The Oeuvre Read online

  No.

  His free hand slid around to her chest, found her breasts, cupped them and squeezed them, pinching hard at her nipples in turn. She stifled a yelp. The bitter viciousness inside him was showing itself. Time for her to know what it felt like, what it was like to be him, to remember what happened all those years ago when the lights went out. Everyone should know that pain, every cunt in the whole wide world. He took the knife away, grabbed her by the crooks of her arms and pushed, sending her sprawling on the ground. She banged her head on the cobbles, bit into her tongue. Her skull was buzzing with black static, he was sure of that. The world would be slip-sliding away. She was trying to regain her footing, get back up but everything kept tilting underneath her feet.

  Yeah, he knew what that felt like too.

  Cutter grabbed a fistful of her yellow hair, pulled it tight, strands twanged out from the hairline. She cried out, she tried to grab his fingers as he dragged her head backwards. Her neck cricked. He was pressing himself down on her so she could feel his cock. It was shivering with a tension that made his stomach clench and twist, making its simple brutal demand. A statement of sexless hateful desire.

  With her molars, she was gnawing at the fleshy insides of her mouth, biting back tears. She was being crushed by him. Expensive cloth was torn and then he was mounting her. She couldn’t see his face and how it wore the smile of a man glorying in the gutting of his quarry. Her chin banged hard on stone as he pushed himself inside her arsehole.

  A quiet, strangled sound escaped from her mouth.

  Cutter went off into the distance, retreating inside himself, to a place of not-seeing and not-feeling. Bile went scooting up and down the back of his throat. He made an ugly, desperate sound. The little light there was in his eyes went out and they became silent, empty spaces. Zeroes that spoke of a lasting loss and the nameless stuff that was left behind, its cancerous residue. Then, he came, a thick wet stream pumping into her rectum, and he was done. There was naught left in her for him, or anyone else, to have now.

  She was like him.

  Nothing left but shadows gathering. It was over with, finished. Cutter issued a solitary grunt as he pulled himself out, barely noticing the blood on his cock.

  She lay there, not moving, not crying. She wanted to stay there, same as he once did in years past. Lie there, starve there, die there. He had wanted to do the same back then, poor thing. No-one would ever know what had been done to her by him. She would go to her grave with the knowledge, a secret unto herself.

  Cutter watched her lying there, pretty little thing, weeping and breathing, all she could do really, then he walked away into the dying dawn.

  The last she heard of him was the coarse sound of his laughter.

  Her name was Mary, not that anyone cared.

  *

  At Liz’s house, Jerry sat down on a rickety stool in the kitchen, not sure what to make of the night’s events. She had come between him and the hounds, put herself in danger. He was sure the Military Police would be after her as well now. He couldn’t thank her enough for what she had done. Didn’t know what to say.

  “You can stop here as long as you like. To tell the truth, I’ll be glad of the company. Been on my own for so long now.”

  Jerry said nothing.

  Liz dug out a fag and lit it.

  “Come on, I’ve got a spare bedroom upstairs. I’ll show you where you’ll be crashing out whilst you’re here.”

  They both knew this was going to happen when their eyes had first met in the station. It was one of those things. Their clothes came away from their bodies in unhurried motions, arms and legs entwined, making them one.

  Jerry could feel the blood in his veins turning hot and heavy, all thought was overcome by a rush that went from the tips of his toes up to his brow. Liz’s body was writhing against him, drawing his swollen shaft into her, he could feel her fingertips eating up his back. Her nails leaving faint red trails, her ankles crossing over in the small of his back. Her heels digging in, bringing him close, she was pulling at him hard. Holding him there, holding on tight, she felt the tide quickly rising inside her. Her back was arching, her senses flooding, filling up, full to the brim. She was drowning, going under, going down deep, a flickering flame descending into a bottomless umbra, a golden-brown shining sea.

  She cried out as waves of orgasm went washing through her, soaking them both. Then, the waves subsided and they slept.

  They awoke later in the day. It was afternoon and the sun was dropping down low, on its curving descent towards the horizon.

  “You know this can’t be something serious between us, right? I’ve lost my husband and I’ve lost my sons. That’s all thanks to this war. I’ve got too much pain in me to share with someone else.”

  “You mean you want to be alone, for the rest of your life?”

  “Yep. Too much has happened to me. Too much nasty stuff, evil shit.”

  Liz paused, her eyes looking Jerry over; life didn’t make things that easy. There was a connection between them, they could feel it, but it could become nothing more than that. Liz wouldn’t let it.

  Jerry broke the silence. “I understand.”

  “Thank you, sweetheart. I hoped you would,” Liz leaned in, kissing him on the cheek. Her fingers, under the bed sheets, plucked at the head of his cock, teasing it until it was hard again.

  “Now then, shall we?”

  Liz was on top, riding him, when Jerry’s vision fogged over.

  She changed, becoming a wrinkled woman with stringy grey hair, the cheeks of her face crusted-over with syphilis scabs. Deep cuts were opening across her arms and chest. Jerry could see sticky parasites nestling in the jellied pockets of the wounds, crawling and spawning. Bloodshot, rheum-coated grubs, hundreds of them, thousands. Her eyes were black hollows and they wept long white worms. The horror mewled and groaned wetly in its throat, muttering four words from the holes cut into its body.

  “We be the echo.”

  Jerry blinked his eyes.

  The vision was gone.

  Chapter Nine

  Liz was alone. All alone in a hallway. She was walking down the hallway. Her feet were bare, the splinters of the boards prickling her soles. There was a strange quality to the light in the hallway, it illuminated the outlines of her surroundings in grey and indigo. There were shapes moving through the atmosphere. First, transparent, then gradually resolving.

  She recognised them. Children, boys, two of them. Will-o’-the-wisps running through the haze, their feet falling without making a sound, cupping their hands to their mouths, they shouted out.

  Their voices made no sound.

  At the end of the hallway, there was a door and it opened at their silent call. Within, there was nothing she could see, only darkness. The boys ran towards it, passing into the void, disappearing altogether. The door shut behind them, Liz did not understand what she was seeing, why she was here. She was not guiding herself, something else was. She kept on walking, there was no way of stopping. The motion was of the dream, it made her feet hurry down the hallway. Her hair whipping back.

  She stopped dead in front of the doorway, her destination.

  Behind it was what it wanted her to see.

  You can say no, she thought, it’s only a dream. It’s not real, you can refuse, make it go away, if you try hard enough. You are real, dreams are not.

  There was a tugging at her fingers, urging them to reach out for the door handle, turn it, see what was on the other side. Her heart thumped in her chest, the handle of the door was jiggling, opening from inside. Whatever waited within was restless. Liz wanted to close her eyes but she could not.

  The door opened.

  Liz saw what was there.

  Robert and Colm, alive and well, in the arms of another woman. She wore a long, black veil and was dressed in the cerements of the grave. She sat upon a bed in the centre of the room, a stale odour wafting from her. The boys were curled up in her arms. They were her sons, she was sure. The
oaky colouring of Colm’s hair, Robert’s eyes, so summery and blue. Their noses dusted with freckles. Liz wiped her eyes, not believing what she was seeing. She took a step forward, she stopped then she took another. Her hands were shaking, her fingers rubbing against one another, her thumbnails digging into her palm-flesh.

  It couldn’t be them.

  Liz crouched, reaching out a nervous palm to Colm. She stroked his cheek, cupping his chin. He was soft and warm, not dead and cold. She reached out her other hand to Robert.

  It was them, somehow.

  Then, they spoke. “You’re not my mummy. This is my mummy.”

  The veiled woman on the bed held them tight against her breast.

  “You stopped believing in us, mummy.”

  “No, no, I didn’t.”

  “You did. You wanted us dead,”

  “But we weren’t ready to be dead, mummy. We weren’t.”

  Liz pulled away.

  “You buried us, mummy.”

  “No, it wasn’t like that. You were dead.”

  “No, mummy, we were still alive.”

  Liz felt an unnameable feeling welling up inside, straining at the banks of her sanity, aching to break them. She held her head in her hands, pulling at the skin of her brow, there was a drumming deep in her temples.

  “Didn’t you love us, mummy?”

  Liz’s mouth worked but no words came out. She knew what Dr Cargill had said, word for word. He assured her that they were dead, but was there a sleep so deep that it only looked like death?

  No one had told her.

  “It wasn’t my fault. I didn’t know.”

  But a mother should know.

  “He told me you were dying. That you were in pain. I wanted it to stop.”

  She tried to be as gentle as she could. Raising the pillow to press it down over Colm’s face. She would have to do it hard and quick as he rarely slept. He might wake his brother. He had looked up at her with unworldly, innocent eyes and then the pillow covered those eyes, blinding them forever. He was too weak to struggle much but each twitch he made brought tears to her eyes. It was for their own good. It would make the pain stop.

  It was a mercy killing. They would go to heaven. There was no pain there.

  Robert did not awaken as she pushed the pillow down over his face. He let out a single mucal snort into the musty underside of the pillow, staining it with a dark discharge of snot and blood.

  Her eyes raw, her heart full and so bitter her throat stung. She could taste a gummy residue in her mouth. After it was done, she sat in the kitchen all alone and waited for morning to come.

  The night after that, they were buried in those rickety boxes, her two boys, where they awoke to darkness, dust and rats. No-one heard their screams as the vermin ate them alive. No-one heard small fragile fingers scraping at the cheap wood of the coffin-boxes. In the spectre’s arms, the bones of their skeletons were now gathered. There was no sign of life, except for the eyes in the hollows of those little eggshell skulls. Weeping eyes, soft, wet and untouched by decay. One pair, summer-bright and blue. The other two, autumnal brown. Queasy and sticky in their sockets. One of the eyes in Colm’s skull jiggled and, with a damp sucking sound, it came out, hanging, dangling, swinging upon the dripping thread of optic nerve from which it depended. A trace of blackness flowed out from the empty orifice, a dark spot that scampered down to the bare boards of the floor.

  She shrank away – but it was no carnivorous shadow out for Liz and her blood, it was just a wolf spider, making its way, picking over old bones.

  The door behind her shut with a bang.

  The lights went out.

  Liz screamed.

  *

  When she awoke, she was crying. All of the feelings and memories she could never share with Jerry, with no-one else. All of her life, all of it, so much horror, all fear and nothing more. Her boys, their deaths, sometimes she remembered it one way, sometimes another. What was real? Which was true? Life? Nightmare?

  She didn’t know.

  Through the window, she watched the rain fall. Each drop was scintillating, a shining diamond, so many little crystals, all of them were jewels, bursting and dissolving against the old, beaten wood and grubby glass. A hundred heartbeats. A thousand tears.

  Jerry, sleeping, was warm beside her, his presence a minor comfort.

  This is how life begins, she thought, in a soft, warm place, of blood, flesh and flowing matter. But, in the end, we are in a tomb, old, cold and crumbling, surrounded by leaden stone, hard wood and blackness, buried somewhere deep under wormy soil and muttering earth.

  In this life, nothing but the rain shall fall.

  Seasons come and go, children are born, lose their innocence, grow old, hurt so much, too much, then die. Such is the cycle and we see so little of it because we each take our turn and then we are gone.

  *

  There was the mist, grey and clinging, seeming to shape itself, momentarily, into faces and forms he knew. He reached out for them, through the bright haze, only to feel a dismal cold biting at his fingers.

  Yes, Black Wood, before he forgot, after the plane crash. That light, the ghosts he saw, there, moving amongst the trees. This place, this Grey, is like that place, he thought, home to something weird, unnatural. He trod on through it, abyssal space that was too quiet and too cold, hoping for something to take shape out of the mist, become substantial.

  His wish was granted.

  The house was home. The old shotgun shack where he was born. A crate of peeling paint, mould-green. The door on the right hand side and the small window on the left, both sheltering under the rattling shadows cast by pieces of corrugated iron sheeting.

  The door stood open.

  Jerry went to it, his heart thrumming, his breath coming in unsteady hitches.

  “You bastards better have left Mom and Badger out of this. You hear me?”

  His voice fell into nothing in the Grey, it was not the echo of bravado he had hoped for, rather the cry of a caged, frightened and wounded animal.

  He crossed the threshold into the house.

  The house he now knew was not home.

  “Mom? Badger?”

  No answer, no sounds.

  The crummy boards of the walls were splitting open, spilling pregnant trails of sticky moss and a pale, fibrous lichen. The first room was the kitchen and eating room, dining was too grand a word for it. Crusts of toughened Grey clung to the cracked plates and a thin mottled gossamer grew out of the chipped, cruddy mugs. Jerry felt a shiver pass through his body as he tried the door to the next room.

  Mom and Badger sat there at the table, everything about them in the room seemed to be composed of ashes; a seaming, crumbling spectacle of black, white and Grey. Mom and Badger did not turn to Jerry. They were too intent on the game. With creaking, click-cracking fingers they reached out in turn, shifting a piece here, a piece there. Pawn to King Four. Bishop to Knight Five. Bishop Pawn takes Pawn. Knight to Queen Bishop Three.

  But there was something wrong with the game.

  What could it be?

  Seeing Mom and Badger so serious, so intent, so still apart from the quick insect-like rhythm of their fingers, made him want to run up to them. Shake them by the shoulders. Shout, bellow and scream. But the room, with its walls streaming rivers of soot and ash, its shimmering motes of disintegration, told him not to do that, not to upset the fragile order here.

  Then, Jerry saw what was wrong with the game.

  The pieces on the board were neither black, nor white, only Grey. The same was true of the squares they were being moved across, slightly different shades, but still all of them were Grey.

  A piece on the table moved, tapped forward by Mom’s finger.

  Jerry moved as well. His feet slithering to the tableside, letting him see the pieces more clearly. He saw himself, carved and polished, in minute detail. He saw Liz as well. Other pieces, fallen, already taken, caught his eye. Women in repose, cut open, gored and slain. On
e piece on the board seemed a subtle shade darker, bearing a knife in diminutive hands, its breast marked with small dabs of blood.

  “Dear god, what is this?”

  The fingers, they stopped their dance.

  Mom and Badger broke their shared stare and turned their eyes onto him. Jerry shrank inside, a damp knot of tissue binding itself tight and Gordian. Badger’s eyes were different. Black and rimmed by meat as rough and rotten as untended bedsores whilst Mom’s eyes were dank holes cut crudely through muslin layers of degenerating skin.

  A finger and thumb rose into the air, closing on one another. A smile split across Badger’s lips. Jerry’s own fingers twitched, wanting to reach out, snatch them down, stop what was about to happen.

  The finger and thumb met, breaking the atmosphere with an ominous snap.

  A piece on the board moved, slowly, slowly, too slowly, scratching its painful way across the surface.

  Until another piece, indistinct, unclear, fell.

  Double Check and Mate.

  A great shadow fell over them all and the house cried out. It trembled to its roots. All scattered, all withered. All collapsed, all fell.

  All were gone, and Something became Nothing.

  Chapter Ten

  The crowd around the entrance to the yard blocked the way. A Hansom cab clattered to a halt behind the heaving clot of humanity. Inside was Inspector Seamus Maygrave. He wiped a strand of lank grey hair out of his face as he clambered out; a small, cadaverous man with a severe hatchet face and iron-grey hair that was thinning and combed over. He wore a dirty, old overcoat against the morning chill.

  “Thanks, Mick. Hold on for me, will you?”

  “No problem, Seamus,” said the cab driver.

  He observed the gathering onlookers. God but he hated the likes of this lot; vultures and ghouls. Monsters, every one of them, wanting to get a look at the poor beggar who’d gone to meet their maker. Misanthropy wasn’t a strong enough word for the feeling twisting his heart into knots as he listened to them gossip.