Sarah Wilson lived in an audio world. She thought in sound, saw in sound. She heard colours and listened to taste; a delicious meal was a symphony; a brilliant view was a concert played out before her eyes. As a child, she had once been mesmerised by the pitch of a dog’s yelp as it was kicked by a small boy. It hit the right note, somehow. Another time, the gasps of a schoolmate who’d just broken his arm falling from the monkey bars, drawing breath for a scream. They sounded to her like gusts of wind down an autumn street. As she grew older, an idea began to build up inside her, something new and exciting. This music only she could hear – what if she collected it? Distilled it to perfection in a way that only she, with her unique talent, could? What if she made a symphony to her own taste?

So, she had cleaned out the basement: piles of leaves and cobwebs obliterated, along with their inhabitants. She’d particularly enjoyed getting rid of the rats – their squeals and chitters had a range and frequency all of their own, especially when tails were cut and legs twisted. When the area was clear of all but the concrete and wooden rafters, she set up a studio. She padded the walls with the highest quality material and crafted every inch to make the acoustics just right. She spent grocery money on microphones, and recording devices of supreme accuracy, which she set up at specific angles and locations around the space.

            Finally, she fitted the rear wall with bolts, cuffs, and loops through which she might thread thin ropes – she didn’t want clinking chains to interfere with the quality of her composition.

‘I wrote a song, do you want to hear it?’ Sarah said.

            Xander didn’t answer immediately. He was standing in the middle of what was supposed to be a living room, but was lacking the furniture to make it worth actually living in. A guitar lay on the dusty floor in the middle of the room, and a single lightbulb hung from a wire above it. Artists, he thought. Can’t live with em…

            ‘It’s about a ghost girl who falls in love with a woman – a living one – and then kills her so they can be together.’ She was sitting up on her kitchen counter, watching him the way a cat might: unsure of him and his intentions, sizing him up with one paw raised and ready to run.

He gave her his most charming smile, trying to put her at ease. So far, the night had gone like nothing else he’d experienced. Usually girls like her – aspiring singers or musicians – would gush over him, or themselves, or music, or all of the above. They were always too eager to lay him or get him to listen to their album. Sarah, however, had spent most of their first date cracking the lobster she’d ordered (on his bill) and talking about the ocean. ‘Did you know it goes deeper than mount Everest is tall? There are less people that have been down there than on the moon.’ That was, of course, when she spoke at all – mostly it was just him on a monologue about what he did, as if he was trying to impress her. He supposed he was. For all his chops and status in the industry, even the singers he dealt with didn’t look this good – and she hadn’t even worn makeup for their date.

‘Sure, go ahead,’ he said, thinking, moment of truth, girl.

He expected her to prepare, somehow, to stand up straight and brush her hair back, take a deep breath. Instead, sitting slouched over on the counter and without so much as a pause, Sarah simply opened her mouth and began to sing.

The smile fell from Xander’s face. His hands, always in and out of his pockets, were limp by his sides. He must have looked horrified, because she stopped suddenly, and shrugged. ‘That’s all I’ve got so far. I’m better with instruments, anyway.’

            Holy shit, he thought. She doesn’t even know. She has no idea how good she is. Her voice had a natural depth to it – the passion of an ancient soul. He was awestruck.

            She hopped off the counter and started back toward the front door. ‘Anyway, you should go. I’ve got stuff to do.’

            ‘Hey, hey hold on. You, uh, got anything else?’ She looked back over her shoulder, uncertain. Seeing he was serious, she nodded, and then pointed to the Cello by the fireplace. ‘I can do something with that.’

            ‘Sure. Go ahead.’

            And she played for him again, pulling out one of the chairs from her kitchen table and sitting with legs splayed out and hair hanging down over her face, completely lost in the music. She played with the confidence of a seasoned professional, yet as wild and unrestrained as an enthusiastic amateur. Xander was familiar with all the classics, and he tried long and hard to place the song – a deep rising melody like Hall of the Mountain King – until he realised it was original music.

            When she was done, she looked up at him with a blank face, waiting for his reaction but apparently expecting nothing. She had played so perfectly, she might have won a standing ovation from the philharmonic orchestra.

            Xander took a deep breath and folded his arms. ‘Sarah.’ He paused. He wanted to run at her and hug her, and maybe kiss her once or twice, and then dance all over the room and then maybe marry her, but instead he just said: ‘How would you like to be famous?’

The trick was getting just the right sound. Sometimes it was hard to get them to co-operate, but with Esther, the problem was something else. The girl wasn’t living up to the potential of her vocal chords. It didn’t seem to matter where Sarah stuck the needle, or how deep she cut, Esther couldn’t hit the note.

            The breakthrough came on the fourth night, just after Xander left. She had deprived Esther of water, hoping to add  a husky quality to her cries, but when she tried to elicit a response,  Esther  swore at her. ‘I know you’re not going to let me go, you bitch! I’ve seen your face!’ She tried to spit in Sarah’s face, but there was no moisture. Sarah crouched in front of her, absentmindedly bouncing the tip of the needle in the palm of her hand. At last, it clicked.

            She fixed the microphone nearest Esther’s face, angling it and clicking it to record. As long as the right note sounded, she could edit everything else out. That was the plan: to collect each note separately and then patch them all together to weave her masterpiece. She removed the black ribbon she’d been using to tie her hair back and secured it over Esther’s eyes.

            ‘What the hell are you doing? I’ve already seen you. I’m not an idiot!’

            Sarah didn’t respond. Her heart was beating quickly, a thrill she only ever got when she was really there, right on the brink of True Art. When it was done, she stepped back and then crouched down, holding her breath and remaining absolutely silent.

            Esther pulled her knees up to her naked breast, half from the cold, half from fear. She knew what was coming, but now she didn’t know from which direction. Her skin was covered in tiny red and black dots, dried blood droplets from Sarah’s previous attempts to produce the perfect sound. ‘What are you doing?’ she said again, her voice trembling, the defiant strength wavering.

            Sarah waited. An owl hooted from the pine just outside the basement. A gust of wind made the rafters groan. She needed silence, and a minute later she found it in between Esther’s breaths. She lashed out like a rattlesnake, the needle piercing Esther in the soft part of her thigh, and there it was: a scream that carried just the right timbre, the perfect pitch.

            Sarah lowered the needle and stood up with a satisfied sigh. ‘Thank you,’ she said, and she meant it. Esther didn’t seem to notice – she was crying again, a low moan that wasn’t without value; here and there Sarah heard something she might be able to use. She leaned forward and patted her on the head. ‘There there,’ she said. ‘It’s over, now.’

            This time, the needle went through Esther’s neck.

Xander booked her into a few underground Jazz clubs, late night spots at first, then the more prominent weekend nine o’ clocks. He spared no expense: he put out posters and flyers, got her a stylist and paid for clothes and jewellery. Not that he could afford it, but he wasn’t an idiot – he knew what was coming.

Sarah, for her part, was completely indifferent. Most girls would have preened and posed in front of the mirror; Sarah merely stared while she got a makeover worthy of any supermodel, the stylist chatting away and complimenting her. When she was done, Sarah said: ‘Thanks Julia,’ and then walked out on stage looking like a movie star from the twenties and singing like Billie Holiday. It was magic.

            He tried to kiss her once, after a celebratory dinner of wine, oysters and rare steak, and she’d let him. It was like kissing a dead girl, her lips cold and soft, her tongue unresponsive. Somehow, it only made him want her more. Give it time, my friend. It’s all new to her.

            Later that same night, they walked along the beach in front of the row of nightclubs and casinos known to locals as ‘Sinner’s Strip’. She let him hold her hand, so delicate and smooth, with nails as long and filed as if they’d been designed to pluck strings. She’d sung one of her own songs that night, instead of covering an old hit, and the crowd had sucked in every word.

            ‘You’re gonna be big, you know,’ he said. ‘You’re gonna be the next Lana Del Rey, or Amy Winehouse, or… hell, better – you’ll be your own thing.’

            She nodded absently, as though this was something she already knew.

            They turned down the pier at the end of the Strip, a shonky line of planks that ended in a viewing platform from which the whole bay and the rising hills beyond it were visible. She liked it there, she said. She was obsessed with great voids, and the bay at night was the only place you could see the emptiness of space and the vastness of the ocean at once.

            They stopped at the end and he turned to face her. She ignored him, staring out over the blackness, hypnotised.

            ‘You’ll be famous,’ he said.

            ‘I don’t want to be famous. I don’t want anyone to know who I am. I want to sing quietly in an empty stadium, and have no one hear my words but me.’

            Every time he thought he her figured out, she found a new way to mystify him.

            ‘That sounds… painful,’ he said eventually.

            ‘All art comes from pain,’ she said.

            He couldn’t think of anything to say to that, so he looked out over the bay and said nothing.

Thirty seconds of sound, pieced together from countless snippets, some milliseconds and others several notes long, edited smoothly together by Sarah’s deft touch and impeccable ear. Her working title was “Ode to Misery”. The sounds of suffering, she found, had a very distinct flavour and range – the same way you could always tell a blues song, regardless of what instruments were playing.

            There was a long way to go, yet – she hadn’t even begun to reach the climax of the piece – but she decided to let someone listen to it.

            Not deliberately, however. This was too intense for the conscious mind. It worked best with a subtle approach; it was more a soundtrack than an epic solo, more a dream than a story, like a David Lynch movie.

            So she asked Greg if she could play her own music as the bottle store’s background noise instead of the usual pop songs and ads they usually played. ‘Only on the late night shifts, when I close by myself,’ she added quickly.

            He squinted at her. ‘What kinda music is it?’

            ‘Alternative.’

            ‘Any swearing in it?’

            ‘None.’

            ‘Sure. Knock yourself out. Not in busy hours, okay? The area manager’s a tightass about having those damn jingles every twenty minutes. Makes me wanna hang myself.’

            ‘No problem. Thanks, Greg.’

            He left at five, and she waited until ten, the last hour of the shift, when only the occasional customer came strolling in. She put the volume down by half and, since she only had half a minute of music, stuck it on repeat. Then she stood behind the counter and pretended to read a copy of Women’s Lifestyle, and watched.

            No one commented on the track, or seemed aware of it at all. The music was a mosaic, each note distinct and separate from every other and yet each leading logically to the next, creating a strange patchwork of sound. It had a human quality so unusual in the modern world of autotune and DJ technology, and yet also superhuman – vocal chords stretching far beyond their normal range.

            A young couple came in, smiling at first, then frowning and finally bickering over which wine to buy, their voices taking on a bitter, jarring quality that intrigued Sarah. They hardly acknowledged her at the counter, and by the time they left the girl had mascara streaming down her face and her boyfriend’s face had turned to stone. Sarah wondered, for the first time, what heartbreak sounded like.

            One of the regulars entered a few minutes later, a fat old man with yellow tinged eyes who bought exactly two cans of beer every day. He stood staring at the shelf for five or ten minutes, muttering to himself. He picked up a six pack, then a case, and finally cursing, headed for the hard liquor section, where he picked up two bottles of bourbon, a hundred proof At the front, he ordered a pack of cigarettes.

            ‘Hey Jim. I though you quit,’ she said. He scowled at her, and when she looked into his eyes she was sure she saw something working at him. The voices of his inner demons, roaring for a fresh piece of his soul and having it granted to them.

            ‘One of those nights,’ he said, snatching the bag from her hand.

            Sarah’s bright gaze followed all who entered that night. She saw it happen again and again: customers came in and seemed to get lost somewhere between the entrance and the counter. Lost in time, lost in their thoughts, turning inward, bothered, irritated, disturbed. They were drowning and they didn’t even know it.

            At the end of the shift, Sarah knew she was on to something special. There was a real bite to that music, some vein of raw human power she was tapping in to… but there was a lot of work to do. There was too much still missing.

            She took her time walking home, playing the tune in her ipod and singing lyrics to herself, improvising as she went.

The clubs were getting bigger now, and soon Xander started to book her in theatres. Money came in, and she quit the bottle store. Xander couldn’t sleep most nights. He was obsessed with her. All the more because of her indifference to his advances, which he was compelled to keep making against his friends’ advice and his own better judgement.

            ‘She’s an ice queen, buddy,’ Jake said to him one night, patting him on the back while he nursed a beer. They were sitting out front of their favourite Hawaiian cocktail bar – Heart of Honolulu – feet up on deckchairs while they watched the waves rolling in.

            ‘I know,’ he said. ‘But the queen is worth the ice.’

            The truth was, since he’d met her, everything in his life had become a kind of rocket, speeding up with engines roaring until it was threatening to blow through the stratosphere. Even Jake was in awe of the way she was snowballing toward stardom, but no one was surprised – no one who had heard her sing, anyway.

            The turning point came when he booked her at the Kingdom Theatre, just a few blocks north of the Strip and one of the biggest venues outside of the City. At five thousand seats, the only place to go after that would be the Olympia, and if you were playing the Olympia, baby, you were Big Time.

            He’d broken the news to her just the day before, deciding to surprise her with a bottle of wine. She’d been playing a violin, a hauntingly beautiful song she seemed to be improvising, and didn’t even notice him come in. She swayed, her eyes closed, delicate fingers dancing along the frets with stunning agility, and he watched her for who knew how long before she saw him and jerked upright, the song coming to an abrupt end.

            ‘What are you doing here?’

            He held up the wine, a ten-year-old cellar release cabernet that would have emptied his bank account just a few months ago and was now barely a drop in the ocean. He smiled. ‘Guess where I just got you a gig?’

            ‘I don’t care.’

            And, to his amazement, she dropped the violin and came to him, enfolding him in her arms and kissing him like never before. She smelled like sweat and leather. She hadn’t been cold that night, and he’d left the next morning feeling dazed and drunk on more than wine, his back covered in stinging scratches.

            He raised his glass to Jake, smiling. ‘Hey, here’s to us.’

            Jake smiled and raised his own glass. ‘It’s all you, buddy. The Ravenites are great, but they’re a Strip band at best. No way could I get them a gig at Kingdom. It’s all up from here. I’m just saying though, you gotta be careful.’

            And there it was, at last – that subtle note of jealousy that Xander had never believed he’d ever hear in Jake’s voice. He almost felt bad for him. ‘What, am I gonna get corrupted by success? Spiral downward in a haze of women and heroin like Jim Morrison and die young? Doesn’t sound so bad to me.’

            He was joking, of course, but Jake wasn’t laughing. ‘Oh, you’ll die young, all right,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘But it’s that crazy singer of yours who’s gonna kill you.’

It was late, but not too late, and a freak heatwave from the previous day hadn’t quite surrendered to the rain and autumn cold. Steam rose from the asphalt carrying with it the smell of tar and gravel. Sarah took turns at random, favouring narrow streets, and those with broken windows and graffiti. The sirens of the police and ambulance were frequent here, a kind of night music of their own. Sarah frowned as she ambled along, thinking of nothing in particular – until she heard an unfamiliar sound: The laughter of a small boy.

It seemed so out of place in this neighbourhood she had to follow it. She found the culprit soon enough, a youth of no more than six playing with a tennis ball in the road. His mother sat against a mouldy wall, sucking on a cigarette with sunken cheeks, rocking back and forth. She looked tired and worn out, like all junkies. The kid was having a blast, slapping his ball up against the factory wall and giggling when it bounced back at him at crazy angles. The old lady watched him with a sad smile on her face.

            Then she caught sight of Sarah, watching her. She coughed out her last drag. ‘Haggghh. H… Hey, this isn’t any place for a… are you lost, honey?’

            Sarah didn’t answer immediately. She had her head cocked to one side, the part of her brain that could tell pitch with perfect accuracy working, hearing the unique qualities in the two voices, mother and son, young and old. Another part of her mind, a more emotional part, was thinking about suffering, and about how physical suffering was only a part of it. A small part, really. Some people would prefer to be horribly tortured rather than suffer the agony of grief, or sorrow.

            ‘Are you – Haaaggh. Are you okay?’ The kid had stopped his game and was staring at Sarah now, meeting her curious gaze with one of his own. The mother stubbed out her cigarette and got to her feet, and Sarah snapped out of it at last. She put a hand to her chest. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry I was just, I heard your son and I was worried he might be lost or…’

            ‘Oh. Oh, no, he’d be right at home in a pig sty. Heh, isn’t that right, Denny? Just as happy as a cow in a mud hole, ain’t ya?’

            Denny shrugged, suddenly shy. He went over to his mother and she patted his head. ‘Nah, we’re all right,’ she went on. ‘But you better get on, lady, this place can get dangerous after dark.’

            ‘Isn’t it dangerous for you, too? Don’t you have a place to stay?’ Her voice cracking with concern. She kept her eyes wide and unblinking, a naïve college girl in the big city.

            The old lady shifted on her feet. ‘Ah, we’ll be fine. Wouldn’t say no if you could pass a dollar or two our way though, would we, Denny?’

            ‘No, no. Look, my house isn’t far from here. Why don’t’ you stay one night? My good deed for the day, kinda thing.’

            ‘Aw, honey, you don’t – ’

            ‘It’s fine. Really, it’s not far. They said it was going to rain again, tonight.’

            Something gave way in the old mother’s shoulders and she let out a soft laugh. ‘Well, isn’t that something, eh Denny? There’s good souls out in the world, aren’t there?’

            ‘Does the lady got balloons, mama?’

            ‘Sure I do,’ Sarah said. ‘I got all the balloons you want.’

The gig at The Kingdom was like nothing she’d ever done before. When she walked out on stage they were screaming for her, their voices joining and rolling across the theatre like a wave. Staaaaaaar giiiiiirrrrrllll! Staaaaaaarrrrrr Giiiiiiiirrrrrlll! It was a name she’d picked up as she was getting more popular in some of the bigger clubs. Stargirl. Xander said it was because of the blue flecks in her eyes, but she knew different. It was because they could see who she was.

            They wanted her soul, and they were drinking it in with their open mouths. She stood up in the middle of the stage for a long time, motionless, watching them as though they were the ones performing for her, seeing their manic eyes and their desperate, thirsty need for her, for what was inside of her. They wanted her soul, and she was going to give it to them.

            And so she sang.

Xander was out of his depth, and he was loving it. Out of his league with the girl, with the music, with the business, with the money. He barely slept four hours a night, the phone rang night and day, and he felt himself being swallowed by the machine, swept along by her success. All that stuff he learned in business school about the networking and the advertising and the hustling fell by the wayside – they’d never prepared him for this, this mad hunger for Stargirl. It was all he could do to keep them from finding out where she lived, and thank god he had, because the kind of people who were so nuts for Stargirl were also the kind of people who would tear her to shreds if they could get their hands on her.

            He rubbed his eyes and ran a hand through his thinning hair, thinking for the hundredth time that he was going to have to hire a whole crew of people just to keep him from having a heart attack. Still, pondering the look she would give him when he told her the Big News was enough to bring a smile to his face.

            Until he came down the overgrown walkway leading to her front door and heard the music coming from inside her shaded house. Not that music was anything unusual – but this was something else, some awful new instrument or song that put his nerves on edge and dread in his heart. He pushed open the front door – it was never locked – and braced himself for whatever fresh madness she was concocting.

            The music was not coming, as Xander had expected, from an instrument at all, but from top-of-the-line speakers that Sarah had arranged around the main room. For all his years in the music business, listening to the mixtapes of a million aspiring musicians, Xander had never heard anything so raw and unpleasant as this. He couldn’t discern a single instrument in the strange, jarring melody. There were no lyrics, nor chorus, nor harmony – but there was a kind of pattern to it, a trance inducing fractal made of notes. Xander didn’t just dislike it – he hated it with emotional force. It affronted every possible musical taste; it could appeal to nobody.

            Sarah was in nothing but a black bra and leggings, her back to him and a half full bottle of Jack in one hand, dancing.

            Xander couldn’t help but stare. She was somehow – impossibly – moving in time with the music. Slow now, then faster, arms and legs twisting and waving like snakes, hips sliding, head thrown back as she took another swig, lost in the madness. She simultaneously attracted and repelled him, and at last he couldn’t take it any more and he stepped over to the stereo and pulled the plug out at the wall.

            As soon as the music stopped she spun around, eyes wild, a light film of sweat on her forehead. ‘Oh! Hey.’

            ‘What was that?’

            ‘My backing track for the big song,’ she said, catching her breath. Her starry eyes were bright, but his heart was sinking. No one’s gonna hear that, he thought. No one would want to hear that.

            ‘I’ve written the lyrics and everything. I’m going to blow them away, Xander.’

            ‘Uh huh,’ he said slowly, resisting the urge to roll his eyes. ‘You’d better save it for after… you… play… the… Olympia!’ He stepped closer to her with each word, and just before he said Olympia he put his hands on her shoulders and flashed a smile. He was expecting something, a raised eyebrow or a disbelieving gasp or a kiss, even. But the name of the Theatre hardly seemed to register. She stared at him – with surprising clarity given the amount of liquor she’d just consumed.

            Silence.

            ‘Hello? Did you hear what I said?’ Still smiling.

            ‘I’m playing my song, Xander.’

            He took a deep breath. ‘Sarah. Once we get it all polished up and edited and all that, sure. But the Olympia is at the end of the month and the fans want to see Stargirl, not…’ Whatever the fuck that was just now. His inner voice finished for him. Even though he’d only heard twenty or so seconds of the strange music, it seemed to echo in the room, infusing the very air with menace. He wanted to shake her. No one wants to feel like that, don’t you understand? No one wants to hear music that makes them want to fucking kill themselves!

            But the fact that the words did not leave his mouth made no difference: Sarah heard them all the same. She heard them in subtitles in his tone, the way she could always tell when people were lying, or fake, or sad.

            ‘That music is my soul, Xander,’ she said, and he heard real emotion in her voice then, real hurt. ‘Don’t you understand that? I just want them to hear my soul.’

            His mind was racing, torn between the desire to keep her happy and the sure and certain knowledge that if he agreed both of their careers were going to take a nose dive straight into the asphalt. It’s for her own good. ‘Sorry, I can’t let you do that,’ he said.

            She stepped away from him, a wall dropping down in front of those exquisite eyes, shutting him out forever. He felt it like a physical thing, a blade of ice piercing his heart even before her next words left her lips.

‘Goodbye, Xander.’

            ‘Are you… are you firing me?’

            ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m breaking up with you.’

JAZZ CITY MAGAZINE

October 25th 2018

Ella Shwartz

Rising force of nature Sarah Grant, known to her adoring fans as ‘Stargirl’ makes her debut at the Olympia this weekend, and tickets are selling like ice cream in the Sahara. Any other musician would be in their element, making the most of their newfound fame, but as Stargirl has shown us time and again, she is not like any other musician.

            For one thing, no one really knows what she looks like. We have a version of her, a dark beauty on stage who can bring tears to your eyes with lyrics (all her own) or voice equally. She is, in a word – haunting, and her life outside the limelight is certainly ghostlike. She vanishes after shows, refuses interviews, and even her most dedicated fans (and there are many) know only the most on-the-surface details about her, and much of that is speculation.

            Perhaps she is merely acting the part of the enigmatic artist? I, for one, doubt it. Her lyrics speak honestly of deep pain, grief, and heartbreak and ring with truth that can only be gained by experience. Her skill with the various instruments she uses to accompany her singing is unparalleled by any other working artist. During her last show at The Kingdom Theatre, I personally witnessed her perform with a guitar, a violin, a cello and a saxophone on four separate songs, and in each case she could have qualified as a virtuoso.

            The only valid criticism of Stargirl would concern the fans she seems to attract. Perhaps it is the inherently bleak subject matter of her songs, or perhaps the deep melancholy her music inspires. Whatever the reason, each successive concert has stretched the growing numbers of security personnel to their limits. Fights, vandalism, drugs, alcohol, tattoos, motorbikes, knives, long painted nails, piercings in every conceivable body part, and all-round recklessness: if these things are to your liking, you will fit in very well at a typical Stargirl concert.

            If not, no worries: hang back and enjoy the show: I guarantee you’ll see something special. Mark my words – Stargirl is no less than a legend in the making, this generation’s answer to Jim Morrison, and I would bet my life she won’t disappoint at the Olympia this weekend. See you there!

He stopped by the bottle store she used to work at. Her boss, Greg whoever, didn’t recognize him, and didn’t comment on his purchase of a half-litre of Polish spirits, the strongest stuff they had. Perhaps he thought Xander was going to use it as a disinfectant.

            In a way, he thought as he slid into the front seat of his car and took a tentative sip, he was. It was just that the wound he wanted to disinfect was in his heart. He kicked the car into gear and pulled onto the highway. He had nowhere in particular to go; just one he had no intention of getting anywhere near the Olympia.

            Sometimes it was just nice to drive.

            This time, though, the miles of city road started to get to him. He drove in silence, staring straight ahead, hands tight on the wheel. Normally he had something playing in the car, but there was only one CD in the drive right now – a new pop rock band – and the thought of listening to their sickly sweet upbeat jams made him want to vomit.

He turned onto the Strip and accelerated, winding down the window so the salty ocean air flew in his face and kept him sober. The billboards shot by the opposite window in a fluorescent blur, each one seeming to bring another memory of Sarah bubbling to the surface. Ever unsmiling, dancing with her hands over the head, too drunk on tequila. Walking the pier late at night and seeing the stars. On stage for the first time, killing it like no one ever before and then asking him afterwards, was I okay?

He rolled down familiar streets, where he could cruise the backroads for as long as he wanted, without worrying or thinking too much.

            Thoughts found their way into his mind, all the same.

            Despite the stern voice – Jake’s voice – telling him it was all right, that she’d been poison from the beginning, he couldn’t let go of that empty look in her eyes at the very end, when she’d…

            The memory triggered another: him shutting off the CD player and popping the disc out. He hadn’t meant to take it away – he’d just wanted to make sure she didn’t play it again, that awful nerve torturing yowl. But  he realised he had – in fact he was wearing the same jacket. Sure enough, when he reached into the inside pocket, it was still there.

            He tossed it onto the seat beside him. She’s ruining herself tonight, he thought. She’ll get laughed off stage. Every minute or so, his eyes darted to the seat. The disc was plain silver, with block letters written in permanent marker across the face:

ODE TO MISERY

DEMO

            He ejected the mixtape belonging to the High Street Wranglers and put it in.

Sarah had put the finishing touches at last. For days she’d pursued those elusive notes, the missing pieces she’d needed to string everything together and make it just right, but after some trial and error, she pulled it together.

            There were nineteen bodies buried in the back garden to prove it. Some had died more painfully than others, or more terrified, or more broken. But they’d  all given her their precious sound, in the end, not knowing that they were giving her a piece of their soul along with their utterances. It was the most ambitious thing she’d ever done, the most impossible – and yet, she’d done it. Every note in the right place; the melody tight, the pacing on point, the tone… sublime.

            It was the greatest thing that she would ever do.

After a couple of swigs, he stopped coughing. A couple more and his throat was numb. Another, and his heart and mind were numb, too. He drove faster and put the music up. It was a beautiful thing, this car – he’d bought it after her first really big gig. He remembered the way she’d looked at him after he’d given her the news: her eyes seemed so deep to him, then. So full of meaning and feeling.

            He took another long slug – almost finished now – and despite his nerveless tongue he detected a certain bitterness. Everything tasted bitter, now.

            The music played in a loop. This version was unfinished, of course, and only three minutes long. Every time the loop came to an end he urged himself to slam the eject and throw the thing out the window. He was grinding his teeth like a crack addict, knuckles white on the wheel. But then the track would start again and he’d hear a strange kind of whoop! Like someone surprised, but not in a good way – the kind of surprised you might get if someone curled a knife around your throat from behind – and that was the hook; every note that followed was like someone working under his fingernails with a screwdriver. Like scratching his retinas out, making him see black: death and despair in a dark cocktail.

            At the end of the Strip, he skidded the car around a tight corner, ran a red light, and headed for the city limits.

Sarah always zoned out in the dressing room. The stylists were chatty, so she let them monologue about celebrities and oh my god have you seen that show it’s amazing… and she would glaze over and think of the music.

            Another band was out there opening for her, and she could hear the heavy thump of drums and a good bass player making the building vibrate rhythmically. The crowd was loving it, the cheers and shouts of fifty thousand people rocking the building. But Sarah was late, as usual, and it wasn’t long before the chaotic ruckus solidified into a steady chant. Starrrrrrr Giiiiiiiiiiiiiiirl! Starrrrrrrr Giiiiiiiiiiiiiiiirl!

            At last her makeup was done and the stylist, a twenty something with pigtails and a brilliant smile, stood back and made a ta-da motion. ‘All ready, Stargirl! Go get ‘em, baby, I believe in you!’

            Sarah poured herself a fresh scotch on the rocks and the lit a cigarette. She took a drag and faced her reflection. The thing in the mirror wasn’t really her. A made-up queen, a superstar, a smoky-eyed crooner. It wasn’t the real Stargirl.

            ‘That’s okay. They’ll all see Stargirl, soon enough,’ she said.

            ‘Huh? Better get moving, girl! They’re calling for you!’

            Starrrrrrr giiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiirl! Starrrrrrrr giiiiiiiiiiiiiiirl!

            Sarah stood up, glass in one hand and cigarette in the other, and spread her arms. ‘How do I look?’

            The pretty pigtail girl clapped her hands. ‘You look like an angel baby!’

            ‘Thanks.’ And she pushed the other girl backward, the comical shock registering on her face as she half landed on the dressing table, cracking the mirror behind her.

            Tina, the other publicist, let out a tiny scream and put both hands up to her mouth, but by then, Sarah was already heading through the doubled doors for Stage Left.

Xander didn’t look back: he just kicked into high gear and drove, and thumbed the dial on his radio all the way up to ten. Why, he’d push it to eleven if he could – he’d push it all the way to hell!

            That was where he was going, after all. He knew that, now. It wasn’t that he was heading away from the city – no, it wasn’t that at all. He was heading where the music told him to go. And it had a lot to say, once you really listened. That was what he found, driving for an hour and then two, and three.

            It hurt – there was no mistake about that. The chords and half-screamed moans twanged around in his head like steel wool on a burn… but it was a good kind of pain, and it spoke to him of the future, a future full of blood and rage, and Xander was all too happy to listen.

            It was Xander’s future, and as the road thundered under his wheels and the air blew in through the open window, hot summer air, he found he couldn’t wait to get there.

As she stepped out, the crowds chanting erupted into an ocean of screams and applause, thousands surging toward the line of security at the front. A forest of arms reached out for her, many of them holding bright phones with the camera lights on. Sarah wondered what the sound quality was like on those. Never mind, the show would be broadcast through the best media available all over the country.

            She didn’t so much as glance at the roaring crowd as she walked on stage, just headed over to the stool near the front. It wasn’t meant for sitting, but for holding her glass. She took a long swallow and they loved that, too, hundreds lifting their own drinks in toast.

            Stargirl didn’t care for any of it. There was no How is everybody doing today? Or Hey, what a crowd, you look great. No Thank you for coming out! There were only the three even steps to front and centre, the raising of the microphone to her lips, and the short intake of breath. This was enough to make the whole theatre silent.

            In that brief instant before she began to sing, someone in the tech room flipped a switch, kicking off the first notes of backing music.

            Sarah saw the expressions change on a ten thousand faces all at once, saw the humanity vanish from their eyes in an instant, and she knew this would be a night to remember.

If you like my stories, you can find my collection ‘Peeping Eyes and Lipless Mouths’ HERE

Rick Markus first heard of the black market from Dennis, talking and drinking in his stained apartment. Dennis had recently gone kamikaze skydiving, and Rick had wasted no time in contacting him to get hold of the memory. There were few people willing to sell something so dangerously acquired: Kamikaze skydiving was the sport, if you could call it that, of throwing your parachute out of the plane before you jumped. ‘Hey, just gimme like a month to savour it, okay?’ Dennis said, but ten days later here he was, and his terrifying memory was in Rick’s head, waiting to be savoured. Dennis’s drug habit was the best thing that ever happened to Rick.

            ‘There’s a black market for this stuff?’ Rick said, taking a burning sip of scotch and turning down the music, some dark rap Dennis always insisted on playing – Kid Cudi or someone.

            ‘Hell yeah, man. There’s a black market for everything. You’ll end up there one way or another, believe me. Seriously, I don’t think I could handle anything more extreme than kamikaze skydiving. You’re gonna have to go someplace else if you want more.’

            ‘Why, what do they have on the black market that’s so hard core? How could memories be illegal?’

            ‘Think about it.’ Dennis sat up in his moth eaten couch and started rolling a joint with shaking hands. His skeletal fingers were always shaking, as though a lifetime of extreme sports had given him a never ending adrenaline rush. ‘A guy kills someone or rapes someone, then sells his memory on the market. When the cops come looking, he can’t give details, can’t even confess, and he passes a lie detector because he doesn’t even know he did anything. Just has this big blank spot in his memory. There’s a kicker, too. Whenever these guys sell, they also sell the memory of whoever their last customer was, as part of the deal, a free bonus. So even if the law does catch him, he can’t tell them who he sold the memory to. Wild, huh?’

            Rick set his scotch glass down and made a sour face. ‘Why the hell would I want a memory of killing someone?’

              ‘Don’t knock it ‘till you try it. I met a guy who did it once, bought a rape murder? He said he lived it over in his head on the daily. Couldn’t get enough, the thrill never lost its edge, you know?’

            ‘Ugh. He liked it? That’s sick.’

            ‘Hey, maybe that’s not for you. But you can do other stuff, too. You can rob houses, do big scale heists, experience a riot. And plenty of stunts you couldn’t get from me, either. One dude makes cash climbing up on these skyscrapers and hanging off the edge, no parachute. Or guys who’ve gone poaching deadly animals in Africa and got mauled.’

            ‘Why would I want to get mauled?’

            ‘Nah, man, you don’t get it. Pain doesn’t translate well in memories, but fear does. You get all the heart beat without the hospital bill. It’s nuts.’ Dennis finally completed the joint and lit it, leaning back with a sigh. His greasy shoulder length hair soaked the smoke, making him smell permanently of weed.

            ‘If you say so. Where is this mysterious black market, anyway?’ Without waiting for him to answer, Rick closed his eyes and logged onto Mindnet to do a quick search. A bunch of blogs and newspapers came up, and he scrolled them as Dennis spoke, confirming everything about it except how to actually access it.

            ‘The black market is more about people than places. In the middle of the city, you find the right people and you ask them where to go. Each guy leads you to a different guy selling different stuff, but you gotta go through like three dudes before you even get anything serious. There’s some really messed up memories, but if you find the right people you can get hold of amazing ones. So I’m told. I never been there, myself.’

            Rick logged out of Mnet and thought about what it would be like to have the memory of murdering someone. No guilt, because you knew it wasn’t really you, and it would sure be a rush. A sick rush, probably, but something not many people had. Besides, as far as legal memories went, he’d collected everything he wanted. Spending eighty hours a week as an advertising executive afforded you a lot of neat experiences. When he looked back over his life, he saw supermodels, gold medals, extreme sports and expensive holidays, all lived by other people. He’d seen the bright side of life, but maybe it was time to delve into the darkness. Humanity’s forbidden lives.

            He held a mouthful of scotch in his mouth before swallowing, letting it numb his tongue. Then he said, ‘So who do you know?’

*

Rick looked the part as he walked Central with a black raincoat and unkempt stubble. It always amazed him that the middle of a first world city could look so primitive. Despite the invention of Mnet, the abolition of physical cash, and the disappearance of private transport, the city itself was still a network of dark grey buildings, angry suited mobs, and dumpsters in alleyways.

            The guy Dennis had told him about was in one particular alley, between an anonymous factory and a Hammel’s Food Scraper, that forty story monstrosity home to every conceivable meal. It made sense that Rick would find an entrance into a world home to another kind of decadence. As he searched for it, he sang to himself, a strange nervous habit he’d had since he was a kid. ‘Nine, five, six, three, won’t you just remember me?’ It was always the same snatch of a song, but for the life of him he couldn’t find the original source. He supposed he’d go to his death not knowing.

The ‘entrance’ in question was leaning against a dry patch of concrete, hands deep in jacket pockets and the empty eyed look of one who’d sold too many memories. As Rick approached, the guy looked up, revealing an acne scarred face and a cross tattoo on one cheek. He smiled and stepped forward to shake his hand.

            ‘Hey, you’re him, aren’tcha? Dennis told me what you looked like. What’s your name?’

            ‘Captain Popeye,’ Rick said. The guy nodded. ‘Okay, good, good, and my name’s Alice. Dennis mentioned you were after a, uh, experience? What kinda thing you lookin for?’

            The alleyway was hot and wet and smelled like fried rice and curry. There were no available dry areas, so Rick stood in the drizzle in silence, realising he hadn’t really decided on exactly what he wanted. The man watched him with crinkled blue eyes and a half smile. What had he done in his life that he couldn’t remember? What memories could he not bring himself to sell?

            ‘I’m looking for a murder,’ Rick said.

*

It was so much more than he’d expected. Rick was sure it had a lot to do with the state of the killer’s mind. Alice had taken him two blocks down the road and then underground to some bathrooms near the subway. They were hot enough to make Rick sweat and smelled of dirt and sewerage. The killer, a bearded troll twice Rick’s weight with eyes that could freeze lava, had lifted a gold crucifix to his lips and kissed it. Rick learned the depths of his sadism only much later, perusing the memory.

            ‘I have found God,’ the behemoth explained at the time. ‘It’s time to leave my past behind me for good.’

            Why such a past had to be left behind became clear very quickly once Rick lay down on his bed, dimmed the lights, and thought back. It wasn’t the act of murder, though that was gruesome enough – it was the feelings that accompanied it. Christ, what a monster. Rick remembered every moment as clearly as yesterday. Good quality.

            A dying house on a sunlit winter day. A familiar place – home to him for many years, and home to the parents who’d locked him away in a windowless room and let him starve, who’d extinguished cigarettes on his arms and fed him dogfood. Rick clutched a hammer in one enormous hand and strode up the cracked driveway, not bothering to check for witnesses. Get away, get convicted – it made no difference. They were inside, and he would have revenge. His heart pumped with the delicious anticipation of theme park goers on a roller coaster just before take-off.  

            Of the three hours that followed, Rick had received every minute he’d paid for, down to the tiniest detail. The man in the subway would have nothing left to recall but black space. God, what a rush. It began with kneecapping, and then Rick broke the two of them piece by screaming piece. Every joint shattered and twisted, every bone broken or fractured, every brown tooth knocked from bloody gums.

            Rick could never have committed such carnage, but in the immense body of the man who’d called himself ‘Tigger’, he not only did it all, he loved it. The screams were sweet music to his ears. The memory was one of justice being done, and sweet satisfaction accompanied every injury perpetrated on the victims, along with the intoxicating joy of destruction inherent in violent men.

            When he’d gone over every part of it – a meditative process that took nearly three hours by itself – Rick sat up in the sweat drenched bed with tears in his eyes. He massaged his forehead with cold hands and laughed aloud in the dark room. ‘Oh, man, that was wild.’

            Rarely had he come across another person’s memory that was so clear and so full of strong emotions. He splashed water on his face and stared into the bathroom mirror for a long time. Just a lawyer, a nice guy. Played with toys as a kid, loving family, successful adult life. Friends, occasional girlfriends, a penchant for other people’s memories and apparently a total adrenaline junky. But not a six foot five ex-inmate with a crucifix necklace.

            ‘You are not a murderer,’ he told himself, reassured by the sound of his high, cultured voice. ‘You are not a murderer.’ Then he smiled.

            ‘But you gotta get some more of these bad boys.’

*

The sicker, the darker, the better. He couldn’t get enough. The only rule was that the men who’d committed the crimes had enjoyed them. Through their eyes and minds he experienced a whole world of horrors in ways he didn’t think possible. Alice became his guide, connecting him with a community of sick bastards, many of whom committed the acts solely to sell them. And sell them they did – Rick was the best customer any of them ever met.

            The day he met his first serial killer – Max the Mouth – Rick knew he was becoming warped by the memories he’d accumulated. They weren’t like the extreme sports Dennis had given him. These intruded when he was at work, forcing their way into his consciousness the moment he allowed himself a daydream. Sometimes he’d blink and twenty minutes had passed him by, and the document on his desk was spotted with icy sweat. A receptionist would greet him with a smile, and he’d make a light hearted joke while inwardly he was imagining in perfect detail what it would be like to rape and strangle her; he already had so many such memories, would it be any different if he did it for real?

            But warped or not, Rick had morals, and as far as he was concerned the memories would always be enough to satisfy whatever tastes he might develop. Max the Mouth was the first appointment that cast doubt on this notion.

            Max lived in a penthouse apartment in Central. He was doing very well for himself considering he’d spent the previous twenty years raping, slaughtering and then cannibalising prostitutes. Like Dennis, he would do the deed, savour it for a month or two, and then sell it on. Alice told him all about it on their walk uptown, munching on a rat dog he’d picked up at a shady stall along Hyde Street.

            ‘He makes big bucks, this guy. Made a business out of it. Real professional. Has a kill room in a warehouse somewhere.’ He took a bite of the dog and ignored the juice that streamed down his chin, kept talking. ‘Does all kinds of horrible shit. Then he eats them. Plus, he has this technique, he meditates for like an hour every morning to train his mind so when it goes down he really takes it in, right? It’s called mindfulness. You got the money, it’s the best you’ll get anywhere.’  

            The receptionist, a petite blonde with more makeup than skin, buzzed them up. Having finished the rat dog, Alice finally wiped his chin and then ran his fingers through greasy hair, shifting on his feet. He gave Rick a sideways grin, but Rick wasn’t fooled.

            ‘Are you nervous?’

            ‘Naaaaaaaah. Well, maybe a little.’

            ‘Jesus. I’ve never seen you nervous before, not even with that cage fighter in Gatesborough.’ One scary guy, that cage fighter, but the memories had been pure gold. He’d sold Rick ten fights – victories of course, since the losers were all dead – and after recalling them blow by blow a few times he’d developed cocaine-high levels of confidence.

            ‘Hey, I’m not used to this level, alright? If we were in the business of drugs instead of memories, I would be a crack dealer and Max the Mouth would be the goddamn godfather.’

            ‘It’ll be fine. He’s a businessman. I can pay what he wants, he’ll make sure I’m a return customer.’

            And he was right about that, but while Max was a very able businessman, he’d also created that business around torturing and consuming human beings, and that kind of man was never going to have all his eggs in one basket. That was clear from the second he opened the door and welcomed the two of them in with a wide smile. Oh, so that’s why they call him The Mouth.

            Big lips, wide smile, painfully white teeth filed to perfect points. He was bald and clean shaven and each expression he made caused every centimetre of rosy skin on his head to move. He held the door open for them and gestured for them to enter. He wore a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a single gold chain around a thick neck.

            ‘Rabbit and Alice, isn’t it? Come in, then.’ They entered and Max led them through an apartment like a spaceship: white surfaces, silver edges, minimalist. A table and chairs sat on a wooden deck outside, looking out over a colourful Japanese garden complete with a running stream, and beyond that the vast smog-drowned city.

            A rare steak and mashed potato steamed on a plate, and Max sat down in front of it with his back to the garden, rubbing his hands. ‘Sorry, hope you don’t mind. I’d just finished making this when you arrived.’ He had an English accent – the kind with a conspicuous lack of Ts. Michael Caine came to mind.

            ‘Course, yeah, no problem,’ Alice said, shrugging at Rick. They pulled out chairs and sat opposite. Steak and Potatoes for breakfast? Sure, why not?

            Max paused a second before cutting into the beef, squinting at Rick. ‘Have we met before, young Rabbit?’

            ‘I, uh, I think I would remember that,’ Rick said.

            ‘I suppose you would.’ He shrugged and cut a hefty chunk of meat, blood leaking in a moat around the mashed potatoes.

            ‘Anyway. Best get to business, yeah? Alice tells me you want a few of the good quality, eh, recollections?’

            ‘The best you got. Say, five?’

            ‘I don’t have five, I’m afraid. Not for you, anyway. Contrary to popular belief, it ain’t that easy to make these things.’

            ‘No problem. How many do you have?’

            ‘Three. But I don’t know you that well, so you can have one.’ His jaws made short juicy work of the first mouthful and he followed it with another, not pausing for breath. He had the thick biceps of a bodybuilder. Lots of protein. Rick decided not to stay longer than he needed.

            ‘Fine by me. If it’s good, I’ll be back.’

            ‘Ahhh, mate.’ He swallowed and looked up from his plate, shark’s teeth gleaming. ‘Don’t you worry about that my friend. They’re aaaaallll good.’

*

Never had Rick been so glad to arrive home safe. From the moment he’d seen that smile, he’d known he was truly in the company of an animal. Were it not for the money in his pocket and the promise of future business, Max the Mouth would have pulled him across the table and bitten his neck open. None of them had had any doubt who were the deer and who was the lion, and as soon as he’d showered and calmed himself, Rick found he was looking forward to feeling that kind of power very much.

            He’d planned to leave it until the following night after work, but midnight came and went and he could not sleep. The fresh memory was settled in the back of his brain, waiting to be called upon. As he drifted, it flashed across his mind’s eye and his heart revved him awake again. He thought of the transferral machine Max had used – a state of the art piece of technology with about a hundred sensors more than any other Rick had encountered; he was used to tangled wires and dusty helmets. Imagine the clarity.

            Nothing for it. He sank back into his pillow with his eyes closed and let it wash over him, a river the size of the amazon, polluted, corrupted.

            Rick had believed himself to be beyond horror. He was wrong.

            The memory began with the girl, so close he could see the cracks in her screaming lips. Rick leaned in and took an enormous bite out of her face with a cavernous mouth, chewing it inches away from her. The image was so intense, complete with the rusty smell of fresh blood, that Rick pulled out mid recall and barely made it to the bathroom before he vomited.

            He held off for a day, his insides squirming whenever he thought of her missing cheek and shredded tongue. Oh God, it was so rich. Max experienced life on another level. The taste of her lingered in Rick’s mouth for the rest of the day. He gathered himself before the next attempt, and it was a ride, alright, the sickest he’d had yet – but at the end of it, something was different. He didn’t notice at first because once the girl was dead and Max performed an elaborate bow in front of a mirror there was no reason to keep remembering. He took a shower, let the high ebb, poured himself a drink. It’d been an expensive memory, but worth it.

            When the glass was half empty and his mind wandered over his past – or rather the past he’d bought and paid for – it occurred to him that he hadn’t seen everything. There was more to the memory Max had given him, an extra minute or two.

He ran through until he reached the part where Max had left the corpse in pieces on his kill room floor and bowed for Rick’s benefit. Everything grew fuzzy here, and Rick realised that this part hadn’t really happened at all. It was an imagined event, something Max must have added on at the last second, perhaps even while they’d been transferring. In the imagination, he straightened from the bow, scowled into the mirror, and spoke.

            ‘Sorry to intrude on you like this. I hope you enjoyed the show as much as I enjoyed making it. I didn’t want to say anything while you were here, because I know all about your friend, Alice. I got a call about you today. Someone tracked you down once they heard you were buying from me. I’m not happy about this, believe me, but I’ll let it go because you’re a high paying customer. Still, the next time anyone tries to use me as a messenger, mate, I’ll have you for my next meal.’ He smiled, the lower half of his face smeared with blood and not a trace of humour in his eyes.

            ‘Anyway. Here’s the message: 459 April Avenue, Haverbrook. I’ve got the memories you’re looking for. Don’t tell Alice, he’s a rat.’

            ‘So there you go. No hard feelings, Rick, I’m sure you didn’t know. Feel free to come back when you get hungry again.’ He winked. As hard as Rick searched, he couldn’t find anything else. As far as he could remember, that was when he’d blinked awake on the transferral chair.

            Rick came back to the present with a sourness in his belly and a bitter taste on his tongue. He finished his glass of scotch and regarded his pale reflection in the dark glass of his television set.

            ‘Damn.’

*

Quitting had been on his mind for some time, and after that scare, Rick gave it the best he had. Three days after he’d purchased the memory from Max the Mouth, he was browsing Mnet and came across Alice’s scowling face, featured in a recent news article titled: Another missing during Central’s worst crime wave.He didn’t read it.

            Fear was enough to keep him away from the Black Market. And after all, he had his memories. He’d always been in such a hurry to collect new ones, he’d never taken the time to peruse the ones he already had. Extreme sports, women, drugs, and of course the best ones: the murders and gun fights and even some war memories he’d bought from a homeless veteran.

            But like an alcoholic with a swollen liver, he had a tolerance for thrills that had grown beyond his capacity to enjoy them. It was no longer about the rush. It was about the sickness in a deep place in his heart, the mild nausea, the filling of a hole inside of him that grew larger the more he fed it. His recollections lost their intensity with each viewing. Even Max’s cherished abomination became almost boring with repetition, the same things being done over and over, the same screams, the same blood with the same taste.

            He needed freshness.

            More importantly, he needed something more.

            I’ve got the memories you’re looking for. Who was it? A seller even more extreme than Max the Mouth? The thought gave him chills. Did he even want to meet someone like that? At what was probably a secluded location, without Alice?

            Think of that rush, though. And the fact that Max hadn’t eaten the messenger alive was telling, too, considering what he’d probably done to Alice. Max obviously trusted whoever it was, and respected them enough to actually pass on the message.

            Rick’s mind turned and turned, but he was not making a decision – he was convincing himself to do what he already knew he was going to do. He was working himself up to it.

            Two weeks later, he called in sick and headed for 459 April Avenue, Haverbrook.

*

So this is the suburbs. Cramped houses and weedy gardens, pot holed asphalt roads winding through hills and valleys, old playgrounds, empty lots and construction sites. A wall of grey cloud cover cast everything in shade, but besides the occasional flurry of drizzle, the rain didn’t fall. The streets were empty.

            The house at the end of April Avenue did not look like the home of a successful memory dealer. It was a modest brick construction with a weedy driveway and barred windows. A weathervane in the shape of an owl creaked on the roof. Who had weathervanes anymore? The house must have been built a century ago. Rick idled in the car for twenty minutes, eyeing the place. He checked Mnet three times to make sure he was at the right address.

            The door had once been gleaming white, but it hadn’t been painted in a long time and what peeling strips remained were dusty yellow. He was hesitant to use the knocker, a lion’s head so rusty and disused it would crumble in his hand. He knocked three times.

            Fuck it. No turning back now. If the guy’s a creep just leave. He can’t be any worse than Max the Mouth. When he heard steps approaching from the other side – uneven clunks, someone limping – he called up everything he had from the cage fighter. He’d broken faces, he’d stomped on heads and watched teeth roll along the floor like marbles. He’d taken blows that would kill normal people. He could handle this.

            Two locks clicked and the door swung inwards. A yellow skinned zombie blinked at Rick. He was short, soft and flabby. His unfocused eyes had dark circles around them and his unwashed hair hung in pasty strands from his head. He regarded Rick for a long time, swaying on his feet, and when he spoke Rick smelt the overly sweet stench of bourbon breath. ‘Hey, Rick. You look well.’

            ‘Who the hell are you?’

            The guy smiled, his sparse black teeth a far cry from Max’s hungry grin. ‘What, you don’t remember little old Fred, Rick buddy? Didya sell me off too, you sick fuck?’

The cage fighter fresh in his mind, Rick stepped in, nudging the zombie aside, and looked around. Christ, and he thought Dennis lived rough. No carpets, holes in the walls, dust and spider webs everywhere. The only furniture was cheap and ancient: wooden chairs with cracked legs in the kitchen, a dusty television set and a couch with stained yellow cushions in the living room. An empty hallway stretched the length of the house, and Fred pushed past him and started down it, hands trailing along the walls for balance.

‘Where are you going?’ Rick called after him. Either the guy was crazy or Rick had really done business with him in the past. Possible, he supposed. Maybe he’d bought a bad quality memory and decided to sell it on to this nutcase.

‘I’d like to see you in my office, Rick,’ Fred said without looking around. ‘Be a doll and bring the six pack from the fridge, huh?’ He pushed open a door at the end of the dim hallway and staggered in.

Rick shook his head and went into the kitchen. The smell of mould and yeast choked him and he put a hand over his mouth. What a mess. Empty beer bottles and fast food boxes covered the floor. Cockroaches crawled over pizza crusts and broken glass, and one of the walls had a long brown stain that could have been blood. The only thing in good shape was the unopened six pack of Guinness in the fridge, and Rick immediately peeled the lid from one with his teeth and took a long draft.

‘Where the fuck am I?’ He considered leaving, walking away from this place and the Black Market altogether for good. Maybe he’d take a holiday, meet a girl, make some memories of his own. But they’d never compare.

Then the zombie called out to him in a harsh croak, ‘Riiiiiiiiiiiccccckkkkk,’ before breaking down in a bout of coughing and spluttering. No, he couldn’t leave yet – not until he found out who the hell this guy was and what memories he had. Rick had heard stories of people who sold their whole lives away so they could start fresh, and if anyone needed a fresh start, it was this guy.

He took another long swig of Guinness and snatched the pack off the counter. He headed down to the end of the hall, hesitated in the doorway, and entered.

*

Fred’s ‘office’ was in fact a transferral room. Two reclining chairs not unlike the kind at a dentists sat back to back, and above each hung a dusty helmet. The wires that connected them to the power point in the far corner were a coiled mess so ancient and tangled that touching it would be enough to fry you into a pile of ashy bones. There was no other furniture in the room, and Fred was lying back on one chair, looking up at the ceiling. He reached out for a bottle, and Rick gave him one and set the rest on the floor beside him.

            ‘Ahh, that hits the spot. Bourbon helps, you know, with the nightmares, but nothing fills you up like a stout. Meal in a bottle.’

            Rick didn’t reply. Soon as he found out what he needed to know, he was gone. Fred really was nuts if he thought Rick was going to get in that goddamn electric chair.

            ‘So you don’t remember me, huh?’ Fred asked him.

            ‘Should I?’

            Fred chuckled. ‘Nah, I guess not. You didn’t want anything to do with me once you paid me.’

            ‘I bought memories off you? Is that what this is? I took your cherished memories and now you’re a broken man and you want ‘em back? Hate to break it to you, Fred, but I don’t have a single memory with you in it. Whatever it was I must’ve sold it on and forgotten. Sorry.’

            He finished his stout and tossed it into a corner, ready to go, but then Fred started laughing. ‘No, man. I’m not buying, I’m selling, remember? I got the memories you want? That was the message.’

            ‘Yeah, well, I don’t wanna buy what you’re selling.’

            ‘Sure about that? I’ve been watching you for a while, Rick. I got a lot of things you probably didn’t want to give me. You vomited all that shit right into my brain, so I know a lot more about you than you realise. I had to keep an eye on you, see, cos I started to get it pretty quick, you know – I started to understand why you were so fucked up. And I understood something else about you, too. A fresh slate wasn’t going to last with you. You’re just you, Rick, you can’t run away from that.’

            ‘Hold on a second here,’ Rick said. He got a fresh Guinness, knowing he shouldn’t but doing it anyway, his mind working. ‘I paid you money… and I gave you memories?’

            Fred clapped his hands and pointed two fingers at Rick. ‘We have a winner. Yes you did, Rick, and in fact you actually paid me to take your memories away.’

            ‘That doesn’t make any sense, dumbass. Why would I pay someone to take my memories? There’s a whole Black Market for that shit. There’s only one kind of memory no one’s willing to buy, and those are the boring ones. So what did I give you, a trip to the dentist?’

            Fred shook his head, his bloodshot eyes swivelling around. ‘Oh, no Rick. No, no, you’re wrong about that. See, there is one very specific set of memories that couldn’t find a buyer for a long time until I came along. You were desperate by then, offering a lot of money to have that shit taken before the cops zeroed in, but the funny part was, in the whole Black Market full of people buying murders and tortures and all that, no one wanted to touch these babies.’

            Rick wanted to believe the guy was crazy, but the longer they spoke the less he truly believed it. But the things he was saying… ‘I’m no criminal. Besides, people buy that stuff all the time, cops or not. It’s too hard to track sold memories and you know it.’

            ‘Jesus Rick, are you hearing what I’m telling you? You’re so fucked up inside that even the most hard core slaughter fiends didn’t want your life. You had to find a sucker at the end of his rope like me to take it. Well I’m done, okay? I can’t handle this anymore. The nightmares. Those kids. Why’d you do that to those kids, Rick? Do you have any idea how many drugs I have to take to make it all go away? You gave me five million. Your life savings. You know how much is left? I’ll be lucky if I don’t fucking starve after this. So you’re gonna get in that chair, plug in, and take it all back. Your life, your memories, you.’

            Fred sucked in a deep breath and ran a hand through his hair. Tears were welled up under his lids, on the brink of spilling down his face.

            Rick didn’t move or speak; he was stuck. The right thing to do would be to turn and walk away from Fred, the Market, this whole life, and forget it ever happened. Only, you’ve done that before, haven’t you? Fred refused to look at him, but Rick stared him up and down, from his twitching restless feet to his yellow, drug wasted face. The dark appetite stirred, and rather than sympathy Rick felt only curiosity.

            These were the memories he’d been looking for, as promised. Didn’t it seem so right that they were his own? Whose life had he been living? Had he murdered the lawyer who owned the things he had now – the happy childhood, the stern parents who’d ultimately died in a car crash – and wasn’t that convenient? ‘I know who I am,’ he said quietly.

            ‘No you don’t,’ Fred said. ‘But I do.’

            His mouth was dry. He swallowed the rest of his bottle and set it down on the floor without picking up another one. The liquid was heavy in his stomach, slow burning, intensifying his hunger. For what? For whatever Fred’s got in that sick head of his. His visions, his evil, his nightmares. They belong to me.

            Rick stepped around and slid into the empty chair. He pulled the helmet down over his head and lay back, eyes closed. Fred connected the necessary wires, clicked things into place. The last thing he said to Rick, his voice hoarse with gratitude: ‘Thank you.’

*

His phone was ringing when he woke up. Work. Disoriented, eyes gummed shut, he answered.

            ‘Rick? Where the hell are you? If you’re sick you’re sick but if you don’t give notice again you’re done, understand? And don’t be sick in the first place. You had a meeting with Redman today, I had to blow him off. Where the hell are you, anyway?’

            Rick struggled into a sitting position, gasping as his hand landed on a pile of broken glass. He wiped his eyes and looked around. Some bedroom, a stained mattress in one corner, the floor as littered with bottles and junk as the kitchen had been. He was naked and covered from head to toe in dried blood.

            Fred’s head rolled out of his lap and onto a pizza box beside him, neck roughly severed by a broken stout bottle. That explained the bloody rag tied around his right hand. Oh. Hi, Fred. It was good to remember things.

            ‘I, ah… I don’t think I’m gonna be coming in to work, Phillip.’

            ‘What? Listen, Rick, I like you, but if you keep this bullshit up another day – ’

            ‘No, asshole. I said I’m Not Coming In To Work. Understand?’

            ‘Rick? Are you okay?’

            He staggered to his feet, kicking Fred’s head aside and wincing at the sharp pain in his big toe. Who knew such a flabby mess would have such a hard head? Damn, he had to find his clothes. Hopefully the house had running water, too.

            ‘My name isn’t Rick, Phil, okay? Rick’s dead. Rick quits. I’m Harold. Rick didn’t know how to have any fun, so I killed him.’

            ‘What the fuck? Okay, I’m coming over, like now.’

            ‘Yeah, that’s a good idea,’ Harold said. The grin on his face would have looked at home on Max the Mouth. ‘You do that.’ He dropped the phone.

            The house had a hot water shower, after all, though the tiles were thick with mould. It was like standing on moss, under a hot waterfall. After, Harold got dressed, feeling refreshed – alive. The grin was still on his face – he just couldn’t get rid of it.

            Everything had come out okay, in the end. He hadn’t lost any of Rick’s memories, so he could look back over the news reports from all that time ago, the ones relating to the man they’d called The Central Sicko, the most prolific violent killer in the City’s history. Attributed with kick starting Central’s biggest crime wave ever. Worked with the mob, they said. Involved in memory trafficking and drugs and weapons. They were wrong about that, though – he wouldn’t sell his memories for the world. Never again.

            He returned to the city, but didn’t bother stopping by Rick’s apartment. Everything he needed was in a bank account Rick had known nothing about, except the password, an eight digit pin that had stuck in his head like a catchy song. Turned out five million wasn’t his life savings, after all.

He laid low until the smog brought on an early nightfall and the sun disappeared for good, and then he put on a hat and a dark pair of sunglasses and headed out.

            The city was a jungle. Lights hanging from tall trees made of metal. Growling beasts stampeded the valleys between skyscraper mountains. Caves and dungeons and basements were everywhere, a million cracks through which a man could disappear. A thousand underworlds through which he could move. He was the panther, the lion, the killer, and they were the monkeys.

            He let his mind roll over some of the better memories, and the dark thing inside him stirred, hungry. But that was okay, because now he understood what it was. And he understood something far more important, something that Rick hadn’t.

            You couldn’t run away from yourself.

            He turned a corner, down a dark and familiar street, and the city swallowed him.  

If you like my short stories, you can find my collection ‘Peeping Eyes and Lipless Mouths’ HERE

The pool glowed blue in dusk light, every bit as beautiful as Kristen had promised. After the story she’d told him, of drowned children and a park closed many years ago, Luke couldn’t help wondering what lay beneath the surface. A light wind blew through pine canopies, but the thick trunks and steep slippery banks shielded the pool and not so much as a ripple crossed it.

            ‘Creepy, huh?’ Kristen was watching him, strands of dark hair falling across her green eyes. Luke shrugged. ‘It’s pretty cool, I guess.’

            ‘Pretty cool?’ She walked around it slowly, keeping back from the edge and peering inside. ‘It’s incredible. Just think about all of the death that’s happened in this one small circle of water. Most of them children. Come on, Luke, I thought you liked horror stories.’

            ‘Well, yeah. I mean, yeah, you know.’ He scratched his head, awkward. He remembered Vince slapping him on the back the day before. ‘Congrats, man,’ he’d said with a half smile. ‘There’s only one reason she’d be taking you up to that isolated spot all alone.’ And he’d given him an exaggerated wink. The idiot. Even if it was true, Luke had no idea what to do. Hey, wanna make out or what? Is that what the cool kids said?

            ‘You know, there’ve been disappearances around the area for decades. One every year or two, and the bodies never get found.’ She sat down on a rotted stump across the pool from him, broken in such a way that when she rested her back on the remains of the trunk it looked like a throne. ‘If you ask me, they’re all right there, in this pool.’

            He shivered and stepped closer to the bank, looking down at the source of what he was sure was an urban legend. It was a pond, except that it was too perfectly circular, and if you squinted you could see the mud around the edges was actually dirty concrete, the remnants of an old public swimming pool. He recalled the ruined fence they’d passed on the way in. No Admittance. Now no more than rusted, overgrown wire, strewn across the path.

            The water was black as coffee grounds, and when Luke leaned over it, he couldn’t see his reflection at all.

            ‘Dare me to jump in?’ She said, grinning.

            He laughed. ‘No way, are you crazy? You’ll freeze to death.’

            ‘What if I fell? Would you dive in and save me? Although, you should know – that’s exactly how one couple died not long after the place got closed.’

            He was making his way around the pool, thinking if he could just get close enough to her she might make the first move. Vince was right – he was getting signals from her: the way she looked at him, the way she smiled and listened so intently. Or was she just being friendly? But she stood up as he came over and stepped away. A long fallen branch lay nearby, the end of which hung over part of the pool. She stepped onto it, balancing with her arms outstretched.

            ‘I wonder how deep it goes,’ she said.

            He watched her, hunched over with his hands in his pockets. ‘It was just a swimming pool, wasn’t it? Can’t be that deep.’

            ‘No, silly. It wasn’t just a swimming pool. It was a Death Pool. A pool of the dead. I bet it goes all the way down to hell.’ She looked up from the branch and gave him a crooked smile. Man, she was a twisted chick. Luke found he didn’t care. He was a high school boy who’d never so much as kissed a girl. She could have been freshly escaped from a mental asylum and he’d have been just as eager. If this was her idea of a date, so be it – she was just a horror fan like him.

            ‘So, this is it, huh? You took me out here just to show me this?’

            ‘Not just.’ She took another couple of steps along the branch, focussing on her feet. ‘But I thought you’d appreciate it.’

            ‘Yeah? I mean, it’s pretty beautiful. Like you.’ She burst out laughing and he felt his face redden. Holy shit, that was corny. Why would I say that?

            ‘You’re cute, Luke Freeman. But I didn’t take you here to make out.’ She took another couple of steps, now on the part of branch overhanging the pool. ‘I just wanted to show you how cool this place was, cos you have the same taste in horror movies as me.’

            ‘Oh. I mean, yeah I know, I was just messing around.’

            ‘The making out we can do later.’

            He opened his mouth to respond and then closed it again, his heart pumping faster than it had watching Hellraiser at age seven. She was kept her eyes on the branch, but she was grinning. She seemed so confident. Had she been with guys before? A girl as pretty as her, she had to be. She was playing with him, not that he cared a damn.

            ‘Well, it’s getting dark,’ he ventured. ‘Maybe we should head back.’

            ‘Okay, in a bit. Reckon I can make it all the way to the end?’

            He eyed the end of the branch uneasily. It didn’t look stable, although she was pretty light and small. Just tell her it’s too risky. But he didn’t want to sound like a sissy, so he just shrugged. ‘Yeah, maybe.’

            One more step. Another. The heavy base of the branch lifted a little off the ground and she swayed, but didn’t fall.

            ‘Be careful,’ he said, trying not to sound as worried as he was. She was doing it on purpose, of course, testing him. All he could think about were the creepy stories she’d told him – of grown men diving under and never coming out.

            ‘If I fall in, would you save me?’ She said.

            ‘Why, can’t you swim?’

            ‘What if I couldn’t?’

            ‘Then, uh, yeah, sure I would.’

            She smiled wider and took another step, one more from the end of the branch. ‘You wouldn’t be scared?’

            He laughed. ‘No way. It’s just water. It’ll take more than your stories to make me scared of a swimming pool.’

            She gave a mock sigh. ‘My hero.’

            He grinned, his stomach doing a pleasant backflip even though he knew she was teasing him. If she got her clothes wet, she’d have to get changed. And his house was close to here, just the twenty minute walk down the path.

            ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘here goes.’

            She lowered her foot lightly onto the end of the branch and shifted some of her weight on to it, neither of them daring to breathe. She was directly over the middle of the pool now, its surface so still and black Luke wondered if it might even be solid. Maybe that was the game she was playing – she’d step off the end onto hard ground and then laugh at the look on his face. He loosened up at the thought, and his eyes darted up to her face and then to her shapely ass, a guilty smile on his face. As Vince would have said, that girl was fine.

            She lifted her foot and turned to head back.

The branch rolled.

            Her right foot slipped on the rotted bark and she went down with a high pitched whoop! And then she disappeared in a splash of thick black water, some of it spattering Luke’s face.

            He stood, frozen, his heat racing, expecting her to come gasping to the surface any second.

            One of her hands came up, covered in a black paste. The pool wasn’t really filled with rainwater as Luke had initially thought – it was thick sludge, with a few inches of rainwater over the top. He came forward as far as he dared, keeping one foot on the bank and planting the other on the branch so that he could lean forward. ‘Kristen!’ He wanted badly to believe it was a joke, that she was keeping herself just below the surface with her hand up, resisting the urge to laugh.

            But it was no joke. Her hand was sinking, small waves lapping at her wrist and then her palm, the weight of her clothes dragging her down. He reached for her but couldn’t get close, not unless he either dove in himself or left the bank and moved along the branch. Didn’t someone say never to let a drowning person grab hold of you? He stood half in and half out, staring at her sinking hand, undecided. She could swim, couldn’t she?

            Grab her! Just wade in and pull her up! He couldn’t do it. He imagined thick mud sucking at his chest, his neck. Her pale desperate hand taking hold of his and pulling him down with her. I bet it goes all the way down to hell.

             Only the tips of her fingers were visible now.

            Too late, he thought of the branch. It was heavy, but he’d be able to move it. He turned away from the pool and grabbed the base, pushing it so that the twisted branches at the tip rolled closer to her hand. Twice his feet lost purchase in the mud and he slid to his knees. When he looked over after the second time, he couldn’t see her at all.

            Shit, shit, shit. He got behind the branch and lifted it so that the end dipped into the muck where she’d gone under. Please oh please grab it, just feel the branch and grab hold.

            A minute passed, and Kristen hadn’t surfaced. Luke lowered the branch and stared at the pool, breathing hard. If he dialled now, emergency services could get here in twenty or twenty five minutes. They’d be looking for a body.

            She might be unconscious now, but still alive. She can’t be that far down. Just go in a bit and feel around for her hand. Do that at least.

             She’d told him about two brothers from way back in the fifties. Ten and eight years old, they’d sneaked in for a swim soon after the pool was closed off. Both strong swimmers. Both found floating the next day. Just a story.

            Luke crouched down by the side of the pool, searching for any sign of her pale skin. He saw nothing beneath the swirling mud. Another minute passed.

            And another. The trees were silent, as though they were holding their breath along with her. But not forever.

            He opened his phone and dialled 000 with shaking fingers. Had a conversation with the operator he couldn’t remember a word of later.  

            Then he put his head in his hands and cried.

*

 He was there, his parents and Kristen’s beside him, when the police fished for her body with what basically amounted to sticks and cameras. Visibility was zero, and they couldn’t send divers because the mud was too thick. They dredged it, and found that most of the pool’s concrete base had long ago crumbled away. The bottom was non-existent, and there was no telling how deep the sinkhole went. Most likely the sludge they’d sucked out would be replaced within the next week or so.

            When they told her parents that her body would likely never be recovered, the sounds of their hysterical weeping ate into Luke’s brain and settled there for good. He heard it that night before he went to sleep, and every night of his life afterwards. They hugged him and told him they didn’t blame him. She’d gone under far too quickly. He was soaked with mud up to his chest and they thanked him for trying. Her father, a tradesman with a stiff grey beard, shook his hand and said in a thick, restrained voice, ‘You were brave to go in as deep as you did, son.’

            The police questioned him for a nerve racking hour, but despite his fears they wrote him off as a distraught witness to a terrible accident, not a suspect. He returned home with his worried parents, who consoled him and got pizza for dinner and told him these things happen, and it wasn’t your fault, and try not to think about it too much. He found a way to fall asleep, and the sun rose the following day just like on any other.

            And just like that, a girl was dead, and the world went on.

            He had breakfast, went for a long walk – nowhere near the pool, of course, and read light hearted comic books. That night, rain fell, and the old swimming pool would be filling up, and Kristen’s boot prints would be washed away, and it would be as though she’d vanished completely from the face of the earth.

*

Their weeping hadn’t been the kind of high pitched wailing they show in movies. It had been low, husky crying, the kind that scratched vocal chords and left you short of breath. The father had been silent, tears streaming down his drawn face against his will. Luke hadn’t had to listen for long, but he listened plenty now, in the early hours of the morning, a long way from sunrise.

            He tossed for the hundredth time, then rolled onto his back and opened his sore eyes. It was the sixth day since she’d died, and he’d slept a grand total of about eighteen hours. The insomnia only made things worse, because his mind tried to dream while he was awake, and as a result the weeping grew louder and more vivid with time. Staring at the ceiling at night, he even saw things: her pretty pale face smiling at him from the ceiling, for example. Then he’d look closer and see it was only the round light seeming to glow in the dark.

            ‘Screw this.’ He threw off his blanket. If he was going to be awake, he might as well do something.

            As soon as he got out of bed the air chilled him to the bone. The heater was on but it only ever managed to warm the ground floor. Maybe he’d have a shower. A long, hot shower, until steam rose from his skin. That would surely make him tired. Except the sound of water hitting tiles might wake up his parents. A bath, then. He could just lie in it in the brightly lit bathroom and drift for a while.

            There was something comforting about the sound of the bath filling up and being in the cosy, clean bathroom, and by the time he slid into scalding hot water he was smiling. He rested his neck on the lip of the tub and relaxed, letting utter silence and heat engulf him.

            He heard her laugh. Definitely in his mind, nothing but a phantom sound, but his exhaustion had him permanently at the threshold of dream world and the laugh was almost loud in his ears, a real thing. He took a deep breath and slid further down, letting the water come up to his chin. It was the perfect temperature – so hot that when he moved it hurt.

            I wonder how deep it goes?

             He closed his eyes. Maybe if he could just fall asleep here in this warmth and light he wouldn’t dream about her.

            I wonder what it was like to drown? Did she try to hold her breath or did she give up once she was too far down? She didn’t strike him as the type to give up. He imagined her struggling against the mud, her clothes weighing her down, the sludge pushing on her. Had her eyes been open or closed?

            He sucked in a deep breath and went all the way under, bracing himself against the side of the tub so he stayed down, his hair swaying a little in the water. It felt nice. If this was what it was like to float in one of those sensory deprivation tanks, he could see the appeal.

            He remembered how her hand had stuck stubbornly out of the water, open and waiting. 

            There’s a moment of despair, he heard her voice speaking in his ear as though she were right next to him. It occurred to him that he didn’t even know her well enough to be sure it was the right voice. He thought she’d sounded like that, but maybe he was getting it wrong. He’d never know.

            When you fight and keep going down, and then you realise no one’s going to grab your hand. Your stomach drops, like it does in a roller coaster. And it’s like, you just get it, you know? You just think, Oh, I’m going to die now.

            His lungs were complaining. Soon he’d get to the part where his chest started seizing up, his body trying to force him to open his mouth and gasp. Had she left it that late, or had she tried to get it over with once she was too deep, just one long pull and that was it? He’d heard somewhere that the urge to breathe came not from lack of oxygen but an abundance of carbon dioxide. As long as you exhaled and then filled your lungs with something, you’d lose the desire to breathe. A lot of drowning survivors reported a certain calmness after that first lungful.

            Oh, relief, sure. Once your body stops screaming at you to get air and your lungs aren’t burning up, there’s plenty of physical relief. But that’s when the panic really sets in, because then you know it’s happening for sure. Everything’s dark, but big black patches start appearing everywhere, not just in your eyes but in your mind. And your heart goes crazy, not beating properly, and all you can think is that it’s happening, you’re dying now and there’s nothing you can do, and it’s just totally fucking horrible.

            His eyes were squeezed tight, his hands fists against the tub. He almost wanted to unclench his jaw and let hot water pour straight into his lungs. Maybe he deserved it. If he’d just had the balls to wade in a little, one hand on that big branch, and grab her hand. If he’d gone for it in those first seconds…

            WHY DIDN’T YOU TAKE MY HAND?

             The water changed in a split second, just as he was on the point of letting go and coming back up for air. From hot to ice cold, and so thick it was as though thousands of litres of it were somehow packed together in the same tub, pushing on all sides. When he opened his eyes it was so pitch black that for a minute he couldn’t be certain he was here at all but out there in the pool, and he fought, reaching for the side of the tub to haul himself out.

            He got his head up at last and sucked in delicious steamy air. He tried to plant his foot underneath him so he could stand, but his legs extended fully, past where the bottom of the bath should have been, until they were kicking blindly in unknown depths, and still he couldn’t see for the mud in his eyes. Hands grabbed at his ankles, opening and closing, grazing his soles with fingertips as though they were stretching up but couldn’t reach high enough.

            He heaved himself over the side of the bathtub, his lower half coming free with a sucking sound, and rolled across the tiles. He wiped his face and crawled backwards until his back was against the bathroom door and then he just stared, sucking air as though he’d run a marathon.

            There was no mud, nor mud trail. The bath was pristine, clear water lapping over the sides in his wake.

            He was so cold, and no steam rose either from his body or the bath. Shivering, goosebumps raising on his skin, he got up and went over to look. Everything was normal: white porcelain and silver taps. He even dared, now that his heart was settling, his mind already rationalizing what must have happened, to reach in and pull the drain. The water was freezing cold, but of course that made sense, because he’d fallen asleep, hadn’t he?

            Underwater?

            He dried himself off and walked back to his bedroom, where he lay awake until early morning, with both the ceiling light and bedside lamp on, and his ears tuned for a voice that didn’t speak.

*

His parents watched him closely, trying to be inconspicuous and achieving the opposite. Finally, when Luke caught his mother casting him a worried look for the hundredth time, he fixed her with a dark look and said: ‘What?’

            She sighed and folded her hands in front of her. ‘I’m sorry, Luke. It’s just… I think you need to see someone.’

            ‘I don’t need to see someone, mum. I’m fine, just tired.’

            ‘Oh? Why’s that? Wouldn’t be because you were having a bath at three in the morning, and your light was still on when I got up at five thirty? Do you even sleep anymore?’

            ‘Sorry I woke you. I just wanted to warm up a bit.’

            ‘Luke, I’ve never seen you this depressed. I know it’s been horrible but you really have to talk about it. If you don’t want to talk to me, see a psychiatrist. We’ll field the bill, whatever. Just do something.’

            ‘I’m fine.’

            ‘Luke.’ She knitted her brow and leaned forward, as if she was about to tell him a secret. ‘I’ve been reading here for three and a half hours now.’

            ‘So?’

            ‘You’ve been staring at the wall without moving since I sat down.’

            ‘Oh.’

            So he went to see a psychiatrist.

            Gregory Tillman was a rational, attentive man with a perpetually concerned expression, glasses, and a build that made his suit looked like it was stuffed with wooden planks. He also had a clipped grey beard and the soft reasonable voice of a scientist. Luke liked that. If anyone could tell him that he wasn’t crazy, it was a man of science, right?

            ‘You’re not crazy,’ Tillman said after Luke told him everything that had happened.

Luke let out the breath he’d been holding and nodded. ‘Yeah, I know, I guess. I just wish I could sleep a little. When does that get better?’

‘Well, that’s a tricky one. Now, I could prescribe you some low strength medication and see if it helps, but… I’m not convinced it will, Luke.’

‘Why not?’

‘Sleep is a funny thing. There are some people out there who’ve completely lost the ability to sleep. The most, uh, afflicted insomniacs can even die from sleep deprivation over a long enough period. The fascinating thing is that only in rare cases are the reasons physiological, say in the case of the badly placed brain tumour or something similar.’

He saw the look on Luke’s face and chuckled. ‘Not to worry, that wasn’t what I was thinking at all. Quite the opposite. You strike me as a classic case of survivor guilt. And since that’s a psychological issue, it won’t be resolved with mere sleep aids.’

‘Survivor guilt.’

‘Yes. The things you say you saw in the bathtub were of course hallucinations brought on by your lack of sleep. But waking hallucinations are your mind trying to dream, and what interests me more is the nature of what you saw. The hands grabbing at your feet, Kristen yelling the words “Why me” into your ear, suggest that you feel guilty to have lived while she died. In addition, the muddy water and general feeling of terror you describe tells me you’re feeling a lot of fear right now. Am I close to the mark?’

Why didn’t you take my hand? ‘Yeah, right on.’

Tillman nodded to himself, took of his glasses and tapped them thoughtfully against his crossed knee. ‘Tell you what I’m going to suggest, and you don’t have to do this, but I really do believe it will help. Say the word and I’ll prescribe those meds, but I think you should try this first: go down to that pool – not too close mind you – and just be there for a while.’

‘You want me to go back?’ His mouth suddenly a little dry.

‘Take a friend with you. Do not on any account go near the water, Luke, though I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that. The reason I suggest this is threefold. One, you’ll face your fear, and see that the pool, while dangerous, is not going to find you and kill you. In the end, it’s just a pool. Two, you can create new, happier memories with your friend. Explore the surrounding area, talk about something pleasant, whatever. Three, you can think about what happened, and realise that really it was just an accident. And if you need anyone to tell you that, son, I will swear on my grandfather’s grave that there wasn’t a thing you could have done. You certainly did more than I would have in your place.’

Luke gave him an appreciative smile.

‘I’ll think about it, I guess. Thanks.’

‘I’m glad to hear it, Luke.’

Just before he left, he turned at the door, something nagging at him. ‘Would it be okay if you prescribed me some of those sleep meds, anyway?’ he said.

*

He went.

            Alone, at dusk, the sky just the same mixture of grey and white it had been on the day, the mud just as wet beneath his feet.

            It had taken him most of the previous day and double the recommended dosage of sleeping pills to work up the courage. They hadn’t worked, of course, but for the two hours he did sleep his dreams had been more alive and terrifying than any he’d ever had. In one of them, he was the one sinking and Kristen stood on the bank, waving him goodbye with a sad smile on her face. The other dreams were variations of what followed: he sank deeper and deeper, fighting the dense mud and getting nowhere, suffocating but never quite dying. He woke tied up in his blankets and face down on his pillow. The air tasted stale.

            He left the house with narrowed eyes and a confident stride, hands jammed in his pockets. With each step he grew more certain that Tillman had been right: he just needed to face his fears, prove he wasn’t a coward, that he couldn’t have done anything anyway. Prove that she was really gone.

            By the time he was halfway there, the tall trees having long ago obscured the house behind him, the familiar smell of wet pine needles and muddy water permeating the air, he’d lost a lot of his bluster. He caught himself moving warily, tiptoeing. He was primed for unusual sounds, laughter perhaps. He scanned the surrounding trees as though someone might be waiting behind one of the thick trunks.

            He came to the rusted fence and looked down at it. The final threshold. A minute or so walking, round a bend or two, and he’d be at the pool. He could see it in his mind as clearly as if he were there now, so perfectly round and black, like an enormous eye reflecting the endless leagues of space.

            She would be there – he was sure of that. He would come into the clearing and she would be sitting in that broken stump – the one that looked like a throne. Not quite the same as he’d last seen her. No, she would be drenched in a coat of mud so thick it was like a second skin, and though her eyes would be open, seeing him, they would just look like two pools of sludge in her face. When she opened her mouth to accuse him of his crime, more would pour out, along with twigs and worms and a rotted tongue.

            Then she would come for him.

            He closed his eyes, a feat of courage in itself, and counted to twenty – another suggestion of Tillman’s. Then, he whispered: ‘It’s okay. You got this. Just one more minute, and you’ll see it’s all in your head.’

            Then he opened his eyes.

            The rusty fence lay before him, and the path winding onward until it turned a bend a few meters ahead. That part of the path was mostly shielded by trees, and not so damp, but it was wet enough for someone in shoes to leave prints. They were small prints, left by a short man, or perhaps a tall girl. They led towards him, away from the pool, which was odd, because to his knowledge this path was the only way to and from the clearing.

            No way, that can’t be – there has to be another way up. Think rationally. But it was hard to be rational when you were looking right at these prints and thinking they could have easily fitted the shoes Kristen had been wearing that day…

            She called to him, on the wind. A distant shout, an indecipherable word. He couldn’t be certain that it was her voice, or his name she was calling, so faint was the sound. But it was her, wasn’t it?

            Luke started back at a fast walk, which soon turned into a slow jog. He glanced over his shoulder every few steps, and followed the prints all the way down the path. How had he not seen them on the way up? He’d been too busy looking at the trees. The shoeprints were visible among his own all the way back.

            No phantom girls followed him back, and when the trees thinned and he made it back to the grassy slope, his house clearly visible at the base, something in him unclenched and he slowed to a walk. You’re a coward. You’re nuts, man. You gotta get your shit together.

            But he didn’t turn back. Instead, he caught his breath and rubbed his eyes and followed the prints. They were harder to see in the grass, but there weren’t any others to confuse them but his own, after all, which were too big. By now, he was sure they weren’t hers anyway – that was ridiculous – so he expected to see them curve at his back fence and follow the gravel path back to the road.

            They didn’t curve away, but headed straight down the hill to the gated wooden fence that marked Luke’s backyard. Do they stop here, though? He wanted to leave it there, to go inside and turn on the television and not think about anything for the rest of the day. But a thought had settled in his brain, the kind that would nag and nag until he put it to rest, so he went around the house to the narrow muddy stretch on the side which held the big metal gas heater and the plumbing pipes and compost heap.

            The prints were much clearer here, but he only needed to find them in one place for his fears to be confirmed, and there they were. Two clearly defined prints, these ones quite deep, set in the mud by the pipes. When he looked up, he saw a tiny square window on the second floor.

            It was the bathroom window.

*

He spent most of the day in a state of helpless terror. He couldn’t show his parents the prints. Whether they were there or not didn’t matter – it was what they meant. She was after him, and no one, least of all the ever reasonable Dr. Tillman, was going to believe him. He hadn’t slept in over a week, nor gone to school. He wasn’t answering Vince’s calls, texting back I’m fine, just need time. He was depressed, lazy, tired, and barely existed in this world any more. He wasn’t himself because he was half insane, and they could all see it, and that was what they would say.

            But just because he was insane did not mean he wasn’t also right, did it? Maybe he was insane because he was right.  

            Four in the morning crept along. It wasn’t raining yet but a heavy wind outside made the whole house creak and shift on its foundations. He had the curtains drawn and made sure all the lights in the house were off. He’d also dropped three times the recommended dosage of sleeping pills, just in case. Despite them, his whole body was tense, his eyes flashing open at the slightest sound.

            Somehow in his paranoia and madness, sleep descended on him by inches, sneaking closer each time he shut his eyes and tossed in his bed, pulling him down into himself to show him things he didn’t want to see.

            He was in this state, halfway between alertness and total coma, when something knocked lightly on his window. It was not in time with the intermittent gusts of wind, and too precise to be natural: three quick knocks, then a silence, as though waiting for someone to answer.

            For a long time he was paralysed by fear, lying rigid straight in his bed and listening. The knocks continued, so regular that after a while he got to thinking maybe it was something real, and not a soft, dead hand. It would be impossible to sleep until he saw what it was, and Luke eventually found the courage to stand up and walk over to the window.

Knock, knock, knock. Pause. He drew back the curtains.

            It was her. Not the rotting mud thing he’d dreaded, but really Kristen, wearing the same clothes and mischievous expression he remembered. She lifted the window with her slender arms, letting in the night air, and his first thought was whether she would be cold to touch.

            This time, he didn’t feel terror at seeing her – only relief and something else very familiar, his heart leaping inside him, a warm stirring in him at the sight of her red lips and the way she smiled at him as she floated in through the window.

            ‘Are you okay? He hadn’t meant to speak, but the words escaped him. Full of concern for her, and the desire he’d felt so strongly that day.

            ‘I am, for now,’ she said, but her smile faded quickly. ‘But I’m so lonely out there.’

            ‘I’m sorry. I wanted you, you know. I really did.’ She smelled strongly of pine needles and bark.

            ‘Then why didn’t you do anything, Luke? Why didn’t you…’

            ‘I just don’t want to die. I got scared.’

            ‘No, Luke, no.’ She reached forward and wiped a tear from his eye, and he’d been right – she was cold, though that fact only served to make him wonder if he could make her warm. ‘Not that. I meant you should have kissed me.’

            She was close now, her icy hand settling on the back of his neck, and he met her dark green eyes. This was it, his chance. His heart was flying now, but from excitement instead of fear, and he leaned forward and kissed her, one hand sliding under her shirt and across the freezing skin of her lower back.

            Her tongue tasted like dirt and metal as it slid across his, and then deeper into his mouth and slowly down his throat and inside him like a snake, the base of it growing thicker until it pushed his jaw wide open. He tried to scream and couldn’t, grabbed her head and pulled at it, but her arms were tight around his body, pressing him close to her.

            Her head crumpled and followed her tongue down his throat, the rest of her body folding in like a deflating balloon as her guts ascended through her neck. Luke gagged, his whole body heaving as it tried to expel the mass expanding in his belly. Her clothes and skin rose up into his distended jaw before he could grab them and he collapsed, mouth still open and begging for air.

            It didn’t come. He clutched his belly, painfully stretched as though he were pregnant, and tried desperately to breathe, but part of her was lodged in his airway and wouldn’t come loose. Slow seconds of this hell passed, and he flopped helplessly on his bedroom carpet, wanting so badly to scream and being unable, until dark circles closed in around his vision and made him blessedly senseless.

*

The pain didn’t go away when he woke. If anything, it was worse, and as soon as he extricated his gasping mouth from his pillows he rolled out of bed clutching his lower abdomen. When the initial disorientation cleared away, he was relieved to discover that he knew what hurt so bad – and it was decidedly more natural than the corpse of a dead girl in his belly: he had to pee, badly.

            He didn’t know what time it was, but the house was dark and he did his best to tiptoe on the way to the bathroom. By the time he reached it, he was doubled over and had to put a hand out against the wall to steady himself before he unleashed.

            It was then, as he was beginning to believe that none of it had happened, that it had in fact been only a nightmare, the nightmare continued. At first, it was as though the sheer pressure on his bladder made it more difficult to urinate, but when he did at last manage it he found a more horrifying reason. Instead of urine, black sludge oozed forth in a thick stream.

            He gritted his teeth against a scream as he watched foul smelling discharge leak into the bowl, litre after litre easing the internal strain with agonizing effort. His forehead was drenched in cold sweat when he staggered back out into the hall and headed downstairs, leaning heavily on the banister though the pain had passed.

            I’m going insane. This is what madness is.

He had to do something, and he had to do it now. Tillman said his hallucinations would only get worse the longer he went without sleep. The way it was going, he would lose his mind completely long before that. Then and there, he decided he would go up the hill once again.

            He would face his fear.

*

Four sleeping pills later, he headed out. It was just before dawn, the grey light and shadow identical to dusk. Or maybe it was dusk, and the sun would go down when he reached the pool and leave him in darkness. Forget it, you’re going. I don’t care how scared you get, you’re going. Don’t go for you, go for her. You owe it to her.

            He’d thrown on a coat and track pants but his feet were bare – cold and slippery in the mud. The time it would have taken to put on his shoes would have been enough for his determination to vanish. This time, he didn’t look around, but kept his eyes on the path just in front of him, his hood muffling his ears, fists clenched in his jacket pockets. He didn’t dare stop for a moment, or look over his shoulder: such things would destroy this false courage as easily as sword might sever a fishing line.

            Do it for her, do it for her. He passed the broken fence in a stride and kept walking. Something in him let go. He imagined a suicide jumper might feel the same way after his feet left the ledge. Point of no return. It was this or madness. 

            He made it to the clearing, stopping only when his bare feet sunk up to his ankles in the soft muddy banks. He was here: the Dreaded Place, the Evil Pool. For a long minute he didn’t move, just looked. She was down there, somewhere. Kristen, his first love: dark humoured, smiling, mischievous, beautiful.

            And she was dead. She was rotting, probably nothing but bones by now, and this was just a pool, and his bath was just a bath, and he was just a sad boy who hadn’t had enough sleep.

He let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding, and flipped the hood off his head so he could see better. The pool remained still and impenetrable. The police had dragged the branch away before cordoning off the area, but apart from that it looked just as it on that day.

The day he didn’t save her.

            She was sitting on the rotted throne, leaning back, her arms resting on the bark, and smiling as if to say I’m so glad you came.

The image vanished as soon as it appeared. He wondered if it was the last time he’d ever see her. Just like Tillman assured him, the fear and stress of the previous days fell away from him with each passing minute. He shook his head, hot tears burning in the corner of his eyes.

            ‘Goodbye, Kristen,’ he whispered. ‘I’m sorry.’ Already he felt the weight of his tiredness on his mind. He wanted to lie down right there and go to sleep.

            A delicate hand rose from the depths in the middle of the pool. Her fingers, open and pleading, followed by her smooth white palm.

            It’s just a hallucination. Your own memory playing tricks on you. The sleeping pills. Face your fears, Tillman said. Luke watched Kristen’s hand, half expecting it to disappear, or descend, or do something more, but it did nothing. She waited, her hand motionless, patient.

            Luke took a step forward, and then another, his lower body sinking into deep mud, but not yet so deep he wasn’t sure he could get out. He could reach her from here, and he did, his cold hand closing on her wet one and squeezing it.

            She pulled at him, but he couldn’t raise her, so he ventured just a little deeper. I won’t give up on you this time. I’ve got you, Kristen. I’ll never let go.

             She pulled harder and he had time for a quick breath before the mud climbed his neck and up his face. He sank, letting her lead him down through meters of black mud, pressure building on all sides as his ears and eyes and mouth filled up. He took it into his aching lungs, and still he kept a tight hold of her hand and followed her down, down to where the mud was warmer and other bodies and hands floated past him and touched him as though meeting him for the first time.

            He descended further, past the dead, and found her eager lips at last, welcoming him.

            Luke drifted with her, and at long last, with the company of the dead, he slept.

Dear Ma and Pa,

I am almost at the front lines now. Some of the guys are still smiling and cracking jokes, but not so much now as we can smell the battlefield up ahead. They say a hundred thousand or more have already died there. I don’t want to make you worry or nothing, but some of the other guys are writing their last letters home just in case, and I thought I would do the same. We are still quite far back, so who knows? Maybe there will be a breakthrough and we won’t get to see any action at all. Part of me hopes not, thought. I intent to take at least one Jerry for you and Mary before I come home, so you’ll be proud of me and know I did my part. Hope all’s well at home,

Love, Johnny

‘Just imagine what kinda stuff we can dig up! If we find a skull I get first dibs!’

     Dougie had never seen Eric so wild eyed and excited before, and that was saying something. He was a wild boy to begin with: he hadn’t climbed a tree until he was right out there on the tiniest, topmost branch with the wind in his face, hadn’t played a game of soccer until he was bloody and covered in mud. Right now, he was gunning the pedals of his bike so fast Douglas was pushing himself to the limit just to keep up, eyes watering, both of them laughing with excitement.

     Thankfully, it wasn’t far, though they had to get off their bikes at the base of a grassy hill and push them up to the top, where a thin line of pines kept the field out of sight of the road. No wonder Dougie had never noticed it before.

     Not that he would have known what it was, in any case.

     ‘It just looks like a muddy old field,’ Eric said, still huffing from exertion.

     ‘Well… It’s a battlefield, anyway,’ Dougie said, although he could see what Eric meant: the field, stretching for acres and acres in either direction and ending in another hill lined with pines about a kilometre opposite them, amounted to little more than an enormous mud puddle. Dougie wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting. Big bomb craters with rusted helmets and bones sticking out of the muck, he supposed. According to one of the letters in the suitcase – he’d only read two before he’d found the map and recognized some of the place names and run off – over a hundred thousand people had died in this area. It seemed incredible that there could be so little left. He shivered.

     ‘I guess we might as well check it out, anyway,’ Eric said, though he sounded somewhat disheartened.

     ‘Yeah. There’s gotta be something cool. There’s gotta be.’ Dougie said.

     Eric had managed to cram his father’s gardening spade into his backpack, the handle sticking out and comically knocking him on the back of the head as he rode. He took it out now and they started down the long slope. A slope which, a hundred years ago, men had raced down, screaming, guns in hand, while shells erupted all around them and bullets flew and death waited at the bottom.

     ‘There’s gotta be something cool,’ Dougie said again.

Dear Ma and Pa,

I am a little worse for wear but still all in one piece, you will be happy to know. It really is rough out here, and we’re not even all the way at the front lines. Close enough, if you ask me. There’s mud over everything, all the time. Our uniforms were shining new a month ago, now you can hardly recognize any of us. No one is getting any sleep, because the shelling is so loud. I didn’t know that many bombs existed in the world, they’re going off a hundred a second all day long, it seems. I think I will feel a lot better when we are all up there and firing our guns instead of marching and marching with dread in our hearts. Got to go, Will Carraway just got in with some rations and even wine. Cheers, hope you all are ok.

Love, Johnnie.

Despite his reluctance, Eric was the first to start down the slope, spade hefted over his shoulder and his other hand outstretched. Dougie watched him, chewing his lip, not understanding the sour dread that welled in the pit of his stomach. He felt nervous – almost as nervous as the time they made everyone do speeches in class and he dropped his notes. He had a powerful urge to run behind one of the tall trees and squat, sure his lunch would emerge in churning liquid form.

     But instead he cracked his knuckles and followed his friend down to the grassy field. Scaredy Cat. Though why he should be afraid of something that a minute ago had been nothing but a source of excitement, he didn’t know. It was just a feeling, that was all.

     They made their way about a quarter of the distance to the opposite hill, to where the mud was thick and deep enough to suck their boots in past the ankle, and then began to dig around with their spades. They hadn’t been there long before a large cloud passed in front of the sun and the wind carried the first drizzling drops of a light rain their way.

     ‘Bloody hell,’ Eric said, staring up at the sky, dismayed. ‘It was sunny a second ago.’

     ‘We’ve got to go deeper, that’s all,’ Dougie said. He believed it, too. Just like the gambler who’s sure to win the next big hand, he felt a keen hope with each shovelful of sludge he tossed aside, squinting into the little holes he made for the white gleam of bone or, perhaps the grey of rusted metal. A hundred thousand dead, he thought, not for the first or last time. A hundred thousand. They kept digging.

     ‘Tell you what, if I don’t get at least a – ’ The words caught cold in his throat.

     He’d stopped for a second to wipe the sweat from his brow and straighten his back, but when he’d turned his head to the hill from which they’d come he’d caught sight of a dead man.

     A long dead man. A soldier. He had his rifle right there, loosely couched against his hip, and a helmet that hung lopsided on his head. His head was lopsided, too, his skull sloping to one side and the flesh seeming to hang loosely from the other, making his empty eye sockets droop and his black half rotted lips droop down at the corners. A cigarette hung from them. His uniform was muddy rags hanging from a skeletal body. He did not move.

     ‘What?’ Eric said, still digging.

     ‘Eric.’ But Dougie’s voice came out whisper thin and anyway it was drowned out by a roll of thunder. No, not thunder, a nasty thought struck him: Shells. The soldiers called them drum mortars because they landed so fast and heavy it was like a drum roll. Rolling across the land, turning living breathing men into so much minced meat. All true, he knew, and it was a truth that was coming to him straight from the black eyes of the soldier on the hill. Not completely black, though… they had a point of light in them, far far back inside, like the pinpoint of light you might see from the very bottom of a deep well. But there was so much in that light, so much…

     He looked away, and it was a good thing, too, or he wouldn’t have seen the hand reaching up out of the hole he’d dug a second ago. It reached for him with yellow nails, some of which were bent backward in the beds, and soft green skin covered in blisters. It touched him for a split second and he felt the skin on his shin, just above the boot. It was too soft, sliding, blisters bursting and pus leeching out when he pulled away, mind blank with terror.

     He stumbled backward two steps and then came down on his rear, eyes wide and staring at the hand which was still groping blindly in the mud where he’d just been. Finally, he found his voice. ‘ERIC LOOK!’

     But Eric was already looking. Not at the hand, but in the other direction, across the countryside where the heavy sound of drum shelling came, clearly disturbed by the way it didn’t let up, and how it shook the air in a way thunder did not. He had not yet seen the soldier.

     Then Dougie saw the other one, a thing more mud than man, half swimming and half dragging itself through the mud towards his friend, one arm now outstretched, and he sucked in the deepest breath he could manage and screamed so loud that afterward it would feel like his vocal chords had been rubbed with sandpaper: ‘ERIIIIIIICCC!’

     And his friend spun around, surprised, and saw the groping hand that had missed Dougie and, a second too late, the thing that was coming for him.

     The hand closed around his ankle.

     Eric assaulted the dead thing with his spade, or what he could reach of it that wasn’t already submerged in mud. He turned its head to mash, snapped its spine with an audible crack, and cut deep trenches in the arm even as it continued to pull at his leg, forcing him to hop on one leg as he fought.

     Dougie rolled aside and picked up his spade, scanning the mud all around him for possible others, seeing nothing but knowing they were there. Eric let out a scream and Dougie turned to see that a second hand had got hold of him. It pulled on his grounded foot and, together with the first hand, upended him. A second later the two hands pulled his feet into the mud, submerging him to the top of his boots. He flailed around on his back, trying to twist over and find purchase.

     Dougie felt sloppy heat slide down the backs of his pant legs and knew that his lunch had come after all, and he realised in a moment that he was going to leave his friend.

     He ran.

Dear ma and pa.

     Today I saw a lot of men die.

     I watched them come in waves, first the enemy and then us. I remember grandpa telling me the story about the bravery and glory of the light brigade and the final charge. I saw it today. I saw hundreds of brave men stand up and run right at the enemy across no-man’s land, right into a hail of bullets and shells that tore them to pieces before they could get anywhere close to the other side. Then the sergeant called out for the next wave. And then the next. The glory and bravery isn’t much left after the first few. After that it’s all just dying.

     I am sorry if I’m scaring you. But as Will said to me the other day, any letter might be the last, and tomorrow I go over the top.

     Pray for me. Send my love to all and Mary.

 Love Johnnie.

He kept his eyes on the ground a few feet in front of him. More were coming up out of the ground every second. He zigzagged to avoid grabbing hands, jumped over legs like twisted tree roots, the mud sucking at his heels with every step and threatening to pull his boots right off. The shelling was so loud – and it was shelling, now: fountains of mud exploded here and there where the bombs landed – that he saw the gunshots rather than heard them as they raised pillars of mud in their wake beside him.

     Something about the angle of these struck him wrong, some deep instinct warning him that he was not running away from danger but towards it, and he stopped to look up ahead.

     The soldier was standing on the opposite hill: down on one knee, rifle tucked under one arm, skinless finger on the trigger. Dougie stared, blank with terror, for one second, and in it he saw a puff of smoke rise from the barrel, the soldier jerking backward from the kick.

     Then Dougie was spinning around, the impact hitting his left shoulder so hard his feet left the ground and he was face down in the mud before he even felt a thing.

     And the first thing he felt was a mouth pressing up against his, rotten teeth clamping down on his lower lip and pulling.

     He lurched backward instinctively, not caring that his lower lip was now stretching like chicken skin, tearing and bleeding. When he broke free, all the pain of the bullet and the lip and the fear all hit him at once and he screamed, scrambling back and away. He saw another corpse trying to pull itself above the surface, and he turned, leapt over the head and shoulders of another, and then fell to his knees.

     Clasping one hand over the bullet wound dribbling blood in his left shoulder, the whole arm completely numb, he looked around at the soldier who had shot him. He fully expected him to have his rifle at the ready for the final shot, the one that would land right between Dougie’s eyes, but it wasn’t so. The man – if that’s what he was – had lowered the weapon once more, and was staring at Dougie intently.

     Dougie met his deep, deep eyes. He looked into the bright points like stars a thousand light years distant. He saw the truth, read the message, and it said: You haven’t done enough, yet. It said: You don’t understand.

      And Dougie knew what he had to do.

Dear Ma and Pa,

     I am still alive.

     I don’t know how, but it’s true. Ben Donohue is not. Red Adler is not. Bill Sexton. Warren Smith. A thousand, a hundred thousand others I don’t know. Will Carroway, too, all my best friends for all my life. And here I am, alive only because a Jerry happened to aim his bullet a foot or so to the right where it hit Will instead of me. I held his head in my arms for six hours and felt his blood pour into my lap. I saw Bill catch shrapnel in the gut and hold his own intestines steaming in his hands. He was begging for his mother.

     The shelling never stops, and I haven’t slept in three days, nor eaten in two. Please send food if you can. The army is not doing so well at getting us what we need.

     The mud is worst of all. It’s in everything, everywhere. It’s in our eyes and mouths and nose all the time. Me and some boys passed a poor lad, no more than eighteen, bogged in up to his knees. We tried to get him out, but there were no footholds for us in the mud, and soon we were called up ahead. Went back that way later and found he was still there, only now he was in all the way up to his neck and quite out of his mind. We had to leave him.

     God save us all, for I don’t think anyone else can.

     I will do the best I can to get back to you.

     Please send love to all and Mary.

     Love, Johnny  

Eric was buried to the chest. He was screaming and out of his mind, his eyes rolled so far back in his head the whites were visible, arms beating madly against the mud and clawing at it. His fingernails were broken and torn back from the force of his efforts.

     ‘They’re bitingme! Helphelp! They’re bitingeating meeeeeee! Heeeeellllp! DOUGIE!’

     That last when Dougie skidded through the mud to his side and grabbed hold of one of his arms. Everything was chaos. It was impossible to know what was going on anywhere else in time or place: The universe had been reduced to the space of one square meter inhabited by the two boys, and everything else was rain, bombs, mud, bullets, bodies, screams, death, horror.

     Dougie wrapped his good arm around his friend and dug his legs into the earth. He pulled, but all it did was sink his feet deep into the soft mud. He felt dead fingers groping his legs. He pulled harder.

     BOOOOOOMMM!!!

     In the wake of some monstrous explosive which raised a tidal wave of mud and flesh just meters away, all sound was replaced by a high pitched whining in Dougie’s ears. He saw men come swarming down the hill on which the soldier stood, though whether they were to his aid or for his death he didn’t know, only that they were equal parts terrified and enraged and had their bayonets fixed. Only when they passed him and collided with the unseen enemy behind him did he realise there was a war going on that didn’t include him at all.

     ‘THEYRE EATING ME DOUGIE! I CAN FEEL THEM EATING ME HELP!’

     Dougie pulled harder, the pain from his shoulder screaming through his chest, everything inside him feeling like nails on a chalkboard. Hands peeled off his shoes and socks. Teeth bit into him, soft teeth that bent back with the force of their bites, yellow-black teeth that stripped his flesh with desperate hunger, and he screamed.

     But he didn’t stop pulling. Eric came free inch by agonizing inch, the mud sucking at him with supernatural force. He wrapped his hands around Dougie, weeping as his body emerged slowly from the thick mud, until they rolled away from the pool and the clutching fingers of the dead and pulled each other to their feet.

     Dougie dragged his friend as fast as he could for the hill, sure the solider would let them through. Shells slammed with unimaginable force into the earth on all sides, bullets flew by their ears. They pushed passed other men, brave soldiers who seemed to be rushing to their own deaths as eagerly as Dougie and Eric were rushing to safety. They fell on all sides, bullets smacking into their faces, chests, ripping muscle and tendons into red tentacles that splayed out in the mud and were buried.

     Only when he reached the foot of the hill on which the soldier stood, slamming into it and then sliding a little, did Dougie let go of his friend and allow himself to rest. Bombs fell with shocking force and noise, guns fired at a thousand bullets a second, men screamed and killed and died – or worse, didn’t die – all around, and yet somehow beneath all this madness Dougie still heard Eric’s yelps of pain. Yelps, just like the heartbreaking whimpers of a dog that had been beaten to within an inch of its life.

     Eric had been eaten down to the bone. Now that the rain was clearing some of the mud away, Dougie could see large round patches of red meat, many of them two or three times larger than any mouth Dougie could imagine. Eric looked around at Dougie, his eyes wild and unseeing. His crotch and lower abdomen had been clawed so badly that his intestines were leaking out and Dougie smelled the putrid stench of half digested food and urine.

     Eric gripped him by the collar and pulled him so close that their noses were almost touching. Dougie pulled at his wrists but he had a grip like fused steel.

     ‘It hurts so bad, Johnny it huuuuurrrrrts.’

     ‘I know, I know, it’s gonna be okay’ but Dougie couldn’t hear his own words because he was crying too much, and he didn’t believe them anyway because Eric’s left foot was nothing but clear bone and he was losing so much blood, so much blood. There was only one thing he could do for his friend, now.

     He looked up the hill to the soldier, and once again an understanding passed between them.

     The soldier raised his rifle once more.

Dear Ma and Pa,

     This is my last letter.

     We have just received orders to go over the top at dawn. None of us are under any illusions. There is a thirty foot distance to the enemy trench, and they have machine gunners and artillery. Word has it they know we are coming.

     Last time this happened to one of our companies, Reggie O’ Donnell stayed in the trench while the others went. The sergeant shot him as a coward in front of all of us. So we all know, there is no way out. For king and country, and all that.

     Don’t weep long for me. Know that I did my part for England.

     Send love to Mary.

     Love Johnny.

Just yesterday he and Eric had been playing Xbox together, and now Dougie was holding him and Eric’s eyes were rolled back in his head and his brains were spread across the hill.

     Dougie had to leave when a black hand snaked out of the mud and took hold of Eric’s foot. He didn’t wait to see what happened. He just started up the hill, slipping now and then in the mud but otherwise unperturbed by the chaos around him.

     The soldier raised the rifle again, but Dougie walked on, deafened by noise, half blinded by mud and tears, exhausted, hollow. Yes, that was it, he was hollow. Whatever had made him who he was, whatever essential soul that had lived inside him only hours ago as he’d ridden so gleefully with the wind in his face and his best friend at his side was gone. He was a ghost.

     He walked until he was stopped by the gun barrel pressing into his forehead, right between his eyes. It was still hot from the last firing.

     Dougie looked past the barrel, and into the deep eyes of the soldier. Dougie looked down into the wells to the points of light a million miles away, and then he looked past those, too.

     The soldier’s finger tightened on the trigger. Dougie did not react. There was nothing inside him left.

     The soldier lowered his rifle and stood aside.

Dear Ma and Pa,

     I am sorry it has taken me so long to write to you. I suppose you’ve been thinking I was dead all this time. I thought I was, too, but tomorrow I will be officially discharged from the infirmary. I had a rough time, they tell me, and had a few close calls, but as of today I am a healthy young man again.

     You will never know the things I’ve seen and done, but at last it is all over, and there is no need to worry, as I will return to you all in one piece.

     Johnny.