It began with a crack in the far wall of the garage, the wall that faced the long garden that merged with the wood beyond. The crack that began at the top of the wall just under the corrugated flat roof that drummed a tribal ritual when it rained.
The fissure ran down the wall almost to the row of blue bricks at its base and when Charlie stood back from it, he could clearly see that either side of the garage listed out the further up the wall you looked. If he left it long enough, he could imagine it splitting in two and the roof crushing him one day while he worked.
Overall, not the best plan he could imagine for his future.
He trained his eye on the base of the wall to the slightly raised area of earth where his mother had planted three rose bushes that never seemed to bloom. Beneath one corner of the garage wall, he could see an indentation of earth and he prodded it with the toe of one scarred shoe. Dirt fell away into a small hole that had formed under a thin crust cobwebbed with roots.
He walked back to the house and found the phone.
Charlie and Aaron had known each other for a little over fifteen years and though their lives took very different paths after they had met in the last year of school, Aaron becoming a builder while Charlie became an artist, they had always stayed in touch.
Aaron walked around the back of the garage and inspected the damage. He dropped a plumb line down from the brickwork at the top of the wall and let it fall. At the base of the wall the line was easily three inches out from the bricks.
“Subsidence.” He said.
“Bad?” Charlie knew it was, he just needed to hear the words.
“Yeah, pretty bad.” He sighed and looked down the garden to the wood. “Some of the buildings south of here have it worse, you’re lucky; really.”
“How so?”
Aaron pointed over to the east and the new industrial estate half hidden by the wood. “All along here was reclaimed land; it was marsh here before. You never wondered why they call it The Marshlands Estate?”
Charlie shook his head.
“Well, that’s why. It used to be marshland from here right on over to the old rectory. Apparently, the church over in Cross Heath used to have their coffins push back to the surface sometimes.”
“Really?”
“I dunno, it might be true.” He grinned. “It sounds good anyway.”
He walked back over to the narrow crazy paving path that led back to the house and nodded for Charlie to follow.
“C’mon mate, let’s see what kind of damage this problems gonna be.”
Aaron was what most considered a character, less charitable observers might think of him in more severe terms, but Charlie liked character best. It was true that he could be bawdy, and he often earned the label of being rather sexist and sometime perhaps even a little racist; but Charlie thought it more than likely he was just a bit misunderstood.
Aaron had an excitable nature and would sometime say things in humour that others might find offensive. Charlie had developed a rather thick skin to his comments, but he still sometimes cringed when he was in public, and Aaron would start up on a controversial issue.
Charlies’ friend wasn’t a violent man and he tended to avoid physical conflicts, but he was very body conscious, he played sports and worked out; and it was because of all these reasons that his reaction later that day stayed with Charlie for the rest of his short life.
Charlie was working in the living room when he heard the scream. He had placed cover sheets down across the carpet and was working on the Richmond commission when the sound cut through the air. It was not a sound he immediately recognised as one made by a human being. It was high and shrill and something that belonged in dense jungle rather than a relatively affluent suburb.
For a moment he stood with paintbrush in hand staring towards the doorway leading to the hall that led through to the rear of the house.
“Mother?” He said, the word flat in the empty house. He knew she wasn’t there; she was in the city with friends – she was nearly always in the city with friends – and he was home alone.
Then realisation struck him, and he dropped the paintbrush into a half jar of spirits and made his way to the backdoor, his feet moving more rapidly as he neared it. When he stepped from the back door and into the small conservatory that was lined either side with plants the sight that awaited him rooted him to the spot.
Aaron’s arm was pasted in crimson up to his bicep, the whole right side of his body splattered in red. His face was white as a newly pressed sheet and his wide eyes registered nothing but shock.
“It bit me…” He said with a tone of amazement.
Charlie returned to the kitchen and grabbed the small first aid case that his mother had insisted they purchase and returned to the conservatory to see Aaron seated in one of the green painted cast iron garden chairs. Later he would notice something else when he thought of the day, something that meant more as he realised the importance of the event.
Even in his weakened and potentially life-threatening state Aaron had taken the time to close and lock the conservatory door.
Charlie patched it up, winding the cheap bandage tight enough to make Aaron cry out and then phoned for an ambulance. It had been a bite, a snake bite perhaps that left two of irregular holes that had torn flesh in a curve from his index finger to the outside of his palm. Across the back of his hand the wound reached to the bones of his palm and the blood ran like a faulty faucet.
Aaron’s skin was cold, and Charlie thought he could see blue creeping into the pale flesh of his friend’s face.
“What happened?” Charlie asked, Aaron’s eyes rolled closed, and Charlie shook him. “Wake up Arry; what happened, what was it?”
Aaron shook his head; it lolled back and forth as though the bones of his neck had turned to jelly.
“Something buried…” His eyes grew wide. “Small like a kid, but when it opened it eyes, they were so big!”
Charlie looked through the conservatory window. The garage was surrounded by a small network of scaffolding pipes that braced the broken brickwork. Through it he could make out the path but not the excavation at the rear of the building.
“A nest? A fox, a badger set?” Charlie asked.
Aaron didn’t answer but Charlie didn’t need him too. The look in his eyes were enough. Aaron was no stranger to animals invading his workspace and he wasn’t averse to invading an animal’s living space if called on to do so. Dealing with vermin was a part of his job and something he would take in his stride; this was something different.
The confused and frightened look in Aaron’s eyes was evidence of it.
When the ambulance left with Aaron strapped to a bed in the back Charlie unlocked the conservatory door and made his way down the crazy paving and under the network of pipes fastened to the garage.
Behind it a pile of earth was piled on top a thick tarpaulin and a wheelbarrow filled with builders’ rubble was sat beside a large hole dug down the side corner of the garage. Gingerly Charlie walked over and peered inside.
Aaron had dug down about four feet and then stopped.
Charlie looked down into the pit for a long time, there was something odd about the bottom of the hole his friend had dug. Instead of the uneven floor scarred with the sharp edge of a shovel there was a bowl-like indentation that showed slight creases as if it had been moulded into shape; or as if something had been curled up there, sleeping.
Something that had perhaps awoken in fright and lashed out.
Something that had crawled out, making the muddy tracks that led in the direction of the wood at the foot of the garden; the very tracks Charlie found himself following with his gaze.
His mother stood at the kitchen window staring across the garden. She had spent the day with the women of the book club she attended, they had watched a cinematic adaptation of a book they had read and had spent a few hours in criticism.
Now she found something else that could do with a bit of criticism but her look of good, humoured suffering said all that needed to be said.
He ran though the events of the day leading up to his inspection of the pit, but not speaking of it or his thoughts concerning it. And her face softened. She knew Aaron, she had often fed him in his youth and had seen him grow to an adult and, though she had never said it, Charlie knew she liked him.
“So how is he?” She asked and Charlie had to admit he hadn’t tried to contact him. His mother gave him that look that only truly disappointed parent are able to produce and admitted defeat instantly.
He rang and the ringtone buzzed in his ear for a very long time before Charlie admitted another defeat. Aaron didn’t answer that evening, and Charlie and his mother didn’t know it, but they would never hear from him again.
The evening darkened and the night fell and with it a cool mist hung close to the ground, perhaps drawn from the earth in the frigid night air.
The cold seemed cruel, and its sudden arrival caught Charlie and his mother off guard. The house had not been heated in preparation for the sudden cold and though the heating had been turned on the icy air had clung to the house they shared and did not seem to want to move on.
Mother retired early and Charlie knew she would probably read for a while before she slept, and he turned the radio on low to listen to a serialised novel that had been broadcast over the previous weeks.
He tried not to think of the pit outside, the trail leading from it or the injury his friend had received; slowly, with the radio broadcast murmuring in the background he drifted off to sleep.
When it returned from the wood it was so late that even the owls were considering sleep. It moved like something unaccustomed to land, something that’s usual habitat was the ocean; but it had never seen the sea. Many, many years before, in a previous life it had visited the river daily to retrieve water, but that was the closest it ever came to the sea.
Its skin was leathery, but the moist mist made it shine with reflected moonlight, once its skin had shone with a lustre all of its own and its beauty could charm man and beast alike; but now that beauty had gone.
It slithered towards the building, laboriously making its way past the pit in which it had slept for so many years and towards the building in which it has seen the man enter. It had lost its beauty and its standing in the world, but what was lost could be regained; all it took was time, and time is something of which it had plenty.
It hit the door with a wet clump to find it closed and sturdy; it considered its options.
With eyes that were not restricted by bone it looked around, the eyes growing large, ballooning until they were the size of its head, irises huge; and light flooded into it, the world around as clear as day.
A grating led into the building, a man’s height above the hard ground. The opening in it were small, tiny enough that perhaps only an insect could enter but that would not deter it. It slithered up the wall, clinging to the hard surface with every molecule of its flesh, until it reached the grating, then drip by dip it forced its body through the tiny gaps. First it deflated an eye and popped that through, then and ear, then teeth, one by one; slowly it fed its body to the building and crept along the crevices inside towards the lives it knew resided within.
It seeped upward towards where they slept, over and around steel and wood and between the cracks between floorboards. In the bedroom the carpet rose like a boil, pulling furniture towards it, then it pushed its teeth up to the surface of its flesh and used them to slice through the thick woven floor covering. The boil burst and the creature spewed out into the bedroom. Around it the furnishings were in disarray, but nothing had fallen or broken, and the occupant still slept.
The creature pushed upwards onto what was once its legs until it swayed over the bed and the person inside. Most of its bones had long since turned to a pulp, the chemicals of the marsh having eaten away the calcium within them; calcium it needed back if it were to survive. The man who had released it earlier had provided it with some of what it needed but it needed more, far more.
Like the hood of a cobra, it extended its flesh and fell forward onto its sleeping victim, and again it pushed its teeth to its surface and shredded the bed and its occupant, drinking it in like a spider does a fly.
Mere feet away the other occupant of the house slept a restless, troubled sleep. Dreams invaded and made the figure thrash in their slumber, tying themselves into knotted bed sheets and staining the bed covers in their sweat. The dreams were of formless things and dark volcanic caverns; they were of the juvenile fears of youth but also of the half-understood desires of the flesh and in these dreams the dreamers heart raced.
Over the sleeper stood a figure on sturdy legs, looking over him with sharp eyes that once swayed ancient rulers. With grace that had been stolen then returned it slid beside him on the bed and swung an arm over his sleeping form.
Then the dreamers dream changed as comfort drove away the horror.
The following morning drifted to the dreamer, but the dreamer didn’t wake. Sunlight managed to find its way past the shredded curtains and the thick vine that had grown through them in the night, leaves fluttered in the breeze admitted by tiny cracks between window and frame and here and there an insect buzzed.
If the dreamer had woken, he would not have been aware of the fact the room had changed so much in so few hours. The carpet could not be seen through the moss that had eaten away at it and the walls were now a barrier of green. The door to the hallway had rotted away and now there was an oval of foliage in its place.
The sleeper slept on a bed that was now little more than a mound of earth. The wood had been taken by the encroachment of the marsh and the sleeper’s body had sunken into its warm embrace.
Beside the sleeper was another form, it had two arms and two legs and a head that housed features that were beautiful once more. Its leathery skin had regained its lustre and its fine fingers were now tipped with slim nails that were perfect and translucent.
Her eyes moved under perfect curves of closed eyelids and if both sleepers awoke and he saw those eyes he would be lost in another dream completely; but that sleeper would never again awake.
The woman had one arm draped over the man as a lover might, and the image may have been a romantic one for someone who did not look closely enough. An observer may have been taken by the woman’s beauty or the intricate tattoo that covered much of her slender back, if that observer was not to see the smears of an old woman’s blood across her tanned flesh or the sinister forms within the tattoos.
Inside the dream he thought the woman was his fantasy, unaware that he was hers, and the fantastical world in which he found himself was a familiar one to her and nothing more than a dream of her long-lost home. In it she was a priestess once more and she was worshipped as was her right, and he was her worshipper; and worship her he did.
The village of the dream was made of homes of wicker forming a circle the centre of which the Priestess made her temple, and as the man worshipped and hunted and repaired the huts, he did not feel his real-world body slowly waste away. He didn’t feel his bones liquefy and he did not feel the nutrients being drained from him by the woman who shared his mossy bed.
The bandage had been removed and the bite had faded to a thin chain of scars when Aaron knocked on Charlie’s door, and even as he did so he was unsure he had arrived at the right house. Where there had been plain red brick there was now a creeping vine that had all but covered the whole front of the building.
It was good work, he mused, it looked very natural, and he would have to ask who Charlie had hired. In fact, it had transformed the house into something resembling a country cottage; no doubt putting a good amount of money on any resale value.
Again, he rapped his knuckles on the door.
The door could do with a coat of mind, he thought as he saw a sliver of blue paint curl away from the wood.
He had tried to call his old friend but there had been no answer and eventually he decided to take potluck on whether he found Charlie in; he knocked again. It seemed that his journey had been a wasted one and he had turned up on one of those very rare occasions when Charlie had gone out, so Aaron turned to leave.
It was then, of course, that he heard the door open.
When he turned, he was momentarily lost for words.
The woman who answered the door was small and slight of build but had a radiance that made him want to look up at her as if she naturally belonged on a pedestal. Aaron smiled, not knowing that he looked suddenly far younger than his years and stepped closer.
“Hi,” he said, “is Charles home?”
The woman smiled back, and Aaron thought that she must have been a model Charlie had hired for one of his projects, a painting perhaps. She wore a pair of jeans far too large for her and a t-shirt that Aaron thought he recognised as Charlies. She smiled more broadly and stepped aside for him to enter, he did and behind him the woman swung the front door closed.
The hallway was cool and dimly lit. The carpet felt thick, and the wallpaper seemed darker and more densely patterned than he remembered; in fact, it all felt wrong.
But it did not feel wrong for long.
He turned but didn’t see what struck him, and even before his head hit the moss that now covered the entire ground floor, he was already far removed from the world in which he had grown up and lived for so many years. His new world was one of villages and temples and amid it all was a beautiful priestess who was to be admired and worshipped.
Even as the vine dissolved his body, and the woman drank in his remains he worshipped her and tended to her; and found that he had never been so happy.