Dead Faces: An Ode to the Unknown
The morgue was green. The shades varied, but ultimately it was green. Marty was halfway through the seventeenth cigarette of his shift. Not that he was keeping count. He’d been half heartedly browsing a newspaper for nearly an hour. He was bored out of his mind. It was at times like these that he usually went body browsing. Some of the corpses at the morgue were more interesting than others. Occasionally a beautiful woman would be wheeled in, sometimes the carcasses displayed fascinatingly horrific injuries, that went far and beyond the usual trauma. Successful suicides whose heads ended with the individual’s bottom row of charred and chipped teeth. It wasn’t that he was ghoulish, he didn’t ‘get-off-on’ these things, it was simply that they meant something to him. Something he could explain no more than a burning sunset, or a snowy plain.
Sometimes, he had company on the shift. Harold, seven years his senior (although most of the time it seemed more like seventeen) had been away for the past three week, attending a convention in Birmingham.
He’d heard a rumour, about six months ago, that Harold was capable of hypnosis. He had mistrusted the older man when he was just worried about him spying on him, catching him taking too many cigarette breaks, and generally slacking on the job. But finding this out took it to another level, although he still wasn’t sure whether there was any truth in it, or if Charlie and some of the others were pulling his leg. Either way, he was glad that Harold was a hundred miles away.
After one final, pointless glance, he threw the tabloid in a wire mesh bin, stood up, checked his reflection in a dirty mirror, and left the room.
At this time of night, the city outside was alive, and Marty knew this. It was alive with music and laughter, smoke and light, sex and drugs, violence and confrontation. It screamed and itched and coughed. Half of him wanted to be out there in the thick of it, but the other half was perfectly happy to be here in silence, with only the dead for company.
He walked down the corridor (green, of course) caught site of the occasional co-worker in a lit up office, and heard the occasional sound.
He knew who he was going to look at first: a young Asian who had been brought in at the very start of his shift. But it wasn’t the appalling injuries that interested him this time. It was the tattoos that covered the young man’s torso; blue, flowery and obscure. They looked like prison tattoos, yet they didn’t. Looked a little like the kind of henna display a silly young girl travelling would delight in, but they weren’t.
The ink etched into his skin formed some sort of a plain which flowed into a kind of vortex. That was the best description that Marty had come up with so far. He wanted to take a closer, longer look, to see if he could articulate it any better. Plus, there may be some other, smaller tattoos, which shed some light on the main one.
He stopped, only once, to grab a coffee from the machine. He planned to spend quite sometime examining the tattoo, so he thought a drink would be a good idea. He never smoked around the deceased though. Somehow it seemed disrespectful - flippant. He sometimes wondered what the relatives might make of his hobby (obsession?) if they were ever to find out.
He checked that nobody was around, as he didn’t really have a good reason for taking the body back out of its container. Satisfied that the coast was clear, he opened the heavy door and slid out the plastic covered corpse. Then slid the standard issue sheet down to reveal waxy skin stretched over a taut angular frame. The man had been naturally skinny in life, but now, stripped of his blood flow, he was damn right skeletal.
He gave the horrific head wound only the most cursory of glances, moving swiftly to the artwork stretched across the dead man’s chest and abdomen. The spiralling lines which made up the vortex were constructed from stars. Marty thought upon the various possible meaning and connotations of stars: space, astrology, astronomy, star of david, pentecostal star, jesus, energy, dead matter, dark matter, sci-fi movies , hope…
What did he know about the victim? Unemployed, possible gang member, criminal record for assault, a disabled sister, a distraught mother.
He eyes grew tired, he sipped his unpleasant coffee, as if in an attempt to waken them back up. He continued to look at the pattern. What did it mean? And why did he care?
He was about to replace the sheet when he thought he saw the ink move (ever so slightly), one of the stars near the dead man’s waste. He looked carefully, closely, they were still. Of course they were still. He rubbed his eyes, repositioned the sheet, and put the corpse back where it belonged.
He went back to the office. He’d watch a litte tv but the old 14inch portable had been broken for weeks. He couldn’t believe they hadn’t gotten around to replacing it yet (especially when you considered how much some of the night shift guys loved their tv). One of the new starters, a young guy called Phil (or Bill, he could never remember which) had promised to bring one in, from home, days ago, but it had never happened. Marty figured the new guy was just trying to make friends and win votes. Talk didn’t get him tv, talk left him bored.
To his annoyance, he fished the paper back out of the waste bin, opened it to the puzzle pages, to cross words half done. For a moment they took on a form similar to that of the dead man’s tattoo. But an instant later it was just black squares and scribbled letters, once more. Marty drained the last of the fourth rate coffee. Asked himself once again why he drank it in the first place.
He reflected briefly on an incident that had taken place in the previous week. A woman had been brought in, beaten to a bruised pulp by her scum bag of a boyfriend. Another new starter (who hadn’t made any promises he didn’t keep) had taken it very badly, and quit, via telephone, the following day.
Marty had been asked to call him, he didn’t want to, but…well, it was part of his job. He’d gently probed him and the young man had said he couldn’t understand why such things happened, how men could do these things, and how people could bare to look at the results. To him it was all a mystery.
He fell asleep briefly at his desk and dreamt that Harold returned early and caught him staring at the dead man’s chest (except in the dream the deceased was black - and his tatooes golden). Harold laughed at him, surprised he didn’t understand the images. He said they were egyptian hieroglyphics, and surely any fool could see that. Marty showed his incomprehension, so Harold started pointing at the body with a pen and spelling it out for him. He said that the markings meant that they had to get a new tv, or the new recruit (the one who had been disturbed by the battered woman) would be killed by a street gang.
Just before he woke up, Marty felt immense guilt flow through his body.
He was awoken by a distant murmuring sound which sounded just like a television. A radio perhaps? He got to his feet and left the office to locate the source. He followed the sound as it snaked first right, then to the end of the corridor and right again at the water cooler. It was emanating, unmistakeably, from the janitor’s supply room. He opened the door warily, even though he couldn’t really account for his caution.
A small television atop a tiny stool. A monochrome image of a studio debate panel. He wasn’t sure whether it was the programme or the tv itself that was black and white. On the screen a presenter from another era was discussing the possibilities and conundrums of M-theory. He was stitched, tightly, into a colourless suit like a ventrilloquist’s dummy lost in the twilight zone. A man sat either side of him. One, small, looked incredulous. The other, large, stared with a thinly veiled sense of rapture.
Everybody in the audience seemed oddly identical. Each held a small box and appeared frozen.
The more the presenter spoke the faster his pace became and the less he played to the layman. He became impassioned and adopted the posture of zealot; words poured forth from his lips, which seemed too progressive for the medium. The man’s body shook. Static descended on the studio set like a gentle snow and the image began to roll.
The television flickered out like a candle and Marty was met by his own reflection, softened and rounded by the old screen.
He had an epiphany and ran back to the morgue. Pulled the sheet from the young asian man’s torso. Saw the stars etched upon his chest, saw the cosmos, saw vital questions written on atrophied flesh. He realised that he wasn’t looking at a tattoo at all; but an after image, screen burn, reluctant resonance.
These bodies held more questions and vitality for him than the living, who were just blank pages etched in invisible ink.
Structural Colour (aka what’s good for the hive…)
It occurred to her, not for the first time, that all the office’s ultra modern fixtures were shaped and smoothed like beetle’s shells. And that the noisy fissure above her desk was like a platoon of burning spiders. The over-head strip lighting refracted off the chromium sheeting of the lift's exterior. Everything automated.
At times she felt like the only human being in the building.
She could hear the muffled laugh of the new girl. So softened by the reinforced door that it resembled under water drops of rain. Different this one. Not in attitude or spirit, or anything truly fundamental, but in appearance. Not innocent and not predatory. Some girls came in who could play both roles, switch and bait, dom and sub, back and forth. But this one just looked…different.
Yoshiaki was regaling her with his usual insipid repertoire. Every time she glanced back at the beetle phone she prayed that the paper company she interviewed for on Thursday would call her back. Not that she had given them the number for the studio, of course
She glanced at the coffee pot, virtually empty, and the clocks hands had progressed more than she had suspected. It was almost time. The new girl would been cleaning herself soon, and they’d be rigging up the lights downstairs…
* * *
The unusual girl was starting to gag on the leash as her would be captor pulled it tighter. At one point Tomoe thought that she was going to vomit all over the concrete. She hated it when they vomited; she could tolerate most things, make herself cold and oblivious to the most unnatural acts, but simply could not stand the vomiting.
The black thighs highs of the leash holder, were as beetle like as the telephone. They had the same suppressed, man made glow.
And thinking of the telephone made her recall an unusual question the area manager had asked her on Thursday.
“Are your limits self imposed, or exterior?”
She ignored the phone until it stopped ringing forever, but the echo never left her ears.
Charles couldn’t sleep and he’d wondered down stairs for a glass of milk. He was sat now at the kitchen table drinking the ice cold liquid. The demon was sat in his usual place – unmoving.
He’d forgotten all about him. These days that was the case. They’d kind of grown use to him, something they never thought they’d do.
It hadn’t been like that in beginning of course. In the beginning they’d been scared to death of him. Petrified. They had considered moving out.
Were on the verge of doing so, when, well, things came up.
Now, nine months later, he was almost a matter of fact. That wasn’t to say that they no longer feared him, that wasn’t to say that Charles didn’t feel at least a little nervous as he drank his milk, with the demon in his peripheral. But it did mean that they were no longer consulting paranormal investigators, or Catholic priests.
Nine months ago Charles had also gotten up for a drink (although on that night it had been Orange Juice as opposed to Milk), on that occasion he hadn’t sat there and drank, he’s dropped the glass on the floor, and then stood on some on the shards in panic.
His first thought was robbery of course, an intruder in a mask. He’d ran up stairs, foot bleeding on a new carpet, and woken Marie.
Neither of them knew what to do. There was no telephone upstairs. Charles knew that he was not a tough man, and just hoped that the intruder would leave, flee the scene of the crime. Of course the idea that it wasn’t a robbery ran through their minds, along with a hundred other unpleasant thoughts and images.
They waited in silence. They heard nothing.
Neither the sounds of him leaving, or ascending the stairs. What was he doing? Waiting? Were they waiting one another out, did he think they were playing some sort of game? Charles had felt sick. He didn’t want to throw up in front of Marie. He would have felt as though he had failed her.
Not knowing what else to do, they waited. Charles clutching the closest thing to a weapon he could find, a bedside lamp, minus the shade.
They waited until the sun came up. Then, tentatively, more on edge than he had ever felt in his entire life, Charles ventured downstairs.
Marie told him not to. But what else could he do?
When he’d gotten there the intruder had gone. It had taken a long time to decide that of course. Every room, every corner... everywhere had to be checked. Charles expecting him to leap out at any moment. Even when he had checked everywhere downstairs three times over, he still couldn’t relax. He began to imagine him in the attic. Waiting to come down another night, slit his throat and sodomise Marie.
But of course he never did anything of the sort. He never even left the kitchen. He simply reappeared night after night, without fail, and without change. He arrived every single night at dusk, and never failed to leave at dawn.
He always sat in the same place, in the same position. The only part of his entire body which moved were his eyes. Jet black on pure white, those eyes were evil. Charles knew it was a fucking cliché, but it happened to be true.
Those eyes were watching him now as he drank his refrigerated milk. They were watching his hand hold the glass. Watching his fingers move across the smooth transparent surface. The demon was fascinated by simple things and slow movements.
Charles’ thoughts turned to the day he had just lived. Trains and tickets, old men with crooked posture in dirty stations, files that always looked the same (even though the number changed), machine coffee, false smiles, bland radio. The utter mundanity of his life always struck him the harshest, during the hours of darkness.
She clutched the ticket tight, it was her way out. She couldn’t keep her eyes off of the men at the security terminal - with their superior gait and shifty, accusing eyes. The unusually short one who sweated a lot, he annoyed her the most.
Over the seas they grasp the bricks and shift the stone. Knuckles crack, hands break and the blackest of crows fly overhead. Their view is fence after fence, a perimeter stretching into the horizon.
She edged closer to her goal, the magic line.
But looking round she suddenly noticed that it was not just the security men who stared at her. Everyone was her accuser, the little girl with the small brown bear, the elderly Chinese couple, the ridiculously attractive couple in their early thirties. All eyes – blue, grey, green, brown – burrowed into her.
She looked down once more at her ticket and noticed, for the first time, that the ink was smudged.
Jamie Gillis poured my coffee. Gillis was pouring because it was Sunday morning. Gillis always poured on Sundays, because Sunday was Ron Jeremy’s day off. Old Ron worked hard but he said he needed that one vital day to get himself right – ‘spiritually aligned’ was the phrase he used.
The two men were like chalk and cheese, their attitudes so different.
Jamie always leering at the girls, especially the marginally under aged ones, chewing on a company straw or surreptitiously touching his grubby crotch.
Whilst Ron, ever the good little Jewish boy, would be folding napkins and restocking the straw dispenser.
Just for Jamie to empty it again with his malignant sexual fantasies.
Gillis was never on time. Ron was never late.
Ron’s company fatigues were supremely pressed and fastidiously cleaned. Gillis’ company fatigues – what there were of them, as he often favoured an old Throbbing Gristle t-shirt, or some contemporary obscenity – were dirty and sported stains from previous lives.
The fundamental difference was that Jamie had followed the darkness whilst Ron had reached for the stars.
But both men were in exactly the same place, even if they didn’t know it.
The Conspiratorial Whispers of Children
On those mornings I always walked to work alone. Alone and frightened and cold. Watched without feeling as Chinese children fired ghosts across the river. I did, however, gain some small comfort from the masked people in the park. There were roughly thirteen of them and they all wore animal masks. Goats and sheep mainly, but there were also horses and foxes, the occasional rabbit, and if you looked very closely, a shark.
I was never sure if anyone else shared this delusion, or if I was all alone, the mad butcher in the disused slaughter house.
Meanwhile the faces of my co-workers began to desolidify, to melt away like plastic, as whatever good I saw in them abruptly evaporated.
But the strangers took on the form of animal more and more. I bought coffee from horses, received ugly looks from chickenhawks and was berated by sheep.
One day I arrived (five minutes late) to the office to find entire building to be populated with nothing except mannequins.
I’d wondered for days, weeks, months where my ‘real’ co-workers had gone. Until one day I heard feint murmurings coming from the ventilation shafts.
The conspiratorial whispers of children, as knowledge comes, unbidden, over them.
Low Budget Film Making: An ode to dead foxes
The location: a dilapidated (and soon to be demolished) house. The mission: to shoot desperation on digital video.
The owner thought we were shooting a porno. I was in love with one of the cast. My best friend was a drunk. I was, and still am, a fool.
We arrived to find something scratching around in the shell of a house.
A tramp we thought, someone as derelict in the flesh as the house was in bricks and mortar.
We entered to discover a wolf sized fox – a pale orange and dirt monster.
He leapt with wounded knee to his grave. He died alone.
So will I. So will the drunk. So will the girl I once loved.
“There is only one way to skin a cat, and anybody who tells you otherwise is a fucking idiot.”
His father’s words rang in his ears at regular intervals. One afternoon he found himself repeating them, as his own, to a friend.
“What do you mean by that,” asked Ben.
“Fucked If I know,” Jack replied, tossing another stone at an already shattered factory window.
Jack dreamt of cats sometimes. Dreamt of a naked woman, with huge tits, skinning them alive.
Jack always awoke from this dream hard, and it both excited and disturbed him. He never told Ben about his dreams except for one, which was more weird than sick, that he just had to get off his chest. Ben had just shrugged and called him a weirdo.They were stood now, as they stood many days, by the side of the disused train track. The trainline had been built five years previous as part of a large scale regeneration for the town and surrounding area. It had fallen flat on its face. Theirs was the type of town you did your best to avoid passing through, let alone visit. Jack’s sister had worked on the train for a while. But things never worked out for Jack’s sister.
Jack dreamt of the train often, even though he had only been on it the one time. He dreamt that he and Ben were stood by the tracks, doing nothing like today, but then a train came and he pushed his friend into its path.
This dream also made him hard.
There was another dream, about the train, but this one was always fuzzy. In this one he is a passenger on the train and he gets into an argument with the conductor. His sister is there. Then something bad happens.
This one doesn’t make him hard, it just makes him feel sick.
Ben says something about a dog and Jack notices the small Alsatian near the abandoned factory. He picks up a stone and tosses it at the animal, it just misses and the dog disappears around the side of the building.
“You’re a cruel bastard you are,” laughs Ben.
Jack stares deep into his friend. He thinks he hates him and one day he will kill him. Not today, but one day. He’ll never see it coming, and this makes Jack smile.
Sorry, I’m not boring you am I? (Further Discourse)
What do you mean?
Well you seemed distracted.
“Oh, nothing, something caught my eye.”
What?
“It doesn’t matter, continue with you story.”
“Well I’ve lost my flow now.”
“Well find it again.”
Okay, well he went to see him and...you’re doing it again. Just tell me what you’ve...
...oh my god.
Outside the night was shiny and black. The kitchen was warm and steamy. Lucy was cooking her favourite vegetable (Asparagus) whilst keeping an eye on the bubbling pans, and chopping chives. She could hear Dan shuffling around in the lounge, looking for something he’d misplaced.
She looked up from the chopping board and caught movement at the end of the garden, near the children’s swing. Then a wind swept across the garden, disturbing the blades of grass, and ruffling leaves. She saw ghosts in the wind, ghosts like rain soaked statues.
She had thought she could put the past behind her. She had thought she could forget. But there they always were, when ever anyone interrupted the steady flow of her life. A simple change in the weather, even a subtle change of light, could bring them to her.
All at once the pans overflowed.
Shards of Answers
Her favourite toys had been reduced to a pile of plastic pulp. The specific colours had been drained into one mass of pale grey and cream. She couldn’t believe that Simon had done this. He had done things to hurt her before, but nothing on this scale. She could identify the odd specific toy in the mass. In one place a Barbie head stuck out, in another a leg. She could see the glass of her beauty salon set glittering in the sun.
Simon himself was nowhere to be seen, and her father would be back from work soon. She imagined his car pulling into the drive, and the thought made her feel sick.
For some reason, which she couldn’t explain, she pulled a piece of the plastic from the edge of the lump, and placed it in her jeans pocket.
Then sat down on one of the plastic garden chairs and waited for her father.
Years later, when her brother finally took his life, she stared at the piece. She looked over every detail of it. Touched and smelt it, even tasted it. She sought answers within its rough edges.
Every night the dead called from the depths of the well. Marris looked at the wall paper, he looked at the clock, he looked at the moon. He looked at anything to avoid looking in the direction of the well.
That same frail cry emanated...
He imagined, actually visualised it, crawling up the cold stones, clinging to the moss and climbing out. Using the pale moon as a guide, a beacon. Flowing over the gravel, swimming through the grass, towards his door. When his ears absorbed them, was he taking them in? Allowing them to rattle within his frame? Was his body absorbing them?
He’d heard stories about the well, many of which were conflicting, others just plain silly. He didn’t pity the victims, he didn’t want to hear about them, he just wanted silent nights. To be left alone in a house, which had more history than he did.
The coffin was so thin it looked as though the damp earth could dissolve it. The moisture seeping into the wood like water into a battered sponge. The mourners were as pale as the fresh tombstones. Their clothes as black as the lettering that marked the names of absentee friends.
You could actually see the yellow of whisky in the priest’s breath, as it hung in the air for a few moments, like dried ice. Patches of stubble clung loosely to his face like cobwebs. He held so tightly to his bible it was as though he was afraid it might run away, and leave him empty handed.
The children appeared bored and restless, and why shouldn’t they be?
Angie wondered how anyone could rest in peace in this dumping ground for the dead.
Near by a man and woman were whispering – a muted argument - and looking around to try and identify the culprits she realised just how few people here she actually knew. How many had she spoken more than twelve words to in the last five years?
Then it struck Angie that in this place the dead outnumbered the living...and the living were barely alive.
The Web of a Killer
Rusty beer cans glint below the moonlight. Nobody is there to witness the man enter the abandoned house. Without an audience he is a spectre.
Detective Wareck heads up the decrepit stairs. The walls are plastered with years of graffiti, made by teenagers and later by their younger siblings. The smell that was faint outside is stronger now, filling his nostrils and penetrating his brain. He reaches the first floor. It is bare apart from a pile of bloodied clothes.
Wareck has been tracking the killer for five long months. For what had seemed like an eternity there hadn’t been a single true lead. But now Wareck had had a true breakthrough. An anonymous tip off that had checked out and led him, on a humid august night, to this dilapidated house.
By now the smell is making him feel sick but he knows he must press on. There could be someone still alive up stairs, someone depending on him for a future.
The next set of stairs is even more worn than the last, and threatens to give way beneath him. Spider webs hang from the ceiling like dried out veins.
A sound comes from upstairs - movement. Wareck comes to a dead halt.
He waits a few second and the sounds comes again. He takes a deep breath.
It’s now or never.
He bolts up the stairs. And falls. Raising his head he comes face to face with the eyes of a dead woman. He scrambles to his feet to see that she is not alone. There are butchered bodies scattered across the room, like the discarded toys of a restless child.
He sees a shape move through the deep black and unleashes a bullet. A whimper floats out of the darkness. Wareck retrieves his flash-light and makes a yellow hole in the dark. In the centre of the hole is a young blonde girl, bloodied and naked, breathing her last. A bullet hole hangs in her chest.
Footsteps disappear down the stairs.
Outside in the wild garden apples haunt the branches and the grass grows untamed. A black widow hangs between the trees. Footprints lead away from the scene of the crime and into eternity.
Generation Gap
After the mugging Mary didn’t leave her flat for a week. No one came to visit her, as she had no family. It was the council who sent her somebody to speak to. Mary was sceptical; there hadn’t been such things in her day. You didn’t ask why, you simply got on with it.
But to Mary’s surprise she liked the young man they sent and enjoyed his company. They would watch afternoon soaps together and discuss what ever was in Mary’s favourite tabloid on that particular day. He even made her laugh sometimes, which few people could do.
* * *
Mary caught him in the act. And yet this didn’t scare her but strangely excited her. She grabbed the large knife on the kitchen counter. He put her money jar down and claimed that he was adding money, because she wouldn’t accept any. Mary didn’t believe this for a second. They were all the same, his generation, would rather take than earn.
He had covered her kitchen with blood, but this didn’t bring Mary to her senses, but made her even angrier.
Afterwards, to her shame, she realised that she had felt more alive in those moments, than she had for the past twenty odd years.
The 35th Story
The dog had barked at Elly for as long as she could remember. It annoyed her but she never stopped to ask why, out of all the people who walked by, it was only she who rubbed the animal up the wrong way. One day she was walking to the shops when she noticed that the Smiths had left their gate open. Teeth out, mouth sneered, the family pet bounded towards her.
* * *
Elly was sat in hospital with a bloodied bandage on her left leg. She was angry with the dog for putting her there when she had th