Spawn of Man (19 page)

Jack turned to face his dead wife again. Her green eyes had stared blankly as her jaw had clashed her sharp teeth together with automated regularity, but now they focused on Jack. The line of saliva escaping from her lips widened and a black tongue tasted it slowly. Her fingers uncurled and Jack saw that the skin of her palms was missing with sinew and muscles apparent and shining.

‘I don’t care,’ said Jack. ‘I don’t care how you have made it back to me. I don’t care, Kathy. I will take care of you now my love.’

Jack stood but his legs felt old and a hard pain jabbed at his back.

‘Shall I make you a nice cup of tea, love? I have some of those cakes you used to love; I mean you love the sponge ones, you still do like those don’t you, Kathy, love?’

And a single tear rolled down Jack’s cheek.

‘No tea. No cake,’ rasped his dead wife. ‘Kiss!’

‘Beg your pardon, Kathy, love?’ Inside Jack’s head the words of the man on the screen were being assimilated and fed into his understanding slowly.

‘No tea. No cake. Kiss!’ repeated his dead wife’s grating voice. ‘Kiss. Kiss.’

But there was no emotion, feeling or gentleness in her words, only an eager insistence, ‘Kiss!’

Jack hesitated. He only saw the vision of his wife’s former beauty sitting in front of him.

‘Kathy, I have missed you so much. Are you really here, love? Am I dreaming? Am I going mad? I’ve been terribly confused you know…’

‘Kiss!’ demanded his dead wife and a trace of red colored the stream of saliva.

Jack approached her. He leaned forward and kissed Kathy’s forehead. The skin tasted bitter and hot and Jack felt the skin on his lips begin to blister.

‘Kathy?’ Jack touched his lips and a layer of skin was painfully rent from them when he withdrew his fingers.

‘Kiss!’

Jack knelt. His old bones creaked and groaned as he accomplished the movement and he gasped at the pain.

‘Kiss!’

Jack pressed his blistered lips to Kathy’s blackened lips. But Kathy’s mouth was abnormally large, and as Jack felt the first wave of heat scorching his tenderized lips, she opened it wide and bared the two rows of pointed teeth. The previous evening Jack had watched a documentary featuring the Venus flytrap plant and Jack thought of that now. Then the teeth clamped back down again, removing Jack’s lips and the surrounding flesh from his nostrils to his chin.

Jack fell away from Kathy and tumbled to the floor. The pain of the fall as it twisted his stiff limbs even managed to supplant the hurt that now pulsated where his mouth used to be.

Kathy rose now and Jack watched her through the blood and tears that clouded his eyes. The curvature of her back forced Kathy to bend at an angle approaching forty-five degrees. And as she drew nearer to Jack, he noticed she held her claw-like hands curled up against her chest like a great bird.

When she stood stooped over Jack’s helpless form she spoke again, ‘Die.’

A trail of the saliva as thick as mucus and as black as tar leaked onto Jack’s face. And where the substance touched, it removed the flesh, liquefying skin and bone in bubbling, steaming pools that were tinged red by Jack’s blood. Jack did not scream. There was no pain. Only the sense of loss of his beloved wife.

When Jack’s face had disappeared, with only a brain-filled cavity remaining, Kathy allowed the acid-like fluid to fall onto his chest. She meticulously dissolved her husband’s body for the next two hours, watching him melt slowly, whilst taking great pains to keep him alive throughout the process. And the screen fell silent once more, only this time it stayed that way.

Chapter Twenty

2036. October, Sunday. 11.04 a.m.

Man’s machines fall,

in metal winters from the clouds.

And out of their windows stare,

bodies wrapped in shrouds.

Falling on his land and on his sea,

where he sails sadly home.

Bleached white and brittle bones,

sat in polished bright and shining chrome.

Staring at the trains,

that dash and crash down the track.

And from behind the windows,

the dead stare quietly back.

Translation from Father Andrew’s book.

Akeno Tanaka had been in New York for two weeks, studying architecture and acclimatizing himself into the city’s way of life. Some things he found similar to Tokyo, some things totally alien. But today he felt almost native, as he rode the subway back to his rented apartment. His father was an influential businessman in his own country and his money had made it possible for Akeno to study in New York. But Akeno’s father had warned him that money may not be able to prevent him from experiencing the harsher realities of this culture. He left the subway station and hurried out of the rain, jogging up the flight of stairs that led to his apartment.

As he turned the key, Akeno glanced to his left, across the short landing and out of the rectangular window that was in desperate need of cleaning. The sky looked so grey and oppressive that initially Akeno surmised the pane of glass was even grubbier than usual and he continued unlocking the door to his apartment. But something halted him, an uneasy wave of foreboding washing the color out of his face. The sense of dread that says the reason you are afraid is because you are now living in the four or five seconds that immediately precipitate an inevitable calamity. The same sense of dread that immediately precipitates your death in a dream, the one you watch unfold, removed yet involved.

Akeno left the key in the door and began to walk to the window, slowly. He did not understand the reason why, but he did not want to arrive at that window, so he took shorter steps towards it. But the laws of physics dictated he would arrive and eventually he did. When he did, he hesitated and looked back at his door. It was open, but he had not opened it. There was a sound outside and he suddenly realized that the reason he had looked at the window in the first place was because there were no longer any sounds outside. He knew he had to turn and look and his body began the process, his head reluctantly following a fraction of a second later.

Everything was grey, the sky, the buildings, the cars, the streets, the people, and Akeno looked at his hands, turning them from palm to back three times, his breath caught somewhere between his chest and throat, as he gazed at the bubbling grey skin. He screamed once, a shrill sound like the ululation of the grief-crazed, and then ran, stumbling, falling and running again. He pushed the door of his apartment open and slammed it shut behind him, eyes closed.

***

Father Bernard O’Neill was the parish priest of the Blessed Sacrament Roman Catholic Church, New York, from 1947 to the day he was arrested, July 22 1952, accused of murdering one of his parishioners, Tommy Howard, a forty-four year old retarded odd job man. Tommy performed gardening duties for the church and on that sunny afternoon in July, Father O’Neill bounced a shovel off the back of Tommy’s head. If Tommy had not been mentally impaired already, he would have been following the blow. And while the simple-minded gardener floundered on his back at the foot of the priest, like a fish deprived of its life-endowing water, Father O’Neill drove the shovel down through the man’s mouth. He accomplished this with such force that the head was decapitated from the top row of his teeth up.

Father O’Neill’s trial was delayed due to the implications of a Catholic priest with such impeccable credentials suddenly becoming a figure of national hatred and derision, and during this interval the priest took his own life. The suicide itself was embroiled in a degree of speculation that was not dissimilar to the events surrounding the crime. Many believed the priest was in a disturbed state of mind when he perpetrated the act of murder and that federal agents and the Catholic church itself then took advantage of that fact to ‘
facilitate
’ Father O’Neill’s suicide. Father O’Neill was found in his cell by the warden of the penitentiary on the morning of March 4th 1953. The fact that the warden and not a guard found the body was another piece in the conspiratorial jigsaw and was seen by some as evidence of the authorities trying to put the event beyond refute. The priest had ripped his own throat out with a fork.

***

The image of Akeno peering out of the rectangular window was the one of the last things Catherine Williams ever saw. She had been out early that morning, shopping for groceries, and as she waited at the counter of Bert’s grocery store she had idly watched the world go by on the street outside. When Bert had given her the change, she had wished him good morning and left the store. She was fifty-three years old and dying of lung cancer. The doctors and specialists had allotted her six more months and she had already used up two of them.

Catherine stood on the sidewalk and wondered why she bothered to buy provisions. What did it really matter if she perished now through lack of food or in four months’ time through lack of a functioning body? Then she looked up and saw Akeno looking down at her and the display on her watch adjusted itself to read 7.14 a.m., and then the world stopped. A blanket of grey was thrown over everything and Catherine dropped her shopping and looked at her hands. They were grey too, the skin moved like it was made of liquid and she looked back up to where Akeno had stood but he had gone.

Akeno rolled his sleeves up to his elbow and slowly opened his eyes. The skin of both forearms was mottled grey and the flesh moved like the surface of an ocean and he screamed again, running into the little bathroom that stood on the left-hand side of the small entrance hall. He pulled the light cord and as the room was illuminated by a rose-tinted fluorescence, he stared at his own reflection, holding his hands flat against the mirror as if this would have a steadying effect on the image that stared back. His face was the color of gunmetal and the skin was alive with activity, small lumps forming then fading, as if minute balloons were being inflated then popped, below the surface of his features.

‘Akeno, oh, Akeno,’ a melodic voice called from somewhere in his apartment, and Akeno gasped and looked towards the hallway.

The voice had been filled with evil at the same time as it had carried the quality of a lullaby and Akeno felt a tear fall across one cheek. ‘I’m waiting for you, Akeno.’

And the voice had a sharp, almost synthetic edge to it, no accent and no depth, almost a mechanical interpretation of a human voice.

Akeno’s own voice was suffused with panic and tainted by the tear that had now run between his lips. ‘Who’s there? What do you want?’

Outside in the greyness, Catherine looked up and down the street. Cars were stopping and their owners leaving the vehicles to watch the sky. People looked at their own bodies and each other’s and wailed, whilst vertical rips appeared in the world in front of them. Catherine witnessed things crawl through these ruptures, things covered in slime and filth, things shaped like humans but patently inhuman. Behind her she heard a wet noise like the sound of afterbirth hitting a cold tiled floor and a flash of warm, orange light glowed for a second, like the death of a sun in a miniature universe. ‘Catherine?’ The voice was soft, wicked and sounded like a recording.

‘Who’s there?’ Akeno asked, as he stepped into the entrance hall, his voice weak and desperate now.

On the street below his apartment Catherine turned around.

Father Bernard O’Neill waited by the couch and as Akeno rounded the corner of the small hallway he smiled. Father O’Neill was still smothered in the slimy material that was the physical form of the matter that existed in the afterlife. Clotted mucus that emanated from the portal still adhered to the creature after it had materialized. The soulless shells of the dead now used the electricity that our world was saturated in to connect the two different planes of existence. Once the nexus had been established they stepped through the veil that separated the two frequencies.

In life, Father O’Neill had been a small, plump, nondescript individual, sour-faced and possessing a curt, quick-tempered disposition, the absolute antithesis of the qualities of the God he promoted. In death, he now stood seven feet tall, virtually skinless, with a monolithic back that bent his torso forward in an unchangeable stalking squat. His massive head hung so low as to give the impression it grew from his chest. The face was unrecognizable as the priest’s, apart from the same beady, calculating green eyes, deep set now under a heavy brow, pitted with nodules and stumped horns. The muscularity of his long boned limbs was markedly thick and knotted and he stood on two distinctly reptilian legs. His mouth leaked a yellow substance from between layer upon layer of small, pointed and clenched teeth that resembled rows of pitched model tents. Most of his throat was missing in replication of the death he suffered, and the fork still protruded from the wound.

Catherine glimpsed her own reflection in the window of Bert’s grocery store and saw that the liquid nature of the surface of her hands now textured the skin on her face.

She instinctively placed her palms against her cheeks and temples, flattening the soft blonde hair that fell there. When she removed her hands, clumps of golden waves were dragged away from her skull, clinging to her right palm, whilst two fingers from her left hand remained attached to the side of her head. She screamed and staggered forward, pushing open the door of the store to find a four-foot beast standing over the partially disemboweled body of Bert.

The creature’s right forearm had been amputated mid-way and a gleaming stainless steel surgical saw had been crudely attached to the remains, dripping with fresh, bright red blood. The flesh of its left arm was missing from just below the shoulder, the dull brown bones beneath still functioning as a limb, and the slender fingers groped inside Bert’s abdomen. Bert lay rigid with fear, his eyes wide and staring imploringly at Catherine. The being was humanoid and naked, with skin the consistency of ripened fruit, but its head was beautiful, proportioned and of a size befitting a taller specimen, with slicked-back black hair and the finely constructed face of a fifty-one year old human male. The only obvious defect being the blue-black ligature marks around its neck. The eyes were blue and intense and even in that moment of utter and complete horror, Catherine sensed sorrow.

Pierre Durand, the brilliant but warped surgeon, Nazi collaborator and mass murderer, hesitated and removed his skeletal hand from the grocer’s stomach. This act seemed to instigate a series of reactions in Bert’s body and he coughed once, producing a thick stream of blood, before his eyes closed and he stopped breathing.

Pierre inclined his head to regard Catherine and he spoke with a sensual, grave voice. ‘Pulmonary malignancy, large cell carcinoma?’

Catherine still somehow managed to register perplexity on what was left of her features and Pierre smiled and added, ‘Lung cancer my dear. I can help you with that. I am a surgeon.’

Father O’Neill moved animal quick, covering the twelve feet between himself and the petrified Akeno in a second. The reverse angle of his lower legs springing him across the room like a prehistoric creature closing in on its disabled prey. He lifted Akeno from the ground in one fluid movement without breaking stride and slammed him against the wall behind. The force of the blow embedded Akeno in the structure, pinioning him in his own silhouette, with only his arms and legs still hanging free, limp and useless now as the impact had smashed Akeno’s back into shattered splinters of bone.

The creature took two loping backward steps and inspected his handiwork, smiling deviously, and then stretched its brawny arms out wide as if imploring the God it had served in life. Its long, claw-like fingers slowly flexed as if it typed on invisible keyboards and the air around the digits manipulated and pulsed. Then a keening sound reverberated in the room, as if unseen witnesses to the scene moaned with pleasure at the sights, whilst the space around Father O’Neill’s fingers erupted with blue-white fire.

He threw back his huge skinless skull and roared, ‘God of nothing, Lord of empty promises, receive a sinless follower!’

The clouds of fire at the priest’s fingertips spiraled into small columns before shaping themselves into effigies of large nails. Akeno raised his head, and through the sweat and tears that misted his vision he saw the thing throw its hands together, sending the fire-nails hurtling forward like glowing arrows. The rods sliced into the flesh of Akeno’s wrists and ankles, lifting and pinning them to the wall in the bearing of a crucifixion. Akeno whimpered with indignation and fear, unable to register pain any longer and terrified at the nature of his impending death.

The emotions and sensations that colored Akeno’s spirit fed into the soulless shell that was the priest and infused him with a life force that would nurture his being on this physical plane for a long time, forestalling his inevitable destruction. The thing that had been Father O’Neill would now feast on the living, thriving in the gratification and postponing its own demise. It now fell to its knees shrieking and looking up at the crucified man, the irony of the spectacle was not lost on Father O’Neill as he sated himself on the victim’s agonies, inspired and rejuvenated.