” Merry Christmas Rose.”
I couldn’t believe midnight had struck and here I was spending Christmas with a half man, half beast. And not in a good way. What the hell had happened to my life that this was where I’d ended up?
But Hell was definitely not going to mend me and one of these days I was going to have to come to terms with that. But for now I slipped between clean cotton sheets and into a dreamless sleep that not even the revenants at the window could keep me from.
The white light of dawn did not flatter Greyfriars Cemetery. Not that this discouraged the ill advised idiots that flocked here in their droves with no idea about what they were messing with, or what the place was really for. As for me, it had always been my dearest ambition not to be found dead here.
Around four hundred years ago, the cemetery had moonlighted briefly as an open air prison for over a thousand people, their suffering leaving an indelible stain, like smoke damage in a diseased lung. It had been this little wheeze that had attracted such dark energies to the place, rather than its day job as a bone-yard. Now it pulsed with a febrile heat, as though something was about to hatch and I knew I was running out of time.
The great vaults were ornately carved: grinning skulls and coy angels coupled together in a sexless dance of death and resurrection; obsessively carved by the living in the hope of making sense of their own one way ticket.
Many of them were so old that the stone itself was crumbling as though in wry tribute to the way of all flesh. Theses cages of stone and iron were of course only for those rich enough to afford such pointless ostentation, constructed to keep the corpses safe from the attentions of the body-snatchers, or Resurrection Men as they were ironically known. They failed of course.
The grass on the other hand looked healthy and vigorous, fed on the superior nutrients leached from the great and the good. At least they had finally given something back to the community.
I sat in the car because, simply, there was nowhere else to go.
To the west, the darkening stain of an oncoming storm gradually cast a caul over the deserted street where I was parked and the sensation of being smothered was very nearly overwhelming. Yet there was still a shimmering quality to the air, as though trying to contain something that was intent on getting out.
I knew the feeling.
To my left was a fish shop which, although it displayed the closed sign, still had meat of indeterminate origin in the window. Great, grey eels were stacked on one side next to what looked like a small pieces of shark meat. Dun coloured fillets rubbed innards with something that had a huge head and lots of small, sharp teeth reminding me of an old school-mate from primary school.
A blurred burst of purple and red in the interior of the shop made me look again. The darkened interior stared blankly back at me and the hairs began to rise on the back of my neck because in that brief monent I had seen a familiar hulking shape: a creature I knew had never been burdened with the vulgarity of a pulse and the flesh over-coat that contained it.
Two doors down in the window above the grocer’s, the corner of a net curtain twitched as though hastily dropped by whatever was behind it. I was trapped in the eye of the storm, knowing that something irrevocable was just about come crashing down, something from which neither I nor this benighted village was ever going to escape.
I did what I normally did when faced with the end of the world, the end of humanity, the end of the end: I pulled out my hip flask and drained it dry.
I hurried back the way I’d come, past the jars and the rows of cages where something forlornly scraped to get out. I ignored it, picking up speed, eager to escape this infernal hell hole. As I walked my only companion was the thin high sound of the giggler in the dark. Shivering I began to run, the sting of the cold, cleansing air a valediction on my straining lungs.
Passing over the threshold, I didn’t bother looking back.
No one knew where I’d been born and no relatives could be traced. The warehouse had been empty for some time and it was as though I had just materialised out of thin air. My foster family gave me my surname, but the relationship didn’t work out and I was placed in a children’s home by the time I was eight. Needless to say I was a strange, truculent child who, as far as the authorities and my foster family had been concerned spoke to people who weren’t there and had very poor impulse control, taking what I wanted when I wanted it.
That was clearly something I had in common with the beast sitting opposite.
“Boyfriend, husband that sort of thing?” he asked.
“What do you think?
“I think you’ve never had a functional relationship with anyone let alone a romantic attachment for want of a better expression, so that would be a no.”
I nearly choked on my toast as he lounged, arms behind his head. No one but me was allowed to wallow in the shambles of my life so far.
“And how the hell do you know that? And what gives you the right-“
“It’s pretty obvious.”
“Oh really. I’d be very careful-“
“There’s a prime example right there. I’d say you’d be pretty scary to your average man. You’re an attractive enough woman Rose-“
“Gee thanks-
“Despite the dye job and the nose ring, but it’s pretty clear your life is in two dimensions: work and trying to forget about work. And of course the empathy with the devil thing you do…isn’t that a Stones song?”
“Just go straight ahead,” I said distractedly scanning the silent streets thronged by the legions of the dead, all calmly tracking my progress.
“I’ll let you know when.”
The last leg of the journey to the hallowed ground of Greyfriars Cemetery was grim. As we drove up Lauriston Place, past the old Royal Infirmary and round into Forrest Road, the horror of one of the older parts of the city opened its arms and enfolded me like a long lost lover. A mass of shades, spirits and revenants shimmering like a heat haze at high noon thronged the streets. I could still make out the road through their insubstantial forms, but the view was distorted and warped; twisted out of true by presences that had no business here. Some of them manifested as pools of moving shadow, a darkness in perpetual motion flitting across the assembly of the dead like a disease liberated from an artificial confinement. A shiver ran down my spine as I realised now what I was looking at: the birth of a necropolis where the dead wandered at will, unfettered by the mostly unconscious restraints imposed by the living. They had always been around, but not with this overwhelming power and purpose.
Dawn of the Dead indeed. So what the hell was high-noon going to bring?
He led me along darkened, winding passageways, down an endless flight of stairs so old the edges had worn away and through what was little more than a crack in the ancient stonework, before finally reaching the dank chamber that was our destination. Edinburgh’s subterranean passageways had brought us down into this eerie underworld and I felt more than a fleeting kinship with Persephone at that moment. At least she got to return to the real world on a part-time basis and I wasn’t sure I was going to be so lucky.
The interior of the room was lit by the same green phosphorescent glow I’d become all too familiar with. Shelves lined the walls from floor to lofty ceiling supporting enormous four by three bell-jars. Inside were squirming limbs and distorted faces fighting to press themselves up against the glass. One of them opened a tooth lined maw as I passed, the bell-jar shaking with the force of a soundless scream. The reptilian eyes were curiously vacant as though there was no mind directing it.
I was suddenly reminded of an old boy-friend.
“Do you like my homunculi?” Viridian asked coyly. “I make them myself.”
The next morning, I showered again just because I could and pulled on some jeans and a crimson mohair top, the colour of which would no doubt be matched by my cheeks any second now. But Santa impersonations were okay, because it was Christmas after all. I decided to let my hair dry naturally even though there was nothing natural about it and, absurdly, felt better than I had for days.
The unmistakable strains of Highway to Hell from the living room managed to extract a smile from me. It got even better when the mouth-watering aroma of coffee and toast wafted through the house. I didn’t have any fresh food (the bread was frozen) as I hadn’t been expecting to be home. Given that not only was it the festive season but also that the dead had decided to join in the celebrations by roaming the streets, it was perhaps a tad unrealistic to expect much in the way of food options. What I really hadn’t expected though was a thug from the Were-kin hard at work in a kitchen unused to such hard core activity making my breakfast and the best of things.
I sauntered through to the living room where the thug in question had neatly set out breakfast on the coffee table. A wan sun shone in the window that was just enough to give the room a warm glow with it’s copper coloured suite and scarlet and black Persian rug softening the effect of the floorboards.
“Nice place you have here,” said Jack gesturing with his arm to include the panoramic view.
“Thanks. I didn’t get to see yours.” I said pointedly, selecting a piece of warm toast from the teetering pile he’d put on a dinner plate and got on with smothering it in Marmite.
“So, do you celebrate Christmas?” he asked as I fought with the Marmite. It felt both surreal and ironic that here I was spending the most family oriented day of the year with something that proudly proclaimed its lack of humanity. No fighting yet though which was probably more than could be said for most households on this day.
“Do you?” I asked mouth full of toast and beef flavouring.
“Not in the Christian sense, if that’s what you mean,” he replied, eyebrow arching sardonically. “You? Do you have any folks that you should be with right now?”
“No.”
My terse reply clearly didn’t phase him because he carried on: “Why not? Where are they?”
“I’ve no idea.”
He wasn’t even vaguely embarrassed which most people were when discussing this particular topic; in fact if anything he appeared too interested. Well, I wasn’t going to indulge him and that was that. I didn’t know who my parents were, or even if they were alive. I’d been brought up by a combination of foster family and children’s home and no one, including social services confessed to having the slightest clue who my parents were. All that was known was that I was found in an abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of the city when I was three years old. Apparently it was my screaming that alerted a security guard patrolling the grounds of a neighbouring factory near the end of his shift. He found me covered in blood, none of it mine as it turned out, sitting half naked and bawling my eyes out.
Come to think of it, that just about neatly summed up my life so far.
I had no time to react, let alone defend myself as I was pitched out of my body into a eerie twilight world where creatures scuttled on the edge of my vision, chittering angrily at the sacrilege of my presence. An unseen force made me walk along a twisting path set in flat featureless countryside. Huge roiling shadows boiled across a monochrome landscape and I knew I would die here. Nameless deformities writhed out of sight giving a mere glimpse of a tail, or the mutated stump of a limb. This particular road had no end and the power that propelled me onward had all the time in the world to force me to take it.
“This is your life now Rose, or rather what’s left of it. Do you approve?” whispered the voice close to my ear as though reading my thoughts.
“Well Eamonn, I’ve always secretly wanted a big red book moment, but to be honest I’m not sure it’s all it’s cracked up to be.”
I decided I was going to go into the village and see what I could find out. My soi-disant employer seemed to think the villagers in Midnight Falls were in on whatever had happened to her husband but I wanted to form my own impressions. I didn’t dismiss what she had said, but it wasn’t hard to imagine the ease with which an incomer could get carried away on a tidal wave of paranoia. I wondered too if there was any way I could check whether or not she had reported him missing. Assume that everyone is at best mistaken, or at worst lying and Bob will invariably not turn out to be your uncle. The facts were the first casualties when emotions ran high, or when people had axes to grind deep down into the meat of the thing.
I shoved my mobile into the pocket of the full length fake fur coat that I was rather embarrassingly keen on, not least because of the fact that it kept out all forms of cold, natural and not. I put on the matching Russian style hat, even though it was slightly too small and therefore a bit of a squeeze for my clearly gargantuan cranium. Why did they only ever make hats in stupid pin-head size? The combination made me feel insulated from the world and ready for just about anything. Odd how something as superficial as clothes can alter your mood, or maybe that should just be stupid.
I checked my watch: half past nine. What the hell was I going to find out and from whom at this ungodly hour? Truth was, I was looking forward to stretching my legs, have a bit of a nose around the area, and maybe even get some fresh air for a change. The only exposed bit of me – my face – tingled with the extreme cold and my breath expired without protest into the morning air. The sky was vast, menacing, with billowing clouds boiling across it from the west, threatening a fate worse than rain. I’d never seen anything so dramatic: to the east shone an unearthly light, as the end of the world might look taunting you with the sheer beauty of it all just before you died.
I walked slowly down the garden path and turned to look at the house. Victorian definitely, with modern add ons for whatever Godforsaken reason had seemed good at the time. But underneath the veneer of change and bad taste imposed over the years, there was still something undeniably disturbing about the house. The colour for one thing, that dark red colour that screamed peeled flesh and raw wounds. There was also a sense of waiting, as though – stupid thought – the house was drawing breath before unleashing whatever was wrong with it, like pus from an ulcerous wound. Of course I didn’t have any proof there was something wrong with it.
Not yet.