The Bones of You (25 page)
Authors: Gary McMahon
I hit her hard but she barely moved. Despite being dead for two years, she was solid, like a hanging cow carcass. I was aware of punching her; I threw wild combinations, lefts, rights, hooks, uppercuts. My fury was my weapon. Soon she began to falter. Her arms were around me, and she was squeezing me tight, but the sheer force and number of my blows were finally causing some damage.
She buckled, went down onto her knees. I heard the sound of bones cracking. When I looked down, I saw the wavering image of a skinny black drug dealer superimposed over her crumbling form. I kicked her in the chest, my foot sinking into the spongy, long-dead matter. She fell. I threw myself on top of her, and then started raining down blows onto that vile pumpkin head, surprised by its texture and solidity, and how it felt like I was slamming my fists into stone.
I counted the punches out loud:
“Ichi, ni, san, shi, go, roku, shichi, hachi, kyu, ju.”
Then I started counting again:
“Ichi, ni, san, shi, go, roku, shichi, hachi, kyu, ju.”
I don’t know how many times I counted to ten, but I knew I couldn’t stop until she was pulp, nothing but a wet stain on the concrete floor. After a while I didn’t even know who I was punching, the dead serial killer, the dead drug dealer, or myself. Perhaps I was trying to smash all three of us into oblivion.
I think I blacked out for a while.
Time lost all meaning.
When I glanced to the side, I saw Holly watching me from the corner of the room. She was smiling sadly and nodding her head. Whatever part she’d played in this from the depths of her coma, it was over.
The next thing I became aware of was a hand on my shoulder, a gentle pressure, someone turning me around with nothing more than a touch as soft and light as a butterfly’s wing. Jess had woken; she was standing behind me, her face bathed in a familiar diffuse light. Behind her stood the Radiant Children wrapped in their protective bright darkness, and they were all smiling, all nodding, too. I felt that each one was offering me their approval for what I had done.
The wicked witch was dead. The terror was over.
I had endured. I had overcome.
When I looked back at the thing on the floor, it was unrecognizable as a person. The cellophane was ripped apart, dark meat and thick juices had spilled out onto the floor, and the greasy remnants of the pumpkin head were smeared on my hands, the floor, my shirt…
I stared at my hands. They were torn and bleeding, the bones of my knuckles showing through the flesh from where I’d kept on punching the concrete floor even after the pumpkin had been turned into soup. I felt no pain; the adrenaline was making me fly.
“Daddy…” Her voice was that of an angel.
I stood, and Jess took my hand. She guided me out of there, up and into the light, and we didn’t look back even once. It was over. We no longer needed to see.
It’ll be okay
, I told myself.
As long as we can get upstairs and out of the house before I count to ten, everything will be okay.
Ichi, ni, san, shi, go…
IS IT TIME?
Two months have passed. I still have bad dreams.
We got out of there alive, but it doesn’t feel anything like a victory.
The weather is bad; the news reports say that big storms are coming, ones like we haven’t seen for a generation. But even the wind and rain and snow cannot wash away all the dirty memories of that night in Katherine Moffat’s cellar.
Jess is lucky. She was in some kind of daze throughout the entire ordeal. She didn’t come out of it until we got back home, far away from the carnage. I speak to her of that night sometimes, and a blank look crosses her face. She recalls children singing, a strange and beautiful light approaching her…but, thankfully, nothing more. I prefer it this way. She can do without those kinds of nightmares. The ones she suffers every night already are more than enough.
Holly is still in a coma. She might come out of it tomorrow, or she might not ever wake up again. Nobody knows. All they can do is maintain her condition. Soon they’ll start asking me questions about turning off the life-support machine.
I still live in the same house with Jess. We’ve made the landlord an offer, and he’s thinking of selling us the place. We adopted two cats from the rescue shelter. Jess wanted to name them Magic One and Magic Two, but I talked her out of it. Instead, we’ve called them Faith and Duty.
My hands are crippled. I lost my job on the warehouse floor, but Evans has given me a new position in the back office, where I get to sit at a computer all day logging in data. It’s the same job Carole used to do. My hands still hurt, but I can type, and I can still use my brain. There are twenty-seven bones in the human hand and I managed to break nearly all of them. I can no longer make a fist, but that’s okay. I think I’ve run out of things to fight against.
I told the police everything I could remember, but I left out the things I’m unable to understand. They didn’t need to know about things like bright-dark, the Radiant Children, and a reanimated corpse with a pumpkin for a head. They’re still looking for Benjamin Kyle; they think he fled the scene, and I’ve told them nothing to contradict that. They cleaned away the remains of Katherine Moffat and burnt them. As far as I know, Pru’s body was incinerated, too. Only ashes remain, but they, too, have drifted away by now, blown on the winds to scatter like pollen, and then returned to earth: ashes to ashes and dust to dust.
Carole, poor Carole, who tried to warn me, was apparently dead the whole time. Kyle must have killed her as soon as he got her down into that cellar, getting busy one last time before I found them there.
Despite—or maybe because of—my injuries, my martial-arts training has now taken on a more spiritual aspect. I train every day with Ted Hannah at his dojo, going ever deeper into the art. I’ve never felt more content about who I am, what I’ve done, and how I can improve myself. I still wake up sweating and thinking about the man Holly and I murdered, but now I can cope with my guilt. I can accept that I have a penance to pay and that one day I shall be called upon to settle the debt.
Sometimes I allow myself to think we’ll make it, the three of us. That Holly will wake up, our grim secret will pull us back together as a couple, and our daughter will overcome her own traumas—the ones we have gifted her, as all good parents somehow manage to do to their children.
The rest of the time, all I can do is hope, because, really, that’s all any of us can cling to as we hurtle through this life at the velocity of bullets from a gun. But at least now I have something to hope for, and something to believe in…and that’s good, because something is always better than nothing.
It is. It really is.
Isn’t it?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gary McMahon is the critically acclaimed author of several novels, novellas and short stories. His latest book releases are the short apocalyptic novel
The End
, a story collection titled
Where You Live
, and the DarkFuse novellas
Nightsiders
and
Reaping the Dark
. His award-winning short fiction has been reprinted in various “Year’s Best” volumes.
Gary lives with his family in Yorkshire, where he trains in Shotokan karate and likes running in the rain.
Visit his website at
www.garymcmahon.com
.
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
DarkFuse is a leading independent publisher of modern fiction in the horror, suspense and thriller genres. As an independent company, it is focused on bringing to the masses the highest quality dark fiction, published as collectible limited hardcover, paperback and eBook editions.
To discover more titles published by DarkFuse, please visit its official site at
www.darkfuse.com
.
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