Dark Terrors 5: The Gollancz Book of Horror

CHAZ BRENCHLEY Everything, in All the Wrong Order

There’s this disease I heard about, drinking with medics one time, where things get so turned around inside that you end up vomiting your own shit.

Think about that, and bear with me. It’s a metaphor, okay? What actually happened was this:

I let him go first up the ladder. I’d thought about that, there were advantages and drawbacks either way, but in the end I waved him up ahead of me. And followed close behind, hard on his heels so that he was barely through the trap before I was following, the bulking shadows of the attic space and my own bulk, my own closeness together serving to disguise and distract him so that he saw nothing, he didn’t even ask a question before I was up and the trap was down and I was standing on it.

Then, only then did I lighten his darkness by tugging on the string that lit the lamp behind me; then, only then did he understand.

One of those creaking, angular shadows that had made no sense in the half-dark was his sister. Still kicking, though not swinging much now: twisting rather, this way and that, like a slow clock running down. Her face was purple, and every ligament in her neck stood out against the rope that was taking its time in choking her. Her mouth was stretched wide, gagged by silence.

He was quick, I’ll give him that, but I’d always known he would be. He looked, he saw; he twisted himself, faster than his sister, and his hand already had a knife in it. He was uncertain, though, whether to save her life or take mine. Indecision can be lethal, I’ve seen that time and again; and told him so, told them both, but of course they did not listen. They were children, what did they know of decisions?

I was ready for him, in any case. I kicked him in the testicles; even on a twelve-year-old, that has its stopping power. As he doubled over, I hooked his legs from under him and then stamped on his head.

After that I could take my time in binding his hands behind his back, slipping the ready noose over his head and hauling him up to hang beside his little sister.

I’d introduced myself to the family the year before. Just one short year, summer to high summer, so many dreams I had, all gone to spoil in a single afternoon.

I slipped my way quietly, indirectly, into their consciousness, so delicate a touch that at first it left no mark of mine, no aluminium oxide dusting could have found me out. Plausible deniability, a cynic I suppose would say. I say that it’s wisdom to be cautious, to step lightly, to let nothing show that might have stayed hidden; I say that events have borne me out in this. It’s always easiest to withdraw early, to leave nothing behind but the fading memory of a sour note. So I was taught, so I have found to be true; so I hope to teach to others eventually. I wasn’t given the time this year, alas.

And it had started so well, all the signs were there and I was feeling so pleased with myself and with my targets. Two little children, ten and eleven years old, as I’d discovered, new to the area and thrilling to the possibilities of life, on the verge of great change, great discoveries: they came out of their house one bright morning to find the family cat busy in the garden, licking at what must at first have seemed to be a rag of ancient fur, some discarded tippet.

They came closer and discovered just how wrong they’d been. The thing was quite fresh, wet with blood, gobbets of dark flesh still clinging. After a while they shooed the cat away — no easy task, it was persistent and possessive of its treasure — to crouch themselves in its place and look over what they had. Perhaps they’d been thinking squirrel, thinking this a trophy hunted down and dragged in from the park. Wrong again.

Eventually, at last they will have seen it for what it was, the skin of a skinned little dog, a Yorkshire terrier. No sign of the flayed corpse, they will have seen, only the hide: and that like a message, pegged out on their lawn.

It was a message, and it did its work. They spent five minutes or more just looking, touching, talking, before the girl went with consent to fetch their mother, to show and share this interesting thing.

While she was gone, the boy touched bloody finger to pale lips and curious tongue behind; I knew then that I had him, and that in him I had them both.

That was what I thought I knew, at least; it was all I thought I needed.

The next night, the boy was awakened unexpectedly, perhaps by the strangeness of the light that was falling on his face. He’d left his window ajar as was his habit, but had pulled the curtains hard against the night; now they were drawn back, and something that was not the moon flickered and faded beyond the glass.

It may have taken him a minute, five minutes, even half an hour to find the courage he needed to get out of bed. A boy who likes the daylight, exposure, revelation — such a boy might well allow himself the luxury of fear unobserved.

Eventually, though, curiosity won as it had to; there at least I had not been wrong. He pressed his face tight against the window, and saw an old-fashioned lantern hanging from a branch of the cherry tree that grew in the garden, whose reaching leaves hung just a foot or two short of the house. They must have obscured his view at least a little, but still he will have been able to see the nightlight that burned in the lantern’s base, and that something obscure hung above its steady flame. He may have seen movement within the lantern’s glass; he may have heard a faint buzzing; he may even have smelled the faint scorching of rank meat.

After a while, there were two faces; he had fetched his sister. Perhaps at her urging, he opened his window wide and they both leaned out as far as they could, as far as they dared. The lantern was beyond their reach, though, and the twigs of the tree offered no support to a climber. At last he closed his curtains, and they both went back to bed.

In the morning, when they looked, they saw nothing in the tree. Neither the night that followed, when they looked again. On the lawn, though, at some distance from the house, a ring of faint light must have caught their eyes, where the lantern hung from a pole set in the grass.

The night after that, there was a figure sitting below the pole.

Attentive children know when they are being summoned; the hopeful, the self-aware respond.

They came down in dressing-gowns and slippers, stepping lightly and breathing hard, holding hands against the mischief and moment of the night. I greeted them with a glance and a nod, before turning my attention back to what I held in my hands.

‘What are you doing?’ It was the girl who stole the privilege of asking; her brother seemed not to resent it, despite his being the elder.

‘Waiting for you.’

‘No,’ she knew that already, ‘I mean, what are you doing?’

‘Ah.’ I peeled my fingers back to show her, to show them both. ‘I’m just pulling the wings off this fly, with these tweezers here, to see if it hurts.’

‘Does it?’ the boy asked in a whisper, as though it were an experiment he’d thought about but had never quite brought himself to the point of making on his own account. Likely it was. Good boys are not wanton.

‘Oh, no.’ I favoured him with a broad smile. ‘It doesn’t hurt at all. Want to try?’

A gesture brought their eyes up to the lantern, only a short time before they must have checked it out for themselves; the noise and the smell were both invasive, on that still summer night. It was more than a beacon, set to attract moth-children to its light. I was using it as a vivarium also, breeding a mass of bluebottles in the nightlight’s heat, feeding them on what remained of the Yorkie as it ripened.

Some few of the flies escaped from the children’s unaccustomed snatchings when I unlatched the lantern’s door and swung it open, but there were plenty to spare. The girl squealed in triumph as she snared one; the boy echoed her a moment later.

Neither one needed to borrow my tweezers, their fingers were small and nimble enough for the task. Wings and legs, taken one by one, afforded some little satisfaction but deliberately not enough; their eyes strayed back to the reeking dangle of the dog’s body. I smiled, and opened the door again to blow out the little flame.

‘Go back now. I will see you another time.’

I let them wait, let them watch in vain for almost a week before my lantern drew them out again. This time I had a rat splayed out on the ground before me, belly-up, its legs pinioned with wire hoops and its tail threshing. Not a street-rat, I’d bought it in a pet shop: white of fur, pink of eye, quivering of whisker.

I showed them a scalpel, wouldn’t let them touch either the blade or the rat, not yet; learning is a process, a progress, step by careful step.

Slowly, carefully, I made my incision through fur and skin and into the belly of the beast. Then, with another length of wire bent like a crochet-hook, I began to pull out its intestines and lay them around the creature on the grass.

‘You see?’ I said, my voice soft but pitched to carry above its agonised screaming. ‘It really doesn’t hurt at all. ’

Neither did it. I passed my hook to the boy, and he dabbled and tugged and felt no pain. The girl was a little hesitant, thinking perhaps she might prefer just to watch; I said I had saved the best, the last of it for her. Guided her hand on the little hook, in and twist and draw slowly, slowly: the rat’s heart came out amid a tracery of arteries and veins and for a moment, for a brief sweet moment it was beating still as I laid it in her palm.

I never asked them questions, that was not my role, but I did wonder what they thought they had seen, what they expected to find when they came out to join me the first night. Some ancient wild man, I imagine, half seer and half tramp, bearded and elflocked, smelling strangely and speaking of wonders, no doubt, the mystic power of blood and sacrifice.

Not me, at any rate, they cannot have expected me. A young man clean-shaven and smartly dressed, saying little and telling less, mostly showing. Showing and again showing, trying to batter the lesson home by endless repetition: here is pain, feel its tug; and look, it cannot hurt you, do you see?

I was, I suppose, just old enough to be their father, though he was older. I was old enough to befriend him, at least, and their mother also; and so I gained the parents’ trust where I had the children’s already, secretly locked between my fingers. I never let the two intermingle, was never seen in public with the children and barely spoke to them under their parents’ eyes. Our private understandings were a thing apart, held separate for safety’s sake. I’d warned them not to know me, when we met; they took that to extremes, of course, as children do. They made a game of ignoring me, which I encouraged: learn through play I might have told them over and over but did not, never felt the need.

They did that in any case, only not fast enough, or else it was too fast. And so we’d come to this, where I sat on an upturned tea-chest and watched the boy dangle, listened to him strangle and murmured my mantra at him one more time. It was wasted breath, of course, but I had it to waste, which he did not; and it’s the first, the last, the only lesson worth the learning, the heart of all teaching. And so I tried once more to drum it into his head, to have him understand that pain is and must be divisible, distributed at will.

‘This is hurting you much more than it’s hurting me,’ I said, seeing how blood sprayed from his torn scalp as he writhed and wrenched against the rope. ‘In fact, it’s not hurting me at all. Every man is an island, lad: alone, cut off, remote. Aye, and every child too. That’s what you’ve forgotten all this time, playing games with your sister. My fault, I admit it, but it’s you that have to suffer for it. That’s the division, that’s where pain draws the line. I’m here, she’s here’ — or she had been; I thought she’d gone by now, though certainly she’d taken her time about it, almost too light to choke and I was no poor man’s friend to pull down on her feet and make it easy — ‘but come right down to it, you’re still and always on your own.’

Pain is divisible, and I felt none of it — only frustration, and only at myself. The blame lay clearly with me, that this delight was spoiled. There could, there should have been years of my slow sculpting, bending tender spirits to a new shape, training fingers and minds to a new sensitivity; instead I’d let them slip out of my control, and we all had to pay the separate penalties for my inattention.

Mine was the lightest, by a distance. There would be no consequences to me, from any of what I did that day. I was known only as a casual acquaintance of the parents, worth one interview perhaps, but nothing more than that. The house we were in was isolated, and had long stood empty; it had been I who found it and I who introduced the children to it, as a more private place to play than their garden and easy of access day or night, but I’d worn gloves from the first day that we’d broken in. To them it had been part of my mystique, they hadn’t thought to look further. Their own prints would be everywhere, but not mine.

Their parents would grieve, of course, and suffer with it, not knowing that pain is divisible, hurt can be apportioned. It’s impossible to teach the old. Give me a ripening child, and I will give you — well, an adult like me. Growth must be guided, from the appropriate age. The right lessons in the right order, that’s what counts. I can show them wonders, one by one. I can make a wonder of them.

Give me a child — but no, don’t give me two. Therein lay my error, I took on too much without knowing. I have learned, now, and they have paid the price. I took the payment, of course, and enjoyed it, yes; but still my mind makes metaphors of shit and vomiting, which feel apt to me. I had taken these children and trained them to be what they became; they went too far too quickly, they got ahead of themselves and ahead of me, and so it was my task to expel them. That I could do it as I did was a gesture, a generosity of fate, but the overriding feeling was pure disappointment.

I’m hardly the first of us to do this. My own mentor told me that he had several discards before he came to me; no doubt he had others after, I wouldn’t know. We don’t keep in touch. The thought that he might have discarded me too if I’d been a weaker pupil, or a greedier — that lingers sometimes, a tickling abstraction in my head.

These two were greedy, but only I think because they were two, and siblings. Inevitably they were rivals, they competed. Even in front of me. I’d seen them jealous, I’d seen them egg each other on. I hadn’t seen the worst of it, that much was clear now.

I sat and watched until the boy was entirely still, until his blood had ceased to drip. Then — satisfied but unfulfilled, a curious sensation that I’d thought I’d long outgrown — I lifted the hatch and lowered my feet to the ladder, wondering as I left them how long it would be before they were found, whether there would be time for other fluids to drip and dribble, to soak through the boards and stain the plaster beneath, some sign to mark my failure.

I closed the hatch and took the ladder with me, to delay their discovery perhaps a little longer, give the juices perhaps a little chance to flow. I felt that I deserved that sign, I’d earned it.

As I made my way out through the kitchen, I passed what they had left for me on the flagged floor there, what they’d been so eager to show me that afternoon: what had changed all my plans for the day and for their lives, what had led me to take them one by one into the attic and leave them dangling, caught short and out of order, all unfinished.

It was a boy, they’d said, five or six years old and wandering alone, adrift. They’d inveigled him with sweets and promises, the kinds of gift I’d never offered them; they’d held his hand and brought him to the house, to a game they’d played for hours before I’d come in search.

Hard to be certain what it was or had been, that wet mess on the stones. Meat and bone, so much was evident; and there were clothes heaped in a corner, the unfastidious might — must, eventually — pick those over and label him a boy. Whoever that task fell to, I hoped they had the stomach for it. There was other matter that had been tossed there too: skin, largely. Skin and hair, from an inept vivisection.

The body’s major organs were laid out beside the faceless corpse, though not in any order. I’d have thought the children better trained than that, but they’d been wild, ecstatic, long past caring. And drenched in blood, and heedless of that too. Careful as I’d been, I’d have to destroy what I was wearing; I could smell this slaughter on me.

Wearily, sorrowfully, I stepped around the body and let myself out of the house, wondering just how long he’d taken in his dying, and glad for once — for the first time ever — not to have been there to see it done. Pain is divisible, and his had been witnessed, not wasted; all the waste had been going on around him.