She sits and waits, hands folded on the lace dress covering her lap and her head slightly bowed. She looked as if in prayer, even to the slight tremble of her lips, half hidden by the lace of her veil and barely seen in the dim light her grey lips shudder as she speaks words that only she can hear.
The attic room is barely a room; the floor is roughly boarded but the rafters and collar beams are exposed, here and there gaps let in thin beams of light. The tiny attic window is built into the brick side of the house rather than through the tiles, through a wall untouched by the sun. The window is less than two bricks in width and if it opened, which it didn’t, it would be big enough only for a child to climb through. The diffused light from it reached almost to the mound of cloth halfway along the attic’s length; a place the Bride never looked.
For a very long time her eyes were closed, there was little to see in the attic and not much more to see through the tiny window. Though even if a fairground had taken up residence opposite the building the Bride would still not raise her gaze; her memories held her too fast.
The Bride told herself that she didn’t care, the Bride told herself she merely waited.
She had sat like a statue, her back to the mound of cloth and the broken length of rope that hung without movement from the collar beam, but then in the building below there had been sounds, shouts and calls followed by the breaking of wood. Then footsteps moved through the house, one set moving around the ground floor as another made for the steps that led up to the second. When she heard the footsteps, her eyes opened and when the footsteps trod the stairs her lips stopped moving; and she listened.
Boxes littered the attic space, some taped with thick brown tape and others opened with their contents strewn across the dusty floor. The box on which the Bride sat did not bow inward under her weight, as she had no weight, and where she sat there was a thick carpet of dust undisturbed by her presence, because in any real sense she was not really there.
The footsteps moved from room to room, pausing only briefly until the whole upper floor was covered. Then there was silence for a moment, broken by the harsh snap as the latches holding the hatch to the attic opened. The hatch, five planks of wood fastened together with two others nailed at a right-angles, is raised into the darkness, a wedge of light cutting into the Brides space.
A man peers into the attic, his face twisted in distaste.
“There’s another one up here.” He calls down through the hatch.
“That’s three.” Another voice responds, a female voice and the Bride raises her head with interest. She rises from her resting place and moves towards the hatch. The man looks to her, through her, past her as oblivious to her as he was to the dust that danced around him.
The man climbs into the attic and unseen the Bride watches; she examines him, he wears an all-in-one cover-all of translucent plastic under which his white shirt and dark blue trousers can be seen. Its hood has been pulled back and his hair, a shaggy blonde that was in need if a cut fell down around his eyes.
The Bride watches him with lips pulled into something approximating pleasure.
He switches on a torch and plays it over the space, dust motes dancing in the beam, until it rests on the box on which the Bride was sat. The man moves deeper into the attic with the confidence of someone who may not be wearing a badge, but certainly possesses one. The boards creak under his polished shoes and his movement disturbs so little dust he is almost a phantom himself.
“No one’s been here in a while…” He says and then the beam of light reached the pile of cloth, the white lace eaten by time and the person under it long since fallen into a jumble of leathery flesh and yellowed bone.
The woman’s voice comes from the rooms below.
“Nah, this is a…”
The man stops and listens as his unseen companion goes silent. He faces away from the hatch, but even if her wasn’t he would not have seen the Bride peering down to the rooms below.
“Hey? Hey!” He shouts.
“A note… Yeah, looks like a murder-suicide down here… Want me to read it?”
“Sure…”
The Bride drifts from the square of light leading down into the rooms below and over to the man as he drops to one knee before the pile of clothes and bones. The Bride doesn’t look down, she doesn’t see the pile of clothes, perhaps it is as invisible to her as she is to the man; or perhaps she simply doesn’t acknowledge its existence.
From below them the woman begins to read, haltingly at first then gaining momentum; from dispassionate to passionate.
“I’m sorry… I don’t know what happened… He kept saying it wasn’t true, that there wasn’t someone else, but I knew. He had changed and the whole world changed with him; and it left me alone… If he would only admit it, I wouldn’t have gotten so angry; but I can’t undo this, it’s all gone too far… I’m sorry… I’m sorry… The word isn’t enough, I can say it until the sun burns out and it wouldn’t be enough… If only he could admit it, but he lied and lied and lied… But I’m still sorry.”
As the woman reads the man has opened boxes with a cursory glance inside each, each box taking him back towards the hatch. The Bride stays beside him, a silent and inscrutable variation of Jiminy Cricket examining his every move. She stands just outside his sphere of vision, in the space between blinks but she is there the whole time, unseen.
The last box he opens was the box the Bride used as her seat, and inside is white lace; a wedding dress.
“Were they married?” He calls to the woman below.
“What was that?”
“This murder-suicide… were they married?”
“Nah… Who gets married these days anyway?”
The man pulls the bridal gown from the box and looks at it. The Bride stands behind him, moving closer with agonising slowness, her brow furrowing beneath the lace of her veil.
“Well, someone did…” He says quietly, then loudly he continues. “How long have they lived here?”
“They’ve still got things in boxes down here, so not long I’d say… why?”
“Nah… This stuff isn’t theirs… Probably been up here for years…” He says, then to himself. “Forgotten about…”
The Bride reaches up with both hands, her movements are slow, almost mechanical, as she grasps her veil.
“What was that?” The woman shouts.
The Bride lifts the veil, lowering her head slightly as she does so. Her skin is ashen and delicate black veins reach around from her temples. Her eyes are sunken, and a pinpoint of light seems to leap from each of them.
“Nothing…” He replies, far too quietly for anyone to hear.
The Bride is very close now, and as the man turns his head towards the hatch she moves to the other side of him, close enough he could feel her breath… if she had any. Her lips are grey and delicate curls of dead skin flutters across her face.
“Nothing, I’m coming back down…” He says.
The Bride’s lips pull close to his ear, her arm snaking over his shoulder as her palm presses to his chest over his heart, through her lace gloves are a road map of blackened veins; and the Bride whispers, “I love you…”
The man had experienced epiphanies and had had those moments of Deja-vu, he had seen things he couldn’t explain and witnessed acts that defied every human value he believed in; but there was nothing like that moment.
It was a moment of being loved so much your every action bred rage.
It was a moment of being known so deeply that thoughts became weapons.
It was adoration that gave only pain; and pain that made him believe in love again.
It was a cycle of emotions, each feeding on the last. An escalating spiral that ate his soul and polluted his sanity. It was, in short love, a love that knew no end to its hunger and no boundaries to its needs.
The man sank to his knees and felt a cool softness envelope him; he did not see the Bride but if he had he would have seen that this head was rested on her breast and her arms were around him.
In the rooms below the woman made notes and pieced together the rooms clues. The air of the room was a witness to the acts performed within it, and she had learned to read its murmurings.
She was dressed similarly to the man above, a matching set of dark blues and whites obscured by the translucent cover-all. Her feet were silent on the hard wood of the kitchen floor as she carefully moved around what was left of its previous inhabitants.
“It was an argument,” she shouted over her shoulder to the open door that led to the stairs. She smiled humorlessly to herself. “But isn’t it always?”
The body of a woman was sprawled across the floor, one hand thrown forward with its index finger pointing as if indicating the stairs. The body wore shorts and a t-shirt that had risen to show a stomach ridged with well-toned muscles. She had taken good care of herself and was perhaps dressed to go jogging or something similar. Her hair was tied in a ponytail, and she wore no make-up or jewellery. In the dead centre of her back was the handle of a kitchen knife, the blade hidden under bloodless flesh.
The woman turned to the other body, brushing a strand of her short blonde hair behind an ear.
This one was worse.
She knew the other body was a man’s but that was about it. The face had been carved down to the bone and flaps of flesh hung from it as if it had been peeled.
For a few minutes, the woman stood over the corpse and stared.
The right hand was bloodied, and she could tell by the direction of the wounds that he had torn at his own flesh, that the wounds – as horrific as they were – were almost certainly self-inflicted and almost as certainly done with his own hands.
The idea took some getting used to.
“This is crazy, man…” She said quietly, then loudly. “You’re not going to believe this…”
She pauses, turns toward the stairs and listens. It seems that sound has been drained from the world, the air pumped from the room; and she felt suddenly light-headed as she made her way to the stairs. She prided herself in her ability to read a room, in her job she was known for it, and suddenly this room, this entire building, felt very wrong.
Halfway up she called again, struggling to keep her tone casual.
At the top of the stairs a small stepladder stood under a square of darkness. She glanced at it and then looked in the upstairs rooms, three of them, a bathroom and two bedrooms. The smaller bedroom was filled with half emptied boxes while the other had a bed a wardrobe and nothing else. Her companion was in none of them.
She returned to the ladder and looked up into the darkness.
“Hey? C’mon, we haven’t got all day here!”
A few moments pass, there is no sound from above. The woman fidgets impatiently, looking around, then stops abruptly.
Her eyes adjusted to the darkness, here and there dust motes drifted in shafts of light so diffused they were patches of lighter grey against the back. Something slightly darker seems to move across her view and the woman took the first step of the ladder, then the second.
There was movement above, she was sure of it; at least she thought she was sure of it.
She took another step, and her eye-line became level with the uneven attic floor, the floorboards curved and knot holes showing tufts of insulation, she took another step.
The musty smell of death filled her nostrils, not the metallic smell of spilt blood, not the pungent smell of new death, but the dusty desiccated smell of old death.
She climbed into the attic, the floor beneath her felt gritty and when she moved her feet it sounded a little like walking on sand. She saw the pile of clothes almost immediately and the analytical part of her brain kicked in and she looked up. Above was a length of rope tied to a crossbeam, it had rotted and now ended in thinning fibres that moved in the breeze rather than the noose the woman knew was originally there. She looked down at the pile of clothes and saw the crook of a shrunken bony elbow, then a curve of something that could only be a skull.
Then she sensed movement, to her right, and she looked around.
She didn’t see him at first, initially she thought it was a trick of what little light there was, but then her eyes adjusted a little more and she saw him crouched down into the wedge where roof met floor. He was clutching something to him as a child would a security blanket, and she thought she heard a noise coming from him that sounded like a tiny whimper.
“Hey,” she began and realised she didn’t know what to say, she didn’t really know him, it was just work, and she felt as though she had stumbled into something deeply private. She stopped abruptly and watched him for a moment. Perhaps he was on the edge for a while; perhaps something in the man had snapped. If anything could make someone snap, it was a job like this one.
She moved closer, leaning low as the tiled roof angled downwards.
“Hey.” She said again, softly, quietly. He looked up and his eyes were rimmed with red, and his face seemed a mass of movement; his lips quivered, and his eyes darted.
He clutched something made of white lace against his chest.
Her mind raced: he was too heavy for her to safely move, especially through the hatch and down the stairs, she didn’t know whether moving him, or even touching him, would set off something she’d rather not handle and, if she did manage all that she’d still have to contact someone anyway; she decided.
“I have to go for a minute, I’ll be back.” She tried to keep her voice even; she was surprised by how casual she sounded. “I won’t be long…”
She turned but didn’t move towards the hatch as she had intended to, again she wasn’t sure, but she sensed movement. She paused and looked around. Her eyes had adjusted now, and the tiny window allowed in just enough light to make out the extent of her surroundings.
The whole attic room was no more than fifteen by twenty feet but other than a few boxes, and the pile of clothes and bones at its centre it was empty, so it appeared larger. Behind each box there was a shadow, and the beams above obscured the shape even more, making the room hard to decipher even though it was small.
Perhaps the movement she saw was a bird moving past the small window, or perhaps just a cloud passing across the path of sunlight, it was possible; but she didn’t but it. Her ability to read the room was churning behind her eyes, trying to make sense of things.
There was something here; she was sure of it.
Then she saw a flicker, or perhaps sensed a flicker was a better way of putting it. Near the hatch leading into the building below, between her and the pile of clothes there was an area that drew her eye, a white smudge like a smear of oil on eyeglasses. Then the smudge moved of its own accord and suddenly she saw another woman in the attic, a woman in white whose face was obscured by a thick veil, a bride.
She had never seen anything like it, she had never seen mysterious lights in the sky or the apparitions she sometimes read about in tabloids. Her job was one of cause-and-effects and the all too predictable horrors of human nature, so she had little time for anything else, she was an eminently practical woman; but what she saw, she knew, could only be described as a ghost.
It was as if the world had been pulled out from under her, and everything about it was forgotten as she watched the Bride; and the Bride watched her back.
She was afraid to blink as she slowly moved forward, standing as the roof angled upward, not taking her eyes off the Bride. The Bride didn’t move and she couldn’t tell if the Bride was even really looking at her from behind her veil, but she felt that she was. The woman didn’t know if she was moving towards the Bride or towards the hatch through which to escape. Her heart was racing, and her breathing was coming in short quick breaths; but she didn’t think it was out of fear. She didn’t feel any hostility from the Bride, she didn’t… then she remembered the bodies in the kitchen downstairs; the argument they must have had and the carnage it had caused.
As well as the obvious implications.
She thought of the man now, huddled in the corner out of her field of view. She wanted to turn to look at him, wondering what he might have concealed in that fabric he clutched in his hands. She could hear no movement but that didn’t mean he was not creeping up on her as she stood transfixed by the apparition in front of her.
Did the danger lie ahead of her or behind?
Was there any danger at all?
She stepped to her left and moved in a slow circle, still moving towards the hatch but keeping it between herself and the Bride. If the man was where she left him she should be able to see him on her right, but there was no sound and no movement apart from her own, even as she reached the hatch and swung her legs over into the space under it the Bride hadn’t moved and it was then that she glanced over to where she left her colleague.
Hands grasped her, a man’s hands wrapping around her wrist and holding on with a strength that seemed inhuman; but this was nothing, because then something else grasped her other wrist, something impossibly cold that froze the marrow in her bones. The man had followed her arc around the attic, one step behind her all the way, and now she found herself trapped between the spirit and the man both intent on keeping her exactly where she was.
The Bride leaned in close, her face hidden in the gloom by the veil that covered it. The woman’s breath was heavy now but none of the sharp exhales disturbed the lace. She pulled at the forces holding her still, her legs dangling into the hallway beneath her, she slid from the edge of the hatch, held aloft by the man and his ghostly accomplice.
The woman screamed and the world around her blurred. She thought she saw the man shake his head, she thought she saw the man’s say something, but she could not hear him over her own shrieks. They were not shrieks of fear, they were of rage, of frustration and she felt the icy grip of the spirit lessen and her body drop a few inches as the man took up the strain of holding her; she shrieked again and, one arm free now, struck out with a round-house that connected with the side of the man’s head and then she fell.
The top of the stepladder hit her in the middle of her back, and she tumbled down it, flipping over sideways until she slammed into the hallway carpet, her feet facing the stairs that lead down to safety. Above her two moon-like face stared down at her, the man was shaking his head slowly as if witnessing something horrible with which he had no control.
She rolled to her feet and half ran, half fell down the stairs; she was halfway down when she heard two sounds simultaneously, two voices overlapping, one from above and one from below. The gentle one from above said the words “I love you” with a level of weariness that hurt the ears, and the other voice came from below, from a place at the foot of the stairs.
“I hate you.” It said, and now the woman did feel fear, sudden and overwhelming fear and when she screamed it was of terror.
The Groom stood at the foot of the stairs, his white shirt starched and gleaming and his shoes glistening with polish. The woman knew what this was too, he looked as real as herself, but she knew that he wasn’t, nothing could possess such hatred in its eyes and still live.
She was still moving down the stairs, the momentum too great to easily dispel, and this momentum carried the woman down into the waiting arms of the Groom; and the last thing the woman saw was the things outstretched hands, its fingers bone thin, the tips all but breaking through the spectral skin, as sharp as knives.
In the attic the Bride wrapped her arms around the man and the man listened to the screams from below. The screams did not last long, and he was grateful for that small mercy, the Bride was too, though she could not express it.
The man dragged the hatch closed.
“I love you.” He said.
“I love you” The Bride replied, and for the moment the man felt safe.