Sex Death and Sleepwalking
Chapter Two
The Small Town of Your Palms
The dim outline of the clustered buildings lay before him, the sea beyond, wild. The twists of the night surged around him, the wind always against his flesh, his clothes wet and heavy and cold clinging to him.
The clouds’ diffuse glow allowed him to see to an extent as he walked amongst the buildings. The door of the first structure lay in pieces, smashed outwards by some great force, some maddened hand. He dared not switch on his torch, to do so would be to draw whatever horror, and horror there was, to him, a flame devouring. He leaned his head back, heard his neck crack brittle and satisfying.
Once more he drew his gun with cold fingers, and this time pushed the tiny deadly switch forward. He kept to one side of the paved street as he moved. The windows were broken or starred, and some of the houses were scored with recent flame.
He wanted to call out, but knew that something could be stalking him, that someone could be watching with eyes wretched like the man in the clearing, wretched and mad.
He heard a whimper and started, but hope of human contact turned bitter with fear as he realised that the noise was animal and not human. He looked into the deep darkness between the buildings. The cry sounded again, a whine sliding into his skull.
He stepped into the darkness, and realised as his feet crunched underneath him and the cry sounded again that it was perhaps not a monster but a dog.
Behind the house he dared, briefly, with desperate relief, to shine the light of his torch into the yard. A small dog was chained to a clothes line, hearing him it began to cry frantically and leap against its bonds. He looked about him before walking forward and bending to stroke the dog’s wet hairy head and let it lick his face. It was shivering with cold and its collar was cruelly tight. It gave little yelps of happiness at his touch and he held its small shaking body to his chest.
“What happened here, boy? Where are all the people, all your friends?” The dog continued to lick his face. He felt the thin ribs beneath the sopping fur, and decided whatever else he would do or find this night, he would feed this dog and make it warm. He lay his head against its back for a few moments and felt its warmth and smelled its doggy smell.
He undid the thick leather collar, and suddenly the dog slid from his hands and raced through the door into the house behind him.
Max shone his torch on his gun. He carefully looked at the safety. It seemed to be in the off position. He slid it back and then forward to make sure. He would have to leave his torch on, however God had cursed this town, in order to see inside the building. He resigned himself to it and followed the dog.
The hallway stank of urine, of damp, of rotting food. He could see the wet trail of the dog in his torchlight, along with smashed crockery. The dog had run up the stairs to the second floor, but Max paused to flick his torch into the living room as he passed it. Someone had pushed all of the furniture against the walls, and there was refuse all over the floor. Refuse – rotting fruit, spilled flour, cigarettes, more shards of crockery, pieces of furniture, all in the contrasting light - in some kind of pattern.
There was a deliberation to it, and Max crunched over the junk on the floor to get a closer look.
The pieces were arranged in deliberate, careful and intricate detail. He could not see an overall picture, if picture there was, and climbed onto an over turned chair in the corner of the room to see the whole. Still he could see nothing he recognized – it looked like some kind of diagram, like a mechanical schematic. He stared, frowning. He knew nothing of the way machines worked, but he was not stupid, and what he saw looked like a bizarre exploded illustration. The crockery pieces formed a drive train or centrifuge. The flour, coffee and tea spiraled out in radiating and interlocking arms; the cigarettes spiking into small pistons. Max stepped carefully from the chair, put his gun back in his belt, wiped his wet hand and bent, taking all the whole cigarettes he could find. He lit one and took his gun back out, breathing the smoke deep into him. He leaned his sore back against the wall and stared hard at the floor. It curled something deep in his chest. It was so human. So strange. So strange.
He butted his cigarette against the wall and flicked it into the room, then walked up the stairs to find the dog.
He heard it before he saw it once more, and followed the snuffling noises into one of the upstairs bedrooms. The destruction here was less complete, and the double bed he saw in the room the noises came from was even made.
The short wet white tail of the dog protruded from beyond the end of the bed, wagging, along with the sounds of happy chewing. Max felt a start of dread in his fingers and down the back of his neck. He flashed his torch around the room, and saw a long splash of dried blood culminating in a hand print just above the wagging tail. A hand jutted out, just before the dog’s munching head disappeared behind the bed.
Max closed his eyes and bit his lip.
He slid down against the wall, his wet jacket leaving a trail that glistened in the torchlight. He took breath to whistle to the dog but gagged, took breath again and formed a call on his lips but then he hung his head and just sat shivering in the half-light for a while.
He forsook his promise to himself to help the dog. He let it eat, and walked down the stairs surprised that he remained dry eyed, relieved, glad that he had the foresight not to look, not to look.
He moved slowly, so tired now. He thought, he knew, that he should move swiftly, that some unseen danger haunted this place – had twisted and wrenched it from wherever it was into this bizarre empty hell.
He rested his head against the locked front door for a while, not listening for danger beyond, for a moment not feeling anything except the press of fatigue, the sounds of the dog chewing, chewing in his mind. Not far away, only a few meters above him.
He flicked off his torch and flung open the door before the darkness sucked him down and he could only hear the dog’s happy licks and bites, eating blissful and unaware.
He stepped forward into the darkness and stumbled – his eyes unadjusted after the stark light of his torch, and he paused though everything in him wanted to get far, far away from the dog and its gruesome meal. He guessed that the night held for him amidst its soft shadows and baleful clouds more horror. His mind ached at the idea and his fingers began to tremble again as fear held him still for a moment.
He forced himself forward, able to see now the street, scattered with dark forms. He progressed from house to house. He dared not walk to the center of the street, though his curiosity burned to know what the dark still forms were. Perhaps it was his curiosity that had driven him this far. He knew he had far more than an ordinary man, and it was this that had taken him to the high places he had surfaced in, in the company of kings…
He knew in his heart that the lumped shadows were corpses. He did not think he would find answers to what had happened to this town in their torn bodies.
Cross the front of one house, step out into the alley between them, don’t think of what could be hiding in the shadows (what could be hiding in the shadows??), ignore the creaks and groans of a dead town, the whistling wind and the lap of some mongrel’s tongue in his mind. Keep walking, keep searching.
He had to cross a side street to make it to the center of the town. He pushed close against the last wall, his fingers curled against the rough wood wall of the last building, and then ran across. As soon as he left the wall, he knew he should have kept walking; as soon as his legs flew beneath him he wanted to give in to the fear clamping his chest and keep running and running and scream into the night howl and scream and – he slammed into the wall of the next home with his shoulder. Stone this time, cold and damp.
His breath sounded rasping, sickly and too loud. He felt his blood sing in his ears.
He gathered himself, shrugged his jacket closer over his back. He was glad of its military practicality. He deliberately loosened the locking pale knuckled grip with which he held the butt of his gun. He stood straight and stretched and cracked his neck again. There was more to see, he had no doubt. He needed to be strong, to be brave against the night. He needed to know.
His next few steps took him from the side street under the eve of the veranda of the big country house. The air stank of rotting fish. A fishing town; of course.
The dark was thick and he stepped on something soft that gave beneath his boot. The door of the house was open and the darkness pooled inside it, swimming blackness before his eyes. Something blocking the light coming from the window beyond the hall, something directly before him.
Max stepped back. He could not see what it was before him. He smelled blood, metallic amongst the sweet putrefaction of the fish.
A flush of supernatural fear prickled his skin. He had to look (don’t look don’t look! His mind hissed to him as he fumbled in his pocket with his spare hand. Not bold enough to use his torch, he found his lighter and it caught as he flicked it.
Three bodies on top of each other lay before him. Three generations – an old woman, face down, her back laid open her ribs white amidst the gore, her floral dress black with blood. Above her a young boy, his teeth smashed in and a chair leg protruding from his naked pale chest. Half straddling him and leaned against the door frame a man wearing only a shirt, his head a pulverized mass of flesh, his face unrecognizable apart from the open mouth with saliva mixed with blood on his broken chin. His small flaccid penis lay against the chest of the boy, absurd.
Max staggered backward at the sight, and he wanted to drop his lighter, close his eyes, anything to shut out the sight. The boy’s sightless eyes looked or did not look toward the rafters.
He realised he was standing in the street with an open flame pinpointing him to whatever eyes were open and still saw.
He snapped his lighter shut and ran diagonally back to the side of the street with the corpses he had seen, but past them, to the next house.
Then he stopped and turned slowly around.
Across the street, separated by a short space of open ground, stood the church. The open ground was to keep the building sacred, hallowed, and away from the polluting Godly influence of the buildings close by.
He knew that these people – this town – were zealots bordering on fanatics. It was rumoured that they still practiced sacrifice, animals (and all too often, the very old, the sickly) to satiate the ever-hungry God, bound and helpless, thrown from the cliffs. He could see the dim outline of the symbolic spikes in the ground, facing outward, keeping God at bay.
He was drawn to it.
Max walked across the street. He did not wish to run towards such a place.
The door was huge. Carved with the most frightening façade that the artisans could invent, it jutted forward at least a meter, a repulsively distorted face in a grimace of rage. To keep God out. The islanders believed, along with most of the rest of the northern continent, that God had created man, and then He had created the universe to torture man. God was man’s ultimate adversary. Hence the term Adversarism. A church was a place to keep God OUT. Every happiness, every success in life, became a victory over God.
The priests of this religion were men who encouraged simple happiness.
To defeat God.
Every joy, every love, every laugh, smile, every success of any kind was in fact subverting God’s will. Delight, contentment, health and prosperity were a subjugation of God. These things, to an Adversarian, were a proof of man’s power, his independence and autonomy from the ultimate evil that had created him. The further man was from his divine and malign inception, the more he succeeded in achieving the veracity of the autonomy of his existence and its freedom from divine influence. Hence man should continue to prove his own ascendancy over God merely by living, and categorically by living well.
At least that was the idea. Sacrifices were made, up until the last few years, of humans – to feed the hungry, vicious jaws of God. Animals were considered a poor substitute, and one that would not ameliorate the curses and tortures the deity generated to torment man.
It had taken the Queen and through her the King decades of small but potent reform to start a decline in sacrifice, and finally to make it illegal.
Of course in reality it had never stopped.
To divert God’s wrath. A church, a sacred place because God was kept at bay. Because man could, there at least, believe that he was only mortal and that he was protected and inviolate.
The enormous door stood slightly open.