Billy was neither surprised nor bothered when the clouds began to form. According to the TV the good weather should have remained unbroken until the following Monday, but as midday arrived on the last Friday of Billy’s holiday the heavens opened, and the rain began to pour.
It didn’t surprise him because it always seemed to rain when he visited his grandfather. There had been a day a few years previously when Billy had visited the old man during the longest period of unbroken sunshine for thirty years; but Billy knew that his visit would break the spell. He had been so certain in fact that he had wagered against colleagues at work and as he had predicted, he won.
As the rain began to fall, he watched unconcerned; it didn’t bother him because of the man sat in the armchair in the room’s corner, and the stories he told under its influence.
In Billy’s opinion the old man had far too much hair for someone of his age and the way he combed it into a careful quiff made him look like an ageing country singer.
Unfortunately, his singing voice may be the reason for the rain.
Billy turned from the old man and watched the rain run rivulets down the living room window; and as the day wore on it seemed that there was no sign of it stopping.
The sun had begun its descent when the old man passed the small photograph to the young man without comment. Billy looked at it, the aged black and white photograph had been torn and creased and in places it was little thicker than tissue paper. The young woman in it wasn’t smiling but it seemed like she might at any moment and Billy thought he saw something deeply mischievous behind her eyes.
“So, who is she Granddad?” he asked and passed the photograph back to the old man. Its blacks were bleached to grey, and the whites stained yellow by time. The old man accepted it, peering into the four-inch square of paper with eyes that no longer picked out the detail they once did.
“I think that she was my first love.”
He slipped the photo back into his wallet and Billy sat in the chair on the opposite site of the fireplace. The young man made himself comfortable, the rain pattered one the window behind him and it sent shadow streaks across the room. Some of them ran over the contours of his grandfather’s face; and for a moment it looked as though he was crying.
It was raining the day she was buried, rain that fell heavily enough it turned the ground to sludge beneath the mourners’ feet. Here and there people slipped on the slick surface and the rainwater fell into the grave, pattering the wood of the coffin as if gently trying to wake the occupant inside.
Tears were washed away by the constant rain, the sermon drowned out by it, the mourners shuddering with grief and cold. Time would rob them of each other’s faces, it would take their memories and bleach them until no detail remained but the loss. Time was a thief; and it took everything in the end.
The young man who would, in time, become a father and then a grandfather was little more than a boy, and this had been the first loss of many in his long life; but he was not to know this. All he knew was that his world had ended, and he would never again feel the feeling he felt when he held Elizabeth’s hand.
He didn’t know it but in this he would be correct.
Was it hours, days, or weeks before when he was told of her passing? He didn’t know. The grey skies would not even throw him a clue as to whether it was night or day. Did they have funerals in the night; did they have them in the rain for that matter?
It was raining; and this was a…
He didn’t want to finish that thought.
Pneumonia, his grandmother had died of it, and he thought it an ailment for the old. Elizabeth was young, she was strong and so very alive; none of this could be true.
In a moment all those sour faces would break into laughter at his expense and Elizabeth would reveal herself from behind a tree. He would be angry at the deception but too pleased to care.
Please, let that be true.
Please, there is nothing he would not give.
When he had heard the words, he felt a pain that he could not describe rip through him, he felt his heart rupture in something that resembled a physical pain but was something more.
His father told him he was only thirteen and did not know what love was, he told him that life would be long, and time healed; but as much as he loved his father he knew when he heard those words that his father was a fool.
This pain would never end.
He looked around him and saw the mourners dispersing, he could see the backs of his parents through the sheets of rain. They had left him to his grief and, fools or not, he loved them for that.
It did not take long until only he remained beside the open grave. He watched the rain hit the top of the coffin, a child’s coffin, far too small to contain her surely?
He looked around him, for a moment convinced beyond reason that she would now reveal herself; and it was then he saw the man. He seemed to step out of nowhere, his shirt soaked through to his scrawny chest and his lank blonde hair plastered to his misshapen skull. He was no taller than the boy, perhaps even a little shorter and the boy probably easily outweighed him.
The man stared down into the open grave giving the boy an unobstructed view of his profile. His face was thin too, his dark skin sunken at the cheeks and stretched tissue thin in places revealing networks of veins at his temples.
“Did you know of her?”
His voice was the death rattle of a sick man.
The boy did not trust his ability to create words, so he just nodded.
For a time, they stood in silence, silence but for the continual rumble of the rain on the muddy earth, like two old friends comfortable in each other’s presence.
“I’ve stood by many graves in my time.” He looked up and rain fell on his upturned face. “And every time it seems to be raining.”
His storm blue eyes narrowed; then closed.
“I love the rain; I hear you people complaining about it and you don’t know how lucky you are. Where I grew up, we prayed for rain; we…”
Abruptly he stopped and turned his head to face the boy.
“Do you want to hear a story boy?”
Either the boy nodded, or the man decided to speak anyway.
“This not only happened long ago but, in a land, far from here, a land that consisted of desert larger than you could imagine. It was a difficult life out there amongst the dunes but, in some ways, it may have been richer in its simplicity.”
“An Empire occupied this land; whether they ruled well or not I can’t say but in this land the Empire had a tenuous grip at best, the locals were too strong a spiritual people who often took more notice of their holy men than the words of their governor.
“And this land teemed with its’ holy people, every way you turned another messenger was telling the people to rise up; or bow down. Anna was one such, holy to some and devil to others and when she came down from her hovel in the hills the people would perk up and take notice.
“It was custom to present to the local religious leaders their first-born male child – don’t ask me why, it was their way. So, Anna arrived at the council’s temple, approaching a couple with a newborn son. She gathered the child into her arms and announced to all who would listen that this child would be some great redeemer.
“Did the Empire laugh!
“The man and wife returned to their home with the child, and the Empire forgot about them; not that the people did. News of this little savior spread and between precocious discussions with law makers and the occasional sacking of a temple the Empire was forced to pay attention to him again. Eventually the Empire heard too much and decided on they wanted him dead. So, the powers that be, brought him to us and we killed him.
“He was led to the place called Golgotha, the place of the skull, a little hill that served for executions and every step of the way to it we hounded him. We draped him in the purple robes of royalty and jammed a crown of Gundelia thorns in his head. He was mocked and cursed even as the stakes of wood was driven through his flesh.”
The rain still fell but the boy thought it was beginning to thin and above them spots of blue could be made out through the grey.
“Do you think that was my story boy? Well, it wasn’t.
“Three days later the man’s grave was found empty and that night he visited me in a dream. I was in the fields I played in while a youth, a lifetime away from the dust and sand and he sat with me on the grass as I weaved reeds into a horse harness. His face was torn from the Gundelia thorns and when I looked down, I could see the folds of his organs through a lance wound in his side.
“He spoke of outliving the oceans and I told him he would; but then he smiled a sad smile and said ‘no, not I’ and then I woke to horror. I didn’t realize it at first, but I began noticing old scars mend and old aches fade and I knew that the dream wasn’t just a dream. My skin had turned to something flawless, and I no longer found solace in sleep. I sat awake watching horrified as the pores on the back of my hands closed up, as my heart stopped, as my breath ceased; as I died without death.”
The breaks in the clouds were wider now, but the sunlight was just as muted. The rain had transformed into little more than mist that settled on the boy’s face as a cool spray. He felt the breeze cut through him, but the chill he felt had little to do with the weather.
“Then came the thirst.”
The man’s words were little more than a whisper and the boy asked himself if he had heard what he thought he had heard. The boy felt himself shudder and he looked around the cemetery; the mourners long since gone, but when he looked back at the man, he wished he hadn’t.
The man’s eyes drilled into the boy, their dirty blue the same colour as the sky above, a tainted blue of purity defiled. It was only then that the boy realized that the man was skinny, yes, but he was not weak, and he carried a snakelike menace.
“But that isn’t my story either.”
The step he took toward the boy was not menacing; but the boy still took a step back.
“My story began with the dreams I had after; the dreams and the hunger.”
He took another step, and as the boy took a further step back, he felt his feet slip on the waterlogged earth. He did not fall but it was close.
“You can’t do what I did and keep your soul.”
The man lunged and the boy ran, and he did not stop running until he reached home.
Billy’s Grandfather hunched sideways in his chair and reached down to press the heel of his hand against his right hip. The sun had disappeared over the horizon and Billy realized the room was uncomfortably dark. He rose and turned on the light, his grandfather squinting against the sudden glare.
Billy stood with his hand on the light-switch unable to move for the moment, thankful of something to distract himself from the questions.
“Make a cup of tea Billy, I need a drink.”
Billy didn’t move.
“Don’t stand there like an idiot Billy; tea, in cup, in hand.”
Billy exited to the kitchen while the old man watched the rain patter against the window.
The old man felt very old, the story – the telling of it – had aged him but the time came when secrets weighed too heavy to hold by yourself anymore, besides; it was almost over.
He reached into his wallet and took out the photograph.
Elizabeth had been born in the same hospital as he was, within an hour of his own birth, and his earliest memories were all of her and he owed her a confession; and a confession was only a confession if told to someone else.
In the kitchen he could hear Billy searching for the tea as the kettle began to boil. When the boy returned with the mug of tea the old man gratefully took it; he steeled himself and continued.
The boy stripped off his clothes and almost scalded his skin in the water he poured in the tin tub the family used as a bath. In the tiny bathroom the steam pressed against him and obscured anything further away than his own hands; even his feet at the other end of the tub were in a place of mystery. He washed and scrubbed and washed again, unsure of what he was trying to wash away, knowing that memory wasn’t so easily banished.
The final image of the man would not fade.
The boy didn’t know the word cadaverous, but when he first heard the word some years later, he thought of the man in the cemetery and when his friends went to see the Universal horror pictures and later the Hammer films the boy would never go with them. He knew the reality and he knew those films were not merely entertainment, even if they thought they were.
There was real horror in the world.
Eventually he climbed from the bath and dried off. His parents were in the living room, quietly listening no doubt. The boy wrapped a towel around him and crept across the hallway and up the stairs to his room. He moved silently and did not hear movement from where his parents sat; all he heard was the radio playing with its volume turned low, but nothing more.
His room was the smallest, they called it the box-room, but it was big enough for his clothes and his books and that was all the boy needed. There would be a time soon when the family would move to a modern building, complete with upstairs bathroom and central heating. His mother would miss the stone pantry and his father would miss the large garden; but the boy would miss nothing and would wake every morning after the move thankful for it.
Perhaps, he always thought, it would mean I wouldn’t be found.
Like I was that night.
Unaware of all this the boy pulled on his pyjamas and climbed into bed. It took a long time but eventually he slept a sleep of shadowy dreams.
When the pain woke him, he could not even place where he was. Outside of the open window the sky was black as pitch, not even a star shone and inside the room it was as silent as a grave. He was cold in spite of the blankets covering him, perhaps it was because of the open window.
He didn’t remember opening the window.
His wrist stung, the cold making his fingertips tingle unpleasantly. The palm of his hand felt as though it was clamped in a workman’s vice. He turned lazily to draw his arm back under the covers.
But it did not move.
“You’re not in here alone boy.”
The voice was the whisper of a corpse, it was a voice of a thing that liked to tell stories and visit graves and it belonged to something that liked the rain. The boys’ eyes adjusted, and the darkness began to split into shades of grey, a square of a window and the flattened oval of the mirror on his mother’s old dressing table. On the wall was the vague outlines of the John Wayne poster his father had brought back from a visit to London, and beneath this was the sunken shape of a man.
He clutched his thin legs against his chest with his reed thin arms, his angular head resting on his bony knees.
“Don’t make a sound boy, we wouldn’t want to wake Momma and Papa now.”
The boy could still not move his arm, his whole body felt leaden and cold.
“It was rude of you to run before I’d finished my story. Your parents would be disappointed in such a rude child. I am a visitor here after all; let me finish and I’ll be on my way. Where was I? The killing of the troublemaker? The curse? The dream? Let me think.
“No, it was the dreams I had after, as well as the hunger.
“The man we killed was a messenger, but he was carrying two messages; not just the one everyone heard. While all his followers roamed the dusty dunes with him talking of their God, they didn’t consider the other side of that coin; and it was that other side that visited me and made me what I am today.
“Sorry, how rude of me; what we are today…”
On cue the boy heard a slurp, the same sound he would sometimes make if his parents took him to an ice-cream parlour after one of their rare visits to the cinema together. It was the sound of someone trying to get the very last drop of melted ice-cream from the bottom of a bowl; and then he realised why he couldn’t move his arm.
With his other hand he reached for the thread that would turn on his bedside lamp. His flesh was cold and did not want to move, and now he thought he knew why this was. On the first attempt he missed the fine chain that dangled under the ornate shade, a shade more fitting to a girls’ room than his own, then on the second he caught it but didn’t manage to flood the room with light. Instead, there was the briefest illumination, a blink of light and in it he saw the man curled under his poster and the room as it should be around him; and beside the bed a huddled mass that may have been a person but may have been something else.
He reached again and this time the light caught; and for the second time that day he wished he hadn’t looked.
The grave dirt still clung to her hair and the white dress she wore was stained red by his blood. She had his wrist clamped between her teeth and she clutched at the palm of his hand with a strength she was not even capable of in life.
Hours ago, he had wished for it and now it had become reality his mind rebelled against it. He had said he would pay any price and as that thought ran through his mind, he heard the man cackle to himself quietly.
“You had so desperately wanted her back; I thought it the least I could do after you listened so patiently to my tale.”
With a sound much like that of water rushing from a tap he felt the blood drawn from his body and the world around him grew grey. The room tilted and swam, and a throbbing pain reached up from the nape of his neck and squeezed the soft jelly of his brain. What happened next was not intended. The hand that clutched the thin chain that led to the bedside light convulsed, dragging the light with it. The shadows of the room elongated then retreated as the light arced over the boys’ prone vulnerable form.
The ceramic base of the light hit the girl and shattered. She pulled back in a sharp birdlike movement, her eyes glittering as the lampshade fell away. The bare bulb illuminated her in a hard cold light and the boy pulled his arm out of her grasp.
Elizabeth’s eyes had been the brilliant green of a meadow and her skin had been as flawless as the Hollywood femme fatales that graced the big screen; but what she was paled next to what she had become. Her eyes were not merely green, they shone like twin range-lights on the shore and her skin was as smooth and pale as bone China. The red that decorated her mouth stood out against her skin and the boy found himself captivated by it.
Movement fluttered across the wall, a living shadow the slid soundlessly to the window; then the man was there, his thin fingers clutching the frame and his face reflecting the meagre light from the moon. No smile pulled at those pale lips; the remnants of his benign veneer finally gone.
“Heaven has no place for me boy, and time is all I have.”
Then he was gone, perhaps he evaporated and was carried away on the wind.
Pain cut into the boy once more, sharp incisors slicing through the soft flesh of his wrist, and fresh blood flowed. The sound she made were more urgent now, gone was the gentle lapping to be replaced by a gnawing and a scraping as her teeth met with the bones of his wrist.
Through the window he could see the first rays of dawn, perhaps the first sunlight he had seen in the days since Elizabeth’s death. The colour in it waned and ebbed as the blood was drained from him, the hard edges of the window frame softening and twisting as his consciousness began to leave him. Then, suddenly the thing that had been Elizabeth released him and screeched.
A thin ribbon of smoke rose from her arm as the sunlight hit her and the boy knew what he should do. He knew; he knew but he did not want to. He wanted to die now; he wanted the price to be paid. The pain filled him, but her touch restored him and the one was worthy of the other.
But then he heard a call from across the landing from his parents’ room, they had heard the screech from the Elizabeth-thing. Soon they would burst through the door, and she would be on them. The boy was willing to pay the price, he wanted to pay the price; but some prices were too high.
He rolled from the bed and landed on her, rolling until his back was to the floor and she was on top of him. He wrapped his arms around her, and she kicked against him. She opened her mouth to screech, and he jammed his bloodied wrist into it, silencing her.
She thrashed as the dawn’s rays hit her pale flesh, her legs pounded, her feet slamming into the floor. The boy heard shouts from his parents’ room. Under his tightening grip he felt something in her body give, a desiccated crunch as something collapsed inside her, her thrashing was feeble now and he saw spots of black creep up her white flesh in growing colonies. As she twisted against him ash flew from her and he saw in fascinated horror that the black spots were not on her, but in her. Urgent footsteps pounded across the landing and his father’s shoulder slammed into the door, the wood cracking as it was forced open.
By then nothing was left of Elizabeth but the fine ash that the morning breeze carried out of the window and into the new day.
The old man drank the remains of his tea and peered into the cup as if his scrutiny would magically refill it, he waited until he was sure this wouldn’t happen then placed the cup on the coaster on the side of the fire-surround.
Across from him Billy sat with elbows on knees, perched so close to the edge of his seat he threatened to slide off.
“I was taken to the hospital and once they patched me up, I was sent to a psychiatrist, and it was touch and go whether I’d be allowed back home. Eventually they accepted they it was a cry for help and my parents paid very close scrutiny to everything I did for some time after that.”
“They thought you’d tried to kill yourself?”
The old man nodded then leaned forward and presented his wrist for Billy to see.
A mass of scars ran across it, looking faintly but unmistakably like the arcs that teeth might make.
“It was stress they said, it was loss they said, it was a cry for help they said; and I never corrected them, never told my story until now.”
“No one would believe you.”
“No one except you Billy.”
Billy recoiled slightly as if slapped, he was unsure of what shocked him the most, the fact that his grandfather had said such a thing or that fact that he suddenly realised the truth in the words. He did believe the story, every word of it; but he would never pass it on, ever, for fear of how its recipients would look at him afterwards.
“For a very long time I convinced myself it was just a grief inspired fantasy, it was another ten years – I was in the army – when the story came back to…”
The old man stopped, and with a grunt he rose from his chair.
“It’s late, I’m off to bed. Will you wake me ‘fore you leave tomorrow?”
“Yes, sure… Hold on… How did the story come back?”
“Ah, its late Billy, I got to sleep.”
“But…”
The old man paused at the living room door, he grimaced and wedged his fist against his back.
“It was when I was in the army, I was stationed abroad when I saw the man again.” He grinned, his eyes far away. “But I was a young man then, a strong ‘un too! I don’t think our second encounter went as the rascal planned!”
“What?! You met him again, how?”
“Ah! It’s too late Billy. Remind me next time you visit…” He opened the door and stepped through. “Night Billy; remember to wake me.”
Billy slumped back into the chair, listening to his grandfather slowly take the stairs and hearing the creak of the floorboards as he made his way to his room.
Billy was alone in the silence, accompanied only by his own irritation.