at me with streaming, questioning eyes that asked why the hands that fed him all these years were now crushing the cartilage in his windpipe. I want to say that he didn't squeal and gasp, legs flailing, tail whipping this way and that whilst I clamped his neck to the floor, that he didn't bite through his own tongue and that it didn't flap around, spraying bright blood over my rigid, shaking arms, arms that betrayed the part of me that cried for him and arms that held him firm till he gave up and just let himself die. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I was, but I couldn't let anymore light leave her, John.

We pressed against the rain slick grey police station, situated at the point where two wide roads crossed. Inside me I felt the hunger lust flip and turn, trying to get out, trying to get us through these jerking corpses, through that wall and in there, into the room beyond where I could feel those warm dry bodies strut back and forth and round in circles. We ached to break through their thick skulls and into the warm, wet complexity inside. Their brains had to stop being in their heads. They just had to.

I could not count us, but I listened to our collective wail fill the grey afternoon and bounce between the buildings, echoing and emphasising our horde. The pressure of each of us multiplied until there was no space between, we were just a tsunami of hunger that had to be fed. We would not leave until their effluvia were smeared down our chests and the hairs on their heads were clogging our throats and nails. This I knew.

For days we pressed and thronged. The passage of time distorted and the sun seemed to flash above as it fell in and out of an indifferent sky. In its light I caught slivered glimpses of us, not as the mass of shambolic rot we must have appeared as to the harried faces that sometimes looked out from behind the gridded windows, but as an organised swarm that ebbed and flowed around its prey, tiring it out, confusing it. There was a beauty in it. There is beauty in everything, if you look deeply enough into it.

Into one shattered night I heard someone scream fuck you, you fucking fucks, and a slight, grey man fell into us from an open window. We dismantled him quickly. Fibula to the left, clavicle to the right. I felt shards of his skull crunch and mix with his blood and my spit all around my mouth and under the tongue I wanted to say sorry with, but couldn’t. A stockier man appeared from behind a heavy blue door and made a run for it through the empty space we left behind as we scrummed over the thin one. The stocky man got a few metres further but came apart just as easily. The door he burst from swung idly on its hinges and we surged and glugged through the hole it left and into the station.

We clattered down the narrow blue corridor, toppling plastic chairs and boxes of paper, passing through the empty reception area where a blue fire burned in a metal bin. Beyond were two cells separated by metal bars, each occupied. In one was a single man who wore a police uniform and who had scabs on his face. His head hung low and he grinned a thin grin as we entered and surrounded him. In the second cell were another two men both dressed in dirty jeans and t-shirts. They pulled away from us knocking a few neatly stacked cans of food and bottles of coke to the ground, their revulsion to us as strong as our attraction to them. They shouted god no! Fuck! Oh fuck no!

We forced ourselves towards them, a thousand strong. My body pressed hard against the bars forcing parts of me through. I felt my ribs crack and rearrange in my chest, my once beautiful torso becoming just a wet, misshapen bag of human parts, but no matter how hard we pressed against those flaky green bars they succeeded in keeping us apart. Our arms reached only a third of the way into the cells and we tried to snatch their hair or clothes but we did so without success, for now, and so we reached an impasse.

The prisoners in the cell to the right sat and held each other’s gaze, reassuring each other, telling each other not to look, don't look, just don't look at them, close your eyes and cover your ears and they're gone! You're at home and the fire is on and Zac is lying on the rug and you're falling asleep and tomorrow you're going to wake up in our bed and they'll all be gone!

But he wouldn't, and we wouldn't.

We protruded grey green limbs through the bars towards them, sometimes scraping the side of these imprisoned people with our relentless horror as they tried to pretend everything was going to be ok. For the first day they blocked us out and hugged each other like children. The older man called Alex comforted the younger one called Mike. He said, “Everything is going to be ok in the end. Just remember, if it’s not ok, it’s not the end”.

They clutched and reassured and fed from tins with their eyes shut and for a while it worked and the two men managed to hold onto themselves and each other and all the time the Officer in the cell to the left just sat cross legged and smirked. Soon though the food ran out and several new days dawned, each one worse than the last, and now we at least had our hunger in common with the men in the cells. Gradually, between the stench of sweat and shit a vinegar tone arrived, like a triangle in the air that no one could see but everyone knew was there, a spiked miasma that meant nothing good. We still gnashed and pawed and moaned but the urgency had gone out of our animation as a certainty arrived amongst the dead, and the soon to be. These weak, flawed and hungry human beings would do our work for us.

Alex stopped comforting his friend, and an angled darkness arrived in Mike's eyes with an obtuse twitch that pulled his knees up to his chest. He hugged them tight like he knew he'd be separated from them soon. Like he was saying goodbye to himself. The dark, dark man in the dark, dark, dark cell to the left beckoned a weakened but still reluctant Alex over to the bars that separated them and whispered diesel into his ear. Sensing the tone change (too late, what could he do?) Mike started a low wail. Hungry and sleep deprived and out of time, I saw the madness catch in his soul like a fire and he rocked and whined and ground his teeth as their end began.

The Officer, speaking aloud for the first time, convinced Alex to put his hands through the bars. That's it, all the way in. Alex cried like a child being punished as he pushed his hands in as far as he could, then the thin man, that horrible, thin man, gripped him tight and cuffed him hard with a pair of silver handcuffs to the bench. He stood up and put his hands on his hips and said, "Little Pig, Little Pig", then bent down and ate the warm flesh off Alex's arms.

The tightening band in Mike snapped and he screamed a scream from the end of time, till specks of blood sprayed out of his mouth. Then he tore off his shirt and pants and clawed at his own face until the blood streaked down his big chest then, mewling, bent down and chewed and tore at the flesh on the neck of the man that had hugged and fed and reassured him only hours earlier. The sun split the acrid grey steam in the air through the narrow slit of a window and Mike, now just animal, bucked hard against the older man caught in the bars, who had gone limp and just wobbled and jerked as the two men plucked and boned. After Mike had filled his stomach with human flesh his face went grey, then slack and as his hunger left him his humanity returned and he fell back against us and offered no resistance as we punished him for his gluttony. He remembered himself as his head came away from his neck and he cried through what remained of his windpipe and mouth until it was just bubbling blood. Alex bled out into a pool and the officer of the law laughed as he stripped bare and finished himself over the orchestra of viscera he conducted with one final flourish, then, as his laughter diminished and his face lost its wicked animation, he unlocked the gate and walked amongst our forest of arms with his own outstretched, and let us crucify him. We cracked through his skull and I saw a dead version of a man in an ambulance drivers uniform delicately eat only some of the brain within. He tongued and nibbled at the grey matter visible through the cracked hole in the Officer’s head with something approaching surgical precision, then dropped the body, leaving it jerking on the cell floor with only the hole in its head and bite marks to its neck. We shuffled away from the place where these three unlikely lives terminated, and a kind of new one was beginning.

CHAPTER 9

Twenty two.

In between, you left me.

I sat in the dark as your red lies bled under my door and those four blue walls pressed in against me.

So tight.

I clung to our life like it was worth clinging to, like there was anything I could do to keep you.

My fingers were bleeding.

Did you see that?

Did you care?

I didn't know you had already gone so I just kept running.

Always getting faster.

Looking but not finding.

Alive but not living.

CHAPTER 10

We made it into a hospital where nurses took care of our survivors, young and infirm.

You know how I came to hate the hospital.

I will not think of what happened there.

(They were all red.)

I just won’t.

CHAPTER 11

This nameless town was now dead. The black saliva that dried in my mouth and settled in my belly confirmed what was already obvious. We meandered this way and that, following faint instincts and whispers of desire that arrived on cold winds from distant places where people survived. The black swarm ebbed around then away from the town, following tiny forces of magnetism, each at that moment no nearer or no more pressing than the next. Once I caught the eye of another and let myself wonder who was in there? What had they done to deserve this? It was a pointless question, one I could never know the answer to, but I did know that it would be a while till we would find anyone else to end and this dawning knowledge allowed me a sort of peace, which of course wasn't peaceful at all but isn't everything relative?

I drifted away from the madding crowd, my twisted legs taking me at an almost leisurely pace down a lane lined with big, old houses, each with a grand set of stairs leading up to it, and each now a violent shade of itself, dressed in fire or blood or broken glass. Streetlights flickered on and off, trying not to look. For a while a ragged brown pup followed me. Its frothy pink tongue flapped and lolled and it panted like it was laughing at my inertia.

The space between the houses increased as the buildings themselves got bigger, and eventually I found my body dragging its carcass over a wide avenue and down an embankment into a field of hard, ridged dirt dark under a bruised sky. An empty coldness arrived with the night winds and penetrated me. I felt it as I would if I had been in a quickly freezing field on a night when my life was my own, only now I was powerless to find shelter; unable to remove myself to a place of warmth. I couldn't even shiver against it. Instead my body carried me deeper into the silver-plating moonlight. Light which seemed to be crystallising around me. The biting wind cracked its lash and I felt the movement of my body slow a little before I felt the hard spikes of intense sub-zero transmute anywhere in me where moisture met air. At first it was my bottom lip. A mixture of bodily fluids, some my own, some new to me, dribbled down over it and I felt it flare in cold heat. The thin skin there hardened then the ice spread into my flesh. The weight of my newly frozen lip dragged it down exposing my cracked and broken teeth, onto which the ice spread too, bringing a pain like a thousand burning needles into the centres of the teeth I had killed people with and making the ice cream headache I felt on the train station platform seem like something to be desired. Rapidly the iced pain spread deep into me, past my tonsils, down my throat and into what offal remained in the core of me, then through that even and into the marrow of my bones. Finally the surface of my eyes iced over, sealing me in, and for the first time in many, many days my body stopped moving. I was still, but now in place of movement I had only pain. A pain so vibrant and intense that it seemed to become a sound inside me that rang out at an unwavering pitch and my whole body was now just an instrument that could play only that one note, and I was its audience of one. There was nothing else to experience. No thought could enter, no emotion be felt. Only the pain existed and I existed only for the pain to be felt.

It cannot be put into words.

It is too much suffering.

I don't know how long I stayed there in the reverberation of that ecstatic note. Days? Weeks? Does it matter? When time stands still all you have left are the images in your mind’s eye, and these were the images in mine.

Seventeen little years…… still so smooth. Life ran through me, a torrent. Flowed through, clear and deep. I was so beautiful reflected naked in that glassy blue lake. She smiled, and turned away from him and dove down into herself, that girl in the glass.

She is me but I will never be her.

Down.

Blue.

Green.

Black.

She couldn't have known that other men had arrived in the shade of the trees.

The kind of men that scare and scar.

Men that now rippled above her with granite fists and swollen intent.

They forced her and tore her a tear so deep it would reach her soul.

Part of her would never resurface.

From then on part of her would always be drowning...

At some point the frost on my left eye melted as the errant sun caught it and I saw out through a damaged cornea over a white field that glistened like acres of finely broken glass. Please don’t imagine beauty. There was none to see. The screeching note of pain quietened for an hour to let me take in the scene. Then the sun dropped away, my eye froze back over.

The music played on.

CHAPTER 12

Midday, one day. The sun's pathetic warmth broke through the needle pitch and I finally felt my repugnant flesh begin to thaw. I stood on the spot, still largely frozen to the ground as my awful body tried to retrieve itself from the ice. Suddenly I felt the air ripple around my head with expectant urgency. A black bird dropped out of the sky, landing on my head. It bounced and pecked at my face, cooing and clawing through a flurry of black wings, plucking at the lice in my matted hair, trying to find meat on me worth eating. It found none, and beat an exit to the skies, leaving me alone.

“Take my eyes!” I thought.

“Please! Come back and take my eyes!”

Constant agony had faded to a dull ache and the slackened thawing flesh on the side of my head slid down my face and hit the floor with sick wet thuds. Under a low brow I looked out over that now filthy brown field and saw the world anew; as punisher and aggressor. The whole universe existed only to crash element against element, to create infinity out of endless collision. Everything was born of violence, I saw that now. The only thing that ever truly existed was cruelty and I was here to feel all of it and to inflict more.

Movement.

My scarred matter spoiled in the weak sun and within an afternoon the ice in my marrow had defrosted enough for my body to regain its lurching momentum and soon I was out of the field and trembling down the banks of a clear stream of melt water. The recent loss of the thin flesh on my skull and chest and arms somehow helped me move with less impediment, but caused elbows and ribs to clatter like a voodoo glockenspiel.

Weeks pass. I am alone in many fields. The countryside so hard to navigate with these bones and this brain. Horror and hatred give way to boredom and despondency. Eventually, a hedge.

On the other side of the hedge was a road. I fell forwards, slack. A weak tug taking me somewhere this road no doubt had taken countless others under better circumstances, but I knew I wasn't going anywhere good. All of a sudden the hunger sparked hard in my belly. Through the hedge I could hear the screech of rubber on Tarmac then doors slamming shut and equipment being moved hastily, all the while people shouted and screamed and argued.

WHAT ARE YOU DOING? DON'T LEAVE ME.

JUST GO KAREN, GET IN THE CAR.

I felt my eyes widen and my arms scrabble against the muddy embankment. I fought against the hedge, looking for a weakness to exploit so I could get to them and sink my teeth into the wonderful, complex brains inside those glistening white skulls…..

MUM DON'T GO. PLEASE! Please...

… so I could slide my dirty, torn tongue round the warm, smooth dome behind the place where their eyes had so recently been and spill acrid black death down upon them, all over their bastard torn faces.

But before I could get through I heard the engine speed away and I felt two of the bodies draw into the distance and I was consumed by despair and sadness. My god the sadness. It was the melancholy felt by colliding planets. It was the sadness the universe felt as an eternity of expansion slowed and reversed into crushing contraction. It was everything that had ever been wrong and I had let this happen by letting them get away. It was all my fault. As if I hadn't caused enough despair... I moaned a long deep moan that filled the early spring air and was the summation of all the pain that had ever been felt, but I could feel that there was someone still left up there on the roadside. With rage I spasticated and spat pitch through my rough-hewn mouth. I would bring down the full fury of the despair I had been forced to endure upon that person up there on that road. There would be no mercy. Ever again.

I fell through the hedge; face down on a patch of once mown grass now just a hash of brown weeds and scrub. As my body jerked and jolted I heard the sound of a weak motor and seized into an upright position. With a cocked head I saw a car park with a short beige building with the word "Toilet" painted on pebbledash in green. Another said "NO TIPPING" in red. A long straight road disappeared into the distance in both directions, lined by the hedge from which I spewed forth.

The body I wanted was inside that little beige box up ahead. Just one person, all alone. My eyes bulged again at the opportunity. The muscles around my left, soggy and gangrenous since the thaw, gave way and I felt the globe drop lower with a sickening wet slurp that echoed a little in the dome of my skull. My vision doubled and stayed that way. Now everything was twice. I could hear him sob as I slowly made my way over the grass and into the car park. His cries reverberated in the cold damp rest room and gave me pause. For a moment I remembered the humanity that had been so quick to leave me. For a minute I was a mother again. The instinct to nurture bubbled inside me and that thin, gasping moan left me again, now with a high pitched whistle that played through a hole in my neck, of which I had been previously unaware. The noise silenced the crying beige box and I felt the wind still as he held his breath. Then through that stillness a steady beeping began and he reversed into view in an electric wheelchair. I moaned and lurched towards him, my arms outstretched, tugged forth by the sex of his meat. He heard me and looked back over his shoulder towards me and his clawed right hand manipulated the joystick on the arm of his special blue chariot. He spun around and for a moment we locked eyes. His were red and swollen, mine apparently too awful to contemplate. Dark hair stuck to the moisture that formed in beads on his brow. A shade of stubble betrayed his youth. He could have been handsome, had he not been so withered. His face twisted up into a grimace of disgust and fear as he took in my image, panting. I felt parts of me flap loose as I lurched forwards again but this time down a high kerb, jolting hard on the lower ground. I felt my right foot twist then pop as it dislocated and swung uselessly at the end of my leg, then I fell flat on the tarmac. I spent so much time face down on tarmac...

Seizing the opportunity he hit the stick that manoeuvred him and tore down the gravel path, past my thrashing, snatching corpse and clunked off the kerb and onto the long straight road that led him away from me. My inelegant frame found itself again and I went after him, gnashing and falling on one good foot and a right-angled ankle. Despite his speed I persevered as he diminished into the distance, the whir of the electric motor that had helped him survive me carried off in the warm, gentle breeze of the sunny afternoon. I heard him laugh and whoop into the crystal clear sky as he disappeared from view. But still I pressed on. As long as the abyss inside me knew he was there I would always press on because I was eternal and he was not and I had only one need and it was him and his flesh and bones and eyes and brain. And progress was slow, but it was still progress, and after an hour or so my loose swinging eyes agreed for a moment on the same blue chair in the middle of the same long, straight strip of dark grey. However, now instead of diminishing he grew bigger with every floundering step I took as the distance between us altered in my favour. The wind carried the sounds of him towards me, like a child telling tales. I heard him shout and hit out at the blue bumper car that was now motionless in the middle of the long, straight road.

I shuddered on through broken bones.

"Come on you piece of shit!”, he shouted, crashing his ambulant limbs into the sides of his tragic little vehicle. Thrusting his torso he tried to lurch the car forwards with a clumsy determination. He looked back over his shoulder, but I was hidden in his blind spot.

"Are you still there?” he said into the wind.

Fear stained his words but beneath them I'm sure I heard a layer of quiet resignation. Relief even, but I may be projecting. The wind retreated for a moment and a two-tone moan emitted from the holes in me. He heard it and began to sob. The sob turned into a cry, then a scream, then a sob again before he began to talk. "Is this where I'm going to die?” into the breeze. He didn't need the answer I couldn't give him, and for a beat in time there was just the two of us, the warmth of the sun and a lilting bird song. It wouldn't be long now. He hung his head low for a moment. From here his skull looked thick. "I was crushed by a car." He threw the sound over his shoulder, back at me. "I was walking into a petrol station and had to squeeze past the front of a parked Mondeo. We needed milk. It was blue, the car, like this”, he said of his wheelchair, and his hand stroked its gleam. "The engine was idling and the man inside said he had the clutch down and the stick in first. But he was old and his legs were weak. He turned to get something off the passenger seat but his foot slipped and the car jumped forwards and crushed me into the wall. I was kind of sideways…" Closer now. I could see the back of his head quite clearly and could make of the vertebrae in the ridge of his spine where it appeared above the line of his t-shirt. "I was ten”, he said, but I didn't care. "The man in the car came out round to the front and held my hand till the ambulance came. He couldn't stop crying”. His shoulders moved up and down. "Did you see the people who left me at those toilets back there? That was my Mum and Dad. Well, he's not my real Dad but she's always made me call him Dad. His name’s Steve. When I was little I remember her holding me still and it burned and they were laughing. I remember them laughing..."

Space and time.

"I'm not scared of you you know! I can hear you; I know you’re getting closer! Slow down though, please. There are things I want to say. There was a woman at the hospital. A nurse. I told her I was frightened of going home. She knew but she let them take me anyway. Her eyes when I was leaving..." He sobbed a while longer. He needed to. "We had good days too…..” he trailed off as he contemplated his clawed hands.

He was so close now.

"So is this all I get? Just a couple of minutes?” I was almost upon him. He looked back and saw me. My teeth chattered and sprayed black spit into the air. His face registered no revulsion. He’d seen worse. "Wait", he said, but I couldn’t. "Just give me one more minute", and he lifted his head up to the sky and I think he smiled.

"I should have looked up more"

"It's so blue up there, isn't it?”

My hands found his shoulders and held tight. For a second I felt them loosen in my hands as I pulled us together. My arms wound around his chest and the teeth clamped down on the top of the spine that had failed him so long ago, and as they crunched through those remaining vertebrae I felt him relax in my arms. He had no choice. We ate him in a frenzy of tooth and nerve, and the sheets of his scarred pale skin gave testament to the many abuses inflicted upon him. And then he was gone, and the world was no better or no worse, it was just as bad as it had always been, but it was all coming to an end.

There is an echo in time just after you kill someone; and that echo creates a space. It’s a space that draws you in and in which knowledge collects. All the pain and all the love. All the bombs and the sideways glances. The taste of fish and the cut of a blunt knife and the light in the morning at the bottom of the sea. It's a never ending library, and if you spend long enough in its echoing chambers you see that we're all just really chapters in a book that we both read and write until our red ink runs dry and our eyes turn to dust in our skulls.

So slow now. So little of me left. Just teeth and bone. I rattle like a junkie on a Sunday morning. The rattle brings a decaying old man out from under a bridge and I lead him on. I don't know how long it took to get down the road and over another featureless field, past another deserted petrol station, collecting time and rotting corpses. Three. Eleven. Fifty-nine. Three hundred and seven. Forwards. Onwards. Always.

She was waiting for me.

The hill on the horizon looked familiar.

Just one more to climb.

CHAPTER 13

Over the hill now but not far away. The black block that rose up before me was unfamiliar from this angle but I already knew where we were. I didn't need its recognition. I had known I would end up here since I lost that last stiletto. The school she ran away too looked so alien from this angle as I descended the hill behind it. I recalled satchels and P.E. kits and the parent’s evenings. Do you remember? She would talk too much, they would say, and I would try not to be jealous that they could hear her voice. They were so hard to go to alone. Inquisition burned through feigned sympathy.

Now thousands of mothers and uncles and cousins and dads were here already, moaning up into the shattered night sky and I led a gaggle of their rot down the grassy knoll with my need and my love.

Love.

Love will tear us apart they say, but so will tooth and nail. And I had all three. She was there and she was mine and I had to show her who I had become.

No.

I had to show her who I always was.

I free fall into the end.

I see grainy footage of bodies falling from fiery towers, not quite dead yet but with no life left to speak of. Just a persistent downward movement, tortured thought and one wet, red inevitability. In the scrum now. Pushing forwards through the weak gangrene, purple, brown it gave way like tender lamb. Weeks pass. Often it rains. Galaxies spin a web overhead. One night the moon peers over burst blue clouds and bores into me with its lidless gaze. Its infinite stare says only,

"YES".

The weak and the old break apart and their remains become mush beneath my feet, piles of moaning offal and bone.

Stepping stones.

I rise up over their slackened bodies toward the window and press against the streaked glass. It shatters under our legion and I fall hard against the battened boards inside. Through the boards I hear young voices make desperate noises, but I keep pressing. Days later the boards give way too and we fall inwards into a dining hall and I know that she has sat in the leather seat by the fireplace because I can taste her sweat on the air around it. My ragged tongue flicks through the air and the black bubbles up out of all the holes in me. The floor is wet with my gastric slick and I slide forward in it as I follow her sweet scent. It smells like night time honeysuckle on a salty beach and I can't do this anymore! I don't want to fucking be here or there or me or anything! I want to smash my fucking skull in and be spilled across these boards and have my soul mix into the thin air and dilute away into nothing! I want to be nothing and nowhere and no one and wash away into the sea where mermaids swim and comb their hair and I had never killed you or her or them or us. My god why!? Why did this become me?! I had been a child once!

Forwards.

Through arms and legs and burning black spittle I make it out of the battalion of hungry dead and into the corridor. The first through, I hear the door swing shut behind me and the bodies pile up against it, gnashing and clawing, but it sounds heavy and it doesn't give. Not for a while at least. At the far end of the corridor are two large double doors that lead out into the garden and away, into the changed world. I remember walking through them on her first day, her two steps ahead. They creak and groan under the pressure of the hungry horde outside. I move on fractured legs down the shattered corridor to where I know I need to be. And then there she is. She rounds the corner of the common room clutching a plank of wood with nails in one end. Her thin face is streaked with grime and grit and salt and I ache at her hunger. I am consumed by a mothers need to feed her young. Two skinny teenage boys run past her, down the corridor then up a wide staircase. One shouts, "Lucy you fucking idiot, MOVE!” but she stops still. She is harder than I remember, almost a woman now. She looks at me with diamond eyes. They glisten and soften for a moment as she sees through my black masque and the tears that streak it and recognises me by the skull we both share. My eyes fight each other. One can't look at her, one can't look away.

Oh god Lucy, I am so sorry.

A scream arrives from around the corner, followed by the familiar sound of wet meat hitting the floor. The sound of progress being made. Lucy looks back over her shoulder, considering her options. She blinks through tears with eyes that have seen too much pain in the sliver in time since they first opened. Pain that I tried to save her from. Pain that I admit that ultimately I inflicted. Skinny, dirty, older, harder. She drops the plank and comes closer. We want her to. We are reaching out to her. We groan because we know but we don’t want to stop. I feel moisture clear a course through the many dried fluids on what’s left of my face. She follows the black tear down then looks into my loose, wet eyes and I know she sees me.

She sees all of me.

All the hidden things.

She always did.

And then it's time. Her shoulders loosen and she moves forward one last time and we embrace. We hold her in our arms of bone. I see our old lounge. The TV is on and I hear the telephone ring in the next room. She answers it. Now I see Lucy on her way to bed. I kiss her goodnight on the top of her head, but I kiss her too hard and my teeth grind against the skull we made. She doesn’t struggle. I watch as we undo her, put her back where she came from. I see a red flower opening, then unravelling. I see all of her hidden beauty. Beauty I made and beauty only I will ever appreciate in its component parts. When she was born she was so good. She was such a good girl. Good girl Lucy, good girl. She never screamed and cried like the other children.

She never screamed.

* * *

You lay naked on the cold white tiles surrounded by a foam of pink froth and dissolving vitamins, which lay scattered around the giant ashen dome of your gaunt, bald head. The heavy musculature that had attracted me to you in that waiting room all those years ago had long since drained down a catheter and into a plastic bag beside the bed, as the cancer that had recently eaten into your brain dissolved the best of you and now left you convulsing in a pool of epileptic spit, tinged pink with tongue blood. After about seven minutes you came round. Your eyes swam and as you fought for the ability to focus you looked up at me, sitting on the closed toilet lid. I knew those eyes so well. Every fleck and vein. They flickered between me and the pills on the floor asked the question your useless, twisted mouth couldn't.

"Because it’s taking too long, John.”, I picked at my flaking nails stained red.

"This isn't about you anymore. Just go quickly and let her have her life back".

You just gawped and gasped, like a goldfish dying in the remnants of its shattered tank.

Your beautiful eyes raged, then pleaded, then rolled back in your head.

As your pathetic body wracked with its last convulsion I turned away from you one last time and said, "I loved you", into thin air.

An hour later I called the ambulance.

* * *

EPILOGUE

Time, everywhere and nowhere, creates to destroy. It is its only purpose. In then out. In then out.

And I am The End. I have always been The End. I ended you and her and him and them and us. I tore through our collective history like a plague of memory and now only mine remains, and ultimately comes down to this…

I wrapped her, then unwrapped her, in a blanket of red.

The pull inside has gone. For a while after I ate our daughter the magnetic desire remained, bloodlust pulling us forward past the school toward another genocide, but my body was trampled by the ravenous stampede and my twisted legs became mush beneath me. Scrambling arms could not release us from where we had become caught in the broken floor and so here we remained whilst other dead bodies tumbled towards new mastication.

For years the pull was ecstatic agony. Limbs and digits frenzied day and night to free themselves, but fingers are just meat and meat is weak and after only a few days of thrashing an unlikely possibility became an impossibility.

Here we would remain.

Me, a thought, a collection of memories, a notion of humanity.

My body, my prison, and my monster.

And Lucy, a light, a daughter, and a ball of bones and hair in my gut.

She was back where she began and this was as close to a happy ending as I could ever have hoped for. Gracelessly we groaned and gnashed through several aching decades, trapped in the crumbling school, which was slowly burying us alive, or dead, or whatever we were. Then, during one starry night, just before the falling building extinguished the sky completely, somewhere the last human light went out, and with it the pull stopped abruptly. Soggy stumps dropped down to the ground with a thud, and fell still.

"Listen", said the wind as it found me through the cracks in the building, "They are all gone.”

Peace.

Over the next several hundred years I looked out through degrading eyes and watched as the building that would become my casket crumbled and flaked. I never understood how fragile the things we created were. Like fine spun glass. Just sandcastles.

It fell in fits and starts, the school, as insect and breeze brought the outside in and upholstered me in weed and moss. Through the gaps in mortar and oak I watched as glorious unbounded nature unfurled, released from the burden of our humanity. It danced and created and expressed itself in beautiful new strokes over wide blue canvas. Through the falling building I saw, and heard, trees of silver thread play a deep vibrato into the air, and a flock of metallic orange birds danced a zig zag for me through turquoise.

A thousand more years of change.

The school became just another part of the mossy hill. A beetle burrows into my eye socket, chewing through those deflated white globes and bringing with it a seed that bursts into a tree. Its roots crack open my skull from the inside and, finally, I am blind. But somehow in these endless days I see more than I ever did. I spread into the dirt and become it and it me and I don't know how to describe how I perceive this but we are each other.

Underground I join the mycelium. Spiralling structures tell me how they pushed us up into the world, crafted us from their own parts. Just an experiment, they say. Just a game they played. But the experiment failed and the game lost its humour and so spore and air aborted their baby, conspiring at their cellular level as we smeared ourselves over the surface of their planet. They animated our dead through virus and instinct and, with their beautiful cruelty, made the problem into the solution. Finally, they trapped people like me within their grotesque soldiers, perhaps to bear eternal punishment for the mistakes of a species, or perhaps to preserve us like butterflies in a glass case. They would not say, but I accept our fate.

All I have left is the thought of you. Our story is etched on our DNA, into the fabric of our bodies combined.

You and I, in her, in me.

Through web and mould our molecules carbonise and replicate forever.

Nothing is wasted.

Your lives had value.

I recount every detail.

The way motes of our skin mixed in the air of our home and fell through coloured light cast through spindles and that stained glass window halfway up the stairs. The heavy, soft feeling just before you fall asleep on the couch on a Wednesday afternoon, as the TV casts flickering lies onto a threadbare carpet. The freckles on our beautiful daughters arm, a constellation in a universe we created.

The privilege of loving her enough to kill you.

I honour the best parts of humanity by never forgetting. I must honour the worst in the same way.

For millennia I do. This tale, I tell it. Never out loud, but the trees hear me and they know what I did.

They forgive me, then they die.

Heat.

Our remains calcify and stratify between layers of dirt and ash. Memories become grit become stone. Pressure immense. Constant. No room here for anything but broken compression and this thought.

Bone is rock is me.

The inferno above. The terrible cracking and we're torn apart. Many splintered fragments of ourselves.

Many.

Spinning.

Cold.

Fragments.

Time.

No time.

One time...

The end.

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Thank you for reading this book.

If you enjoyed it please consider leaving a review at your favourite retailer, or letting the author know at www.adammbooth.com

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Table of Contents

- DRIVE
- ANGELA
- THE END