Monsters: Chapter 5

The darkness was only broken by the beams of moonlight that shone through the thickness of trees above, Curtis stepping out from the shadows, the gleam of his slick leather jacket reflecting the nightly rays and making him glow somewhat in the quietness of night.

He looked around slowly, groping details from the stone wall and tall iron gate in front of him to try and discern where he was. The rough stone wall rose until it was neck height to Curtis and in front of him was a tall, black-painted gate that led into a graveyard, a tall church looming in the background amongst the mist and fog.

Though it was dark wherever he looked, he could see everything with surprising detail. He saw the crusted bark that clung to the thick form of the tree to his right and to his left could see the differently coloured petals of the flowers that flowed away from him in an endless current, stretching off into the dark abyss.

He was aware of everything and yet felt empty, almost coreless. Like he was seeing this all through someone else’s eyes and he could only observe the movements and actions of another as they played out like a movie. This made a strange anxiety hang in his chest, vibrating and humming like a bell’s toll.

Curtis tried to recall how he came to this strange graveyard, but his thoughts tripped and juddered, mixed and whipped like cream until his head throbbed and confusion wrapped him completely. His mouth felt dry and coarse, his throat stinging as if it were made of sandpaper. Something about this place felt incredibly wrong. Curtis could make out every detail he laid his eyes upon, but they felt corrupted. Terrible.

Curtis cringed, wanting to recoil from the place he stood and never return, but the sudden thought of moving caused his feet to immediately strike out in front of him, and he was instantly thrust though the gate and into the mass of gravestones. He spun around, feeling a wave of dread drape over him like a large cloth and running back at the iron gate, but the gate, the one in which he had only just walked through, was no longer behind him. Instead, there was a huge wall of trees, the trunks so closely clumped together that they looked almost like a wall of pure bark and birchwood.

“What in the god damn?” He breathed, the words spilling from his lips like dry ice.

Curtis twisted, looking off in different directions for an escape route or refuge from the deathly stones he stood amongst, but everywhere he looked he could see grave after grave, some cracked and faded with time and some sitting with a marble-like erectness that only new gravestones could sit like. His skin seemed to want to peel away from his bones and his stomach churned with a vile sickness that only the thought of death could warrant.

The air around him was thick and licked at his skin to make the hairs along his arms and neck stand on end. Curtis could not think of where he was. He looked intently at the large church that still hung in the distance, then at the silhouetted buildings within the background, but still could not understand the location or his purpose for being there. His eyes trailed until they reached the spire of the church and then went beyond, gazing up at the brightly illuminated sky. Thoughts began to slowly spark in his mind, brought on by a memory that he still could not put his finger on.

His eyes fell back to earth, and he began to scan the gravestones, wishing to find a way out of this nightmare. He felt the fear begin to bubble in his chest and felt another surge of the strange dread fall upon him, sinking under its weight until he could bear it no longer. He walked on, amongst the mass of stone within the graveyard, his boots sinking deep into the wet mud and proving harder and harder to pull his foot out with each passing step.

As Curtis walked, names began to leap out at him like aggressive predators, first reading the name of his late mother, and then that of his father. It wasn’t until he reached a crossroads of sorts amongst the graves, lanes for walking stretching out in four straight lines away from each other, did his eyes fall upon an engraved name that made his heart stumble in his chest until it froze solid. Curtis stilled to a halt, his palms now moistening and his mind a mass of confusion and fear, the names bringing back memories he lusted to leave forgotten in time. Why had he come here? What had led him to this terrible place? The throbbing pain in his head began to pulse again, dropping the questions so that his head would stop spinning.

Dizzily, he approached the gravestone, his legs as weak as thin string, not wanting to move from under him. He read the name, feeling the words settle harshly on his tongue and sting at his throat. Here Lies Lindsey Donahew. Victim of a Crippled Man.

“No!” Curtis wheeped, his hands closing around his face. “No, I couldn’t do anything. I would’ve, I swear it.” He could taste fresh salty tears settle at the corners of his mouth, his body collapsing to its knees in front of the darkened granite.

The tears now flowed furiously down his cheeks and began wetting the inside of his neck as they flowed further and further. He lifted his face from his slickened hands to find that he now knelt at the top of stone stairs, leading into the deep depths of a crypt.

Curtis didn’t think his blood could run any colder, but it seemed the damp chill of the tomb almost reached out to him and seeped into his skin and made the marrow in his bones thicken with ice. He felt like he might fall into the darkness, fall and let it consume him for all eternity in the bowels of its stomach, but Curtis somehow found the strength to lift himself from the drenched dirt, stepping one foot in front of the other down into the darkness.

Moonlight guided him to the bottom of the stairs but cowered now at the threshold, letting the shadows loom beyond. As he stood on the precipice between the tomb and the light, he suddenly felt his hand clasped around the form of a small torch, feeling its rough hilt, until his thumb trailed over the button, switching it on and letting the catacomb flood with bright light.

Around him were cobbled floors, the cracks filled with a dark green fluid that trickled away from the crypt like a stream, toward the moonlight as if escaping from the horrors within. The walls were made of thick, lumpy stone that oozed water and saw moss drape down from the crack between the ceiling and the wall itself. The smell of death and decay filled Curtis’ nose. It was ripe with a sour odour of rotting flesh and freshly laid magots that slowly gorged on a carcass. All this he somehow knew in his head and as the thoughts brought a picture into his mind of what it might be, the torch light fell upon an alter at the end of the short tunnel, revealing white garments worn by a rotting corpse.

His eyes narrowed and the corpse slowly familiarised until he recognised the bright blonde hair that still held life within it, even though it sat upon a rotting scalp and slackened flesh that featured oozing holes where the bone was left bare to gleam in the torchlight.

“Lindsey.” He gulped, his chest welling with despair and guilt. The corpse held the same flowers she had held in her tightly knotted hands at her funeral, Curtis remembering the overwhelming feeling of wanting to join her in her coffin as she was slowly lowered into the ground amongst the pointless words of the priest’s payer, wanting to grip the bible and throw into the flames of a fire, screaming that if his god was real then he wouldn’t have taken Lindsey from the world. “I tried to save you, Lindsey, I tried to go to you. But my knee, I couldn’t get to you in time.”

His body trembled and he sunk his head into his hands once again, but before the tears could flow, a raspy voice, the sound like the grinding of metal on stone.

“Your knee? Your knee is why I am dead. Why I lie here rotting in the ground.” The corpse spoke somehow, beginning to twist beneath the white cloth, Curtis now hearing the bones of the corpse click and crack with movement they hadn’t performed in years. The body dragged itself from the alter until it now stood a few metres from Curtis, its jaw hanging from only one side on its skull and its body contorted, held together by only a few strands of remaining flesh.

“Lindsey?” Curtis’ words rose in his throat like bile but thinned to a whisper as the sound escaped through gritted teeth, his eyes wide with terror and astonishment.

“You do not deserve to speak my name. You are nothing but a crippled man, destined to hobble around until you too join me down in this tomb. But why wait?” Though the corpse’s skull featured a hanging jaw, Curtis could swear he saw it grimace into a menacing smile, lifting a bony hand and gesturing with a cracking finger for him to come to her.

“No!” he screamed. “This isn’t you. It can’t be.” He closed shut his eyes, trying to hide away from the horror. Nothing else was said by the corpse, it simply screamed the most terrible and torturous scream Curtis had ever heard and then lunged at him. He opened his eyes, scurrying back across the cobbled floor toward the moonlight, thinking the corpse would be shunned away from it for being so evil. He now saw that the green liquid, which now covered his hands and trousers, flowed directly from the corpse and dripped from the corrupted flesh. He felt vomit rise in his throat, swallowing it quickly but feeling its urges surge in his stomach.

The corpse’s hand settled tightly around his knee as he reached the stairs of the crypt, the bare tip of its thumb digging deeply into the joint below his knee cap. He cried out; the sound lost in the darkness. He threw the torch down upon the corpse’s skull, but the object turned into rising smoke and ash upon contact. He tried to escape further up the stairs, hoping the open graveyard might save him from the horrifying form that stood before him, but the corpse simply dug its thumb deeper into the joint, the pain like a searing hot pointer, fresh from the flames, being thrust deep into his flesh and bone.

His eyes squeezed shut from the pain but when he opened them, he found himself lying awkwardly in the Maudite cottage bedroom, his skin lathered in icy-cold sweat. For a moment Curtis felt stuck to the bed, held there by an unforeseen force. He squeezed his fists, trying to thrust the memories of the nightmare back to his unconscious mind.

He rose from the mattress and tried to catch his breath, Curtis’ chest feeling like a tight knot as cool air filled his lungs. He looked around, the dream feeling so vivid and real that he half expected to see the corpse huddling in the corner, waiting to strike at him again. The shadows, though thick and deep amongst the dawn light that filtered through the cracks in the blinds, held only bare corners and featureless furniture, the fear drumming in his heart slowly filtering out.

Curtis breathed deeply, feeling the air dilute the knotting muscles of his body until they relaxed beneath the sheets. He looked down then, feeling an aspect of the dream still remaining. His right leg, which was usually propped up by a thick pillow beneath his knee joint, had twisted awkwardly in his sleep into a painful position, the pillow in a curled heap on the floor.

Curtis draped his legs over the edge of the bed, massaging the tissue above his kneecap until the pain pulsed less and less. He focused on the blue hew that settled on the bare wooden floor, stretching off across the floor until climbing the doors to the wardrobe before stopping short of the doorhandle. By the look of the light, he surmised that it was five-thirty, the emerging essence of rising sunlight making the blue light brighter with every minute that passed.

He bought his hands to his eyes and rubbed; the image of Lindsey’s corpse still engrained deeply on the back of his eyelids. In his conscious state, it was easier to filter through the happy memories of his late girlfriend, but his dreams were a different story, plaguing Curtis with recurring memories of Lindsey’s funeral, or worse, her death. He focused on her smile, the one she held when the two were off on an adventure together. The feature that still to this day warmed his chest like a freshly made hearth.

He reached over to the dusty bedside table and retrieved the half empty bottle of whiskey he had been sipping the night before, unscrewing the top and taking a deep, passionate gulp, letting the liquid inflame his lips and burn his throat. He winced as the alcohol scorched its way down his neck like hot tar but appreciated the warmth it soon emitted at the depths of his stomach.

Curtis let the heat grow within him, starting from his chest and gently drifting to his limbs and up to his head, which he felt needed it most. The nightmares were becoming more frequent now, like the memories were reaching some crescendo. Curtis thought back to a conversation him and his sister, Kelly had had before he came to St Argent, telling him he needed to see a shrink, like he was some crazy lunatic. He had laughed in her face when she had said it, but now, as he sat in the still dark room, the thought didn’t sound so crazy.

He stared into the tight mouth of the whiskey bottle, rolling the cork between his fingers. The whiskey, which had been brewed in some large factory down in the south, was a deep, musky brown, the colour of charred oak, the aroma bringing back memories of Curtis and his father, Jason, sitting on the porch in the warm Washington evenings and talking over a cool glass of Tennessee whiskey. These memories were neither terrible nor dreadful, but sweet and warming. Like the memories an adult gets of running through fields as a child or climbing trees with a pack of friends, always ending in a blazing campfire and stories that would be told well into the night.

It settled Curtis’ mind, allowing him peace from the dreadful memories his dream had brought him, so much so that as the sun began to peak over the horizon, he was already dressed and out the door with a belly full of grilled bacon and scrambled egg, the scent wafting through the open cottage door as he hobbled his way down the garden path and toward his planned stretch of garden he was to work on that day, the tap of his cane rhythmically clicking as he went.

Curtis focused on a large bloom of overgrowth sitting adjacent from the botanical garden greenhouse, ripe with brambles, Bull Thistles and Catchweed, all proving a mighty adversary and distracting his mind from his past. His efforts took him well into the mid-morning, beating and whipping at the wild plants with a rusted machete he had found in the shed behind his cottage, stopping every now and then to stretch his leg and stop the pain from erupting like it so often did and leave him crippled for the rest of the day. The hours flew past, his arm rhythmically arching and falling in a pattern that made him look and feel like he was a machine, powered only by cogs and wheels.

Curtis finally reached the end of the largest growth of brambles and stopped his onslaught, feeling the hot sun beating too furiously to work any further. Within the large alcove he had made within the nest of brambles and other weeds, he collapsed, letting his body cool in the damp mist that rose from the fallen vegetation.

Though the plants beneath were hard and knotted, speckled with sharp thorns and prickly vines, there was an odd comfort in laying in this particular area in the garden. The brambles, which had seemed to have spread like wildfire for many years without pruning, had offered a gap within the canopy of trees above, the stretching leaves and branches reaching into the space just enough to form almost a perfect circle ahead of where Curtis lay.

It was perfect. Curtis wanted time to stop entirely. The sun, which had almost reached its zenith now, shone through the circular gap enough to create a deep orange curtain of light, the steam and water vapor off the damp but drying plantation rising like a mist. It was not long until Curtis drifted into a light, dreamless sleep.

Little stirred around him in the wild overgrowth, all except the light footsteps of someone, who watched Curtis from the path the alcove sat upon. It wasn’t until the shrieking cry of a bird off in the distance, did Curtis wake, opening his eyes to the bright open gap of the trees above him, his eyes slowly falling until they focused on the small form of a woman, who watched him with a strange intensity.

He lifted himself from the branches, the woman’s glare acknowledging every move. She was stern through the mess of bright blonde hair upon her head, her rounded lips pursed and her eyes shrewd with bright green pupils. Though she was small in frame and size, there was something about the woman that made him raise his guard a little. He hesitated on the idea of her strength lying in her slightly broadened shoulders, or the fullness of her chest, not only due to her subtle bust but also because of the elation of it which only a muscular chest held.

The woman said nothing, continuing to examine Curtis with impenetrable eyes, the soft green of them glistening ever now and then as the swaying beams of sunlight shone through the trees. The woman held herself intrinsically, a perfectly white blowse tucked into an amber-coloured skirt that trickled across her toned thighs in the breeze. The woman was intense, but she was beautiful. Not like that of women in magazines or models in the swimwear adverts, with their airbrushed skin and angular facial structures. No, this woman before Curtis was instead majestic and natural, fierce yet gracious.

“Can I help you?” He asked, the silence becoming too heavy for Curtis to bare any longer.

The woman rested on the question for a long moment, her face showing no sign of an answer. “So, you are my father’s new gardener?” She finally spoke, spitting the words into the space between them.

Father? He thought, and then his thoughts instantly regarded her shape with that of Dr Maudite. Though the woman was small and petite compared to Curtis’ employer, her broad and muscular frame fit that of Dr Maudite’s. “Yes, I’m Curtis. Curtis Bristol. I started work a few days ago. Are you Dr Maudite’s daughter?”

The woman remained silent, scornfully investigating him from his plain cream shirt, which was now covered in dirt and drying sweat, to sap-covered jeans and tough leather boots. Then she lifted her eyes back to Curtis’. “You should leave this place, Curtis Bristol. Leave and do not come back.”

Curtis was taken aback by her abrupt hostility, Her words stern and grudging, like his mere existence offended her.

“Have I done something wrong?”

“You have no idea.” She looked above him then, Curtis turning to find that she was gazing at the rising turret of Maudite Mansion, which peaked above the trees in the distance. Curtis turned to face her once again but when he did, the woman had vanished, as if she had never stood there in the first place.

He hurried out of the alcove, looking up and down the path she stood on, finding nothing but leaves swaying sluggishly in the sun-blighted breeze.

“The hell is wrong with these people?” He asked, the question lingering in the air long after he returned to work, unaware that the answer would be more terrible than he could possibly imagine.