Dark Terrors 3 (32 page)

She was one of the few I’d told the truth about Serge, and so filling her in on Jared made sense to me, and then it made more sense to keep going and tell her that it was a temptation to take to the streets again. Hunt down that peculiar man in his top hat and walking stick, and let him work his anesthetizing magic on me, too. And then it would no longer matter that the flesh I loved and fit best with was now emptied of the stuff that had first made it so appealing. Such terrible temptation.

“I never told you about when I came out to my family, did I?” Danielle asked.

I told her I didn’t think so.

“When he found out about me, my daddy called me an accident of birth,” she said. “Scarcely said a word to me for the next two years. Didn’t even want to look at me, and us in the same room, why, you’d think we were strangers. And I suspect I suddenly was, to him. An accident of birth. Got so I played it for a joke, and I’d stand all quiet-like around a corner, lying in wait for him to come face to face with me, so I could see him squirm, just like a wiggle worm on a hot sidewalk.”

I wondered which was worse: someone who abandons you in the flesh, or one who does it while remaining under the same roof.

“But I see things a little different now,” Danielle admitted. “We’re all accidents of birth, every one of us. Born in the wrong place, or at the wrong time. In the wrong body, or to the wrong set of people. No matter who you are, there’ll be something not right. So that all just becomes part of the game, then -- there’s no malice in it. And the rest of the game? It’s putting those things as right as you can.”

She reached down to hold my hand. Lifted it up, kissed it, put it back where she’d found it.

“But you don’t go throwing away what’s not broken,” she said, “not unless you got something better to take its place. Nature does abhor a vacuum, you know.”

I told her I’d try to remember that.

Danielle liked the fit of her own body just fine, so there’d been no accidents there.

But sometimes I still wished she was a guy.

I don’t see Jared anymore.

He left a couple of days after the thing with the pigeons. If it hurt to see him go, it was only because it was a physical echo of what had already happened. Jared was gone before he ever walked out the door, maybe even before he’d heard of the strange man who traversed the worst streets and called to those in pain, offering them an easy way out. Maybe he was gone long before any of it, part of him beaten to death as surely as Serge had been.

So I don’t see Jared anymore.

A few nights after he left, I went to sleep wondering what Hieronymus Beadle did with the souls he collected, and in a dream I saw him strolling ponderously away from the city, bloated almost to the point of bursting with his cargo. He walked and sweated blood and walked and mopped his brow and walked until the city lay far behind. At a copse of trees, he stopped, stripped the clothes from his swollen body, and strained and shuddered. They poured from within him like a sickness, those souls, something between liquid and vapor, seeking safety in the ground below; some anchor to cling to. Then, much slimmer, his reservoirs depleted, he put his clothes back on and strolled onward, with purpose, while from the ground on which he’d voided grew rose bushes. The petals were so perfect they nearly resembled faces, and seemed to scream when another man came along, with white hair and a leathery patrician face, and snipped each bud from its stem. He’d toss each one over his shoulder, or drop them to the ground, and when he was done and the bushes were bare, he smiled while a herd of coarse-bristled, tusked pigs burst from deeper within the trees. They squealed and rooted and stamped and slashed, until every last blossom had been devoured, and then, grunting, they lumbered back into the shadows while the white-haired autocrat patted their crusty dark hides.

I was shaking when I woke up, as though I’d seen something I wasn’t supposed to. It was a long time before I could get back to sleep, or even wanted to, afraid I might see Jared on hands and knees, fueled by regret and emptiness, rooting in the piles of pigshit, saying, “I know it’s here. I know it’s here someplace.”

But I don’t see Jared anymore.

He’s around, though. I’ve seen the writing on the wall.

It was weeks before I made the connection, entertaining the notion that the painted silhouettes which had begun appearing on building walls had come from Jared’s hand. No two were the same, black silhouettes as crisp as shadows thrown by someone who could have been standing right next to you, but wasn’t. Each one looked tensed, as if startled by the coming of something that cast no shadow of its own. There was one on our building, one on Terry’s. One inside the alley where Serge had been murdered. Others, and I wondered if they’d been chosen at random, or if they too had some special significance.

Now and then I’d hear people talk about them, wherever people lingered, and the silhouettes were spoken of with great curiosity. Where they’d come from, what they meant. Everyone loves a mystery.

But no one else had been privy to the things that Jared found most significant when he looked at the world. No one else had sat with him one evening while he paged through a book, horrified and fascinated by photos shot fifty years earlier in the wastelands of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of the silhouettes of human beings that had been seared onto walls at the instant of the bomb blasts.

What if those were their souls, he’d wondered, souls yearning in that instant of sublime and blinding violence for some record of their passing, even as their bodies were vaporized.

It gave us something to think about.

And now, every day, I look at the silhouette he painted on the side of our building, hoping I’ll find it gone. Hoping against all rationality that in the night it will have peeled itself free of the bricks, and gone seeking the flesh where it so rightfully belongs.

But even if I get my wish, what a long search it has ahead.

The city grows at night, and I don’t see Jared anymore.

* * * *

Brian Hodge
has published six novels,
Dark Advent, Oasis, Nightlife, Deathgrip, The Darker Saints
and
Prototype,
and close to seventy short stories and novelettes in a wide variety of magazines and anthologies. His first collection of tales,
The Convulsion Factory,
was themed around the idea of urban decay and was a finalist nominee for the Bram Stoker Award. A second collection,
Falling Idols,
features stories with spiritual and outré religious themes. When he’s not playing the didjeridoo, Hodge reviews music and books and has been scripting for comics publisher Verotik. About ‘Little Holocausts’ he says: ‘My girlfriend and I had driven through several hours of cold autumn rain to spend a weekend with a houseful of friends. As soon as we arrived, we learned that the long-time partner of one of the friends we’d expected to be there had died the night before, of AIDS complications. So we went back out into the rain with everyone else to attend the wake. I’d not yet met the man who died, and would not have recognized him from a picture that I saw, he’d changed so. After the wake, several of us went to the apartment he’d shared with our friend - the home where he’d died - and we ate and drank and laughed and told stories, the way you do at these times. You laugh a lot. At one point I walked into the empty kitchen for another Heineken and noticed a box of adult diapers, waiting to go out to the trash, no longer needed. In its implications, that sight was just the most heartbreaking thing. The whole story came out of that moment. That, and this climate of intolerance we live in that never really seems to go away.’

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* * * *

JULIAN RATHBONE

It was, I suppose, a small thatched cottage, but you don’t see them like that any more - a two roomed cabin, made of mediaeval daub - a mixture of cow-dung and fine gravel, terracotta-coloured where the whitewash had peeled off. The thatch was dark brown, covered with blackish moss, roof-tree sagging. There was nothing picturesque about it at all, no briar-roses, no hollyhocks. Thin chickens squabbled over the dusty yard, a white lean rooster with a spare handful of tail feathers racketed amongst them, occasionally fucking them. The hens paid no attention, often just went on desperately pecking at the ground for a grain or seed they might have missed.

There was a shed, a barn and a stable. In the stable, in a stall too small for her, a fat old sow suckled six out of eight piglets. She had eaten the two runts along with all the afterbirths in order to have milk for the others.

There was a pond, shrunk in July, within a saucer of chocolate-coloured cracked mud, sheeted with emerald green algae and beside it a dung-heap which heaved with thin white worms.

It was all set at the top end of a narrow coombe at the end of a chalky track that threaded the three ten-acre fields she had. The steep sides of the downs were filled with beech and birch woods, but the back end was crowned with an ancient yew forest, planted by Henry VIII to provide longbows. Too late someone told him about gunpowder so the trees were never used.

We crouched in hiding on the edge of the beech wood, James and I, watched, waited and speculated. We were pupils at Minster Hill, a boarding school that claimed to be a public school. Minster Hill prided itself on its progressive approach to education so, on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, we were let out to walk around the countryside at will.

We were wearing the summer uniform - grey Vyella shirts with sleeves rolled up, grey corduroy shorts, very baggy and loose, wollen stockings, sandals. The sandals were impractical, but there we were, there was nothing we could do about that. I wore a sheathed SS dagger my uncle had brought back from Germany. The hilt was wound with silver wire and there was a swastika on the centre of the cross-guard. I carried it under my shirt when we left the school buildings, but threaded the sheath on to my belt as soon as we were clear.

It was a hot sultry day. The flies were a bother. We headed into the woods and searched out rotten silver birch trees, which, we had discovered, could be pushed over. Often you had to rock them first, then they would begin to crack, and at last they’d topple. Occasionally they would break in three or four places up the trunk and concertina down around us in a flurry of soft umber shards and dust. When we couldn’t find any more trees that would go, I took out my SS knife and we practised throwing it at the trunks of the beech trees. These were grey and wrinkled and put me in mind of the giant legs of huge elephants. It wasn’t easy to make the point stick in. You could either throw it point first in one sweeping underarm movement, a method which worked over short distances. Or, over five yards or more, we held it by the point and made it turn in the air three times or more, always hoping the point would hit the tree first. Sometimes it did.