Where the Dead Live Read online

  Natalie screamed again and fought against the bonds, but her struggles only served to strap her down tighter. A fourth root, or branch, she couldn’t tell, leashed her other ankle.

  “Help!” she screamed. “Somebody, please, help me!”

  But all she heard was the rustle and creak of the branches, leaves and roots around her. How, with the strange acoustics, they sounded exactly like they were whispering her name…

  Natalie.

  She opened her mouth to scream again, but a root slithered out of the undergrowth and plugged her mouth, sliding down the back of her throat. Her reflexes reacted, and she gagged against it, but it made no difference to its downward journey. Now her screams were muffled, their sound muted against the thick rope of vegetation. Terrified, she thrashed her head back and forth, but nothing could dislodge the thing now prizing her jaws open and blocking her throat.

  She shouldn’t be able to breathe, but somehow she could still inhale and exhale, despite the blockage. Her body just reacted; she wasn’t able to give anything any length of thought. Terror and disbelief filled all of her mind, certain she was trapped in some horrifying nightmare she was surely going to wake from.

  Another root crept up her trouser leg, against the inside of her thigh, cold and slimy, like the rotten touch of a corpse. Her struggles increased with renewed force, knowing exactly where the vegetation was heading. Her screams were mere whimpers against the thick rope of root already jammed down her throat, snaking its way down to her stomach.

  The other root slipped inside her panties and forced its way between her most intimate folds, penetrating her.

  Inside her head, Natalie screamed.

  The roots were deep inside her now, one reaching down, the other up, connecting her with the earth. She was still pinned down, still conscious and aware of everything happening to her, but her mind blurred with disbelief.

  Beside and beneath her, grains of earth separated, making way for her form as if she was sinking into quicksand. Instead of pulling her limbs outwards, like being on the rack, the root around her ankles and wrists started to pull her down, dragging her into the earth.

  They pulled her beneath ground, soil filling her nose, blocking her airways. She couldn’t breathe yet she was still conscious, still aware of everything. Her desire to take great, gulping breaths vanished, as if her pores were absorbing the oxygen now and she had no need.

  Within her, the roots continued to spread. They crept and divided, throughout her internal organs and veins, into her bones, like a cancer eating away at her.

  Externally, she was being stretched outwards, her limbs lengthening and elongated. Excruciating pain wracked through her, but she could no longer voice her agonies. Her fingers grew and lengthened, each knuckle becoming a nodule, the finger branching from the node. Her torso thickened. Legs and toes protruded, lengthening and spreading, seeking their way through the earth.

  Then, to her surprise, she found herself pushing her way back up through the dirt, head first. She broke through crusts of earth, soil falling around her. The roots penetrating her were now a part of her, no longer an intrusion. She continued to push up, her strangely elongated arms reaching towards the moon, which still hung low in the night’s sky. The damp scent of autumn filled the air and the biting cold was such a relief she wanted to laugh and cry all at the same time. She was escaping, breaking free from whatever terror had griped her.

  Yet somehow, her perspective was wrong. She was too high. The pathway snaked far below her now, a mere strip, its emptiness lit by the orange glow of the streetlamps.

  The branches of the trees that had threatened her now grew around her like old companions. Growing up through them, she became skeletal, her own fingers now elongated and malformed, her knuckles and joints the protrusions of the branches.

  A tree grew opposite, across the other side of the pathway. Something about it jolted recognition inside her. There was something in the shading of the bark, in the pits and knots of the wood. She saw the knots as eyes and recognized the imploring death in them.

  Mark?

  She saw the man she had once loved, and there was no doubt in her mind that his soul was somehow trapped within this stilted and rigid form.

  Natalie reached towards him, desperately, and he reached back. What were once her fingers clawed their way towards him, grabbing hold. His fingers felt like bones in her grasp, like hard, jointed twigs. She clasped hold of them, seeking solace in their gnarled touch. She tried to pull herself into his arms, but she was rooted to the ground.

  Above the pathway they locked hands together, two trees with branches clasped together, creating a canopy which, in summer, would create a dappled shade for passers-by to stroll beneath.

  But in the dead of winter the interlocking twigs would remind people of bones, like the clutching hands of long dead lovers.

  Faces

  “The faces on the wall make me scared...”

  This answer has just come from my three-year old daughter as I sit with her on her bed, reading her a Winnie-the-Pooh book that deals with emotions. So far the answers have been what I expected;

  ‘What makes you happy?’

  ‘Getting treats.’

  ‘What makes you sad?

  ‘Not getting treats.’

  But then I asked her, ‘what makes you scared?’ and the last thing I expected was that answer.

  “What faces?” I say, my blood running cold. “There aren’t faces on the walls.”

  “Yes there are,” she insists. “Some of them are nice, but some of them are mean.”

  “Where are they?” I ask her. “When do you see them?

  “They’re everywhere,” she says, looking around her. “And I see them all the time.

  I huddle my daughter into my arms, as always shocked at how quickly my fat little baby, who had dimple in her dimples, grew into this skinny legged, sharp elbowed child.

  A shiver runs through me, certain the room is a few degrees cooler.

  “There’s nothing on the walls,” I tell her, reaching out and touching one of the smooth surfaces. “You’re seeing shadows.”

  She looks at me as only a three-year old can. With total scepticism.

  “They’re not shadows,” she almost laughs, as if I’ve told her a dog is a horse. “They’re people and they’re in the walls.”

  “Don’t be silly. People can’t get in the walls.”

  I know I’m telling her the truth, but there is still part of me that wonders...what if? What if she is right and I am the one who is wrong?

  Suddenly claustrophobia presses on all sides, as if I am surrounded by faces, all peering down at me. For once I find myself wishing my ex-husband were here, and I was not alone in the house.

  I lean down and kiss her small head, her fine hair tickling my nose.

  “Come on, it’s time to go to sleep,” I tell her, pulling the covers up over her narrow frame. She snuggles down into her pillow and pulls her teddy-bear close to her body.

  I reach out to switch off her bedroom lamp, but something moves on the wall, something just out of my peripheral vision. I freeze, my hand held in the same position, my heart pounding in my chest. Slowly I turn my head, cautiously needing to know what caught my attention, and almost laugh out loud. There is the shadow of my arm, grotesquely morphed across my daughter’s bedroom wall, frozen in position.

  I wiggle my fingers, reassuring myself, and the shadow waves back.

  It was nothing, only my imagination. Fears brought on by a child’s imagination.

  I kiss her again and whisper, ‘I love you,’ into her ear.

  Already she is halfway into the arms of sleep and I quietly back out of the room, trying to tell myself the flurry of movement across the wall is simply a creation of light and shade.

  Downstairs, I sink into the arms of my favourite couch and pick up the well-thumbed paperback I’m currently reading. For a while I am taken into a different world; one of heroes with broad shoulders and
dangerous smiles, of heroines with heaving breasts and plucky personalities.

  A piercing scream tears me from my reverie. My head snaps up, my body launching from the couch. With blood rushing through my veins, I race up the stairs. Bursting through her bedroom door, the first thing I see is my child, huddled in the middle of the bed, her soft toy clutched to her chest. But then, as I take in her surrounding, my eyes prickle with sharp tears of fear.

  Her room is back to front, her pillow at the wrong end of her bed, her book case turned around, her toys piled in the centre of the room.

  “Honey?” I say, unsure if I should be terrified or angry. “What did you do to your room?”

  “It wasn’t me!” she cries, her face in her hands. “It was the faces.”

  “Don’t be silly. Faces can’t move things.”

  Then I realise what I’ve said. “And there aren’t any faces. They’re just walls!”

  I reach out my hand, intending to hit the wall, show her how solid it is, but her shriek of fear freezes me in my tracks.

  “No, Mummy! Don’t hit them. They’re the mean ones and you’ll make them angry.”

  I open my mouth to tell her the faces are not real, but movement stops me.

  Do I see the walls ripple around me, the swirl of dark and light above my head? I squeeze my eyes shut. This isn’t real; it’s hysteria. I’ve watched a documentary about it before, I’m sure. How one person’s panic can take hold of another?

  Yet something darts above me, bleeding into the paintwork, and another swoops down like a black cloak, billowing around us.

  I grab my daughter from her bed and she clings to my neck, her legs wrapped around my waist. Staring at the mottled pink strands of her bedroom rug— too terrified to look up— I back out of the room and quickly pull the door shut behind me.

  I hurry into my own bedroom and slam the door, blocking her bedroom from my own by the length of the hallway and two closed doors. I climb into bed, my daughter still attached to my body, like a monkey, shivering.

  It was nothing, I tell myself. Just a bad case of night terrors.

  And yet, as I huddle down beneath the covers, holding my daughter tight against the curve of my body, I am certain I can feel eyes peering down at me.

  Faces in the walls.

  Cut

  The gushing tap echoed in the small bathroom, a thunderstorm in the otherwise silent apartment.

  Opening the medicine cabinet, I retrieved a small, plastic pink razor and a canister of foam, and set the objects down on the hard tiles beside the sink. Picking up the canister, I slammed its hard, metal base down on the head of the razor, shattering the plastic and freeing the shiny slips of metal.

  There was something about the preparation I enjoyed. The bubbles of excitement and trepidation in my stomach, knowing I was doing something very wrong, yet being unable to stop. I experienced no fit of rage or anxiety; I was as methodical as a surgeon.

  Sitting on the edge of the bath, I leaned over and swirled my hand in the water, judging its temperature.

  The water frothed and foamed, like a miniature waterfall in the white porcelain bath, stirring up the healthy dash of bubble bath I’d added only moments before. I stood and watched for a moment, my hand at my throat, fingers lightly touching the gold necklace nestled against my skin. I traced the skilfully twisted metal; the letters making up my name. A-N-N-A.

  A thick, dark blue towelling robe covered my otherwise naked body. Its arms swallowed my hands, the hem brushing the tops of my feet. Though snug and cosy wrapped within its folds—a child beneath a security blanket—I shrugged off the garment, allowing the material to fall to the floor.

  In an attempt to make the tiny room appear larger, a full length mirror decorated one wall of the room. As the heat from the running water slowly fogged up the glass, I examined my body; my heart heavy, my stomach sickened.

  I cast my eyes down, below my breasts, to the ribs of my reflected identical twin. The most recent cuts were beginning to heal, creating a reddish brown crust across my skin. Left alone, they would heal quickly. But once I had opened the same wounds time and time again, they would never truly heal. The scars they created were raised; thick and serrated. My body was littered in them.

  Once upon a time, in the early days, I cut only my arms. However, that had quickly gotten me more attention than I wanted. I found myself making excuses about where the marks had come from—I had fallen through a glass table, or accidently slipped and landed on a knife. Each excuse was more ridiculous than the last and my cheeks would colour with shame at both the lies and the actions they covered.

  Now I cut the places people couldn’t see; beneath my breasts, on the insides of my thighs. Places only the most intimate of companions would ever find—not that I had anyone I was intimate with. The cuts between my thighs rub as I walk and the underwire of my bras scraped open the wounds, the blood staining the white lace so often I now only wore black.

  Yet, I was unable to stop. Each time the pain inside grew too much for me to stand. Each time I felt I would burst if I did not get some release, and I cut again. There was such stupid pleasure at the pain, at seeing the red blood, prickle and bloom against the white of my flesh. Then would come the guilt and I would swear to myself that I would stop. I would not hurt myself again.

  Until the next time.

  I ran my hand across the steamy mirror, my fingertips causing the fine mist to pool together, condensation running down the glass, leaving clear spaces through which I could see myself more clearly.

  My hated body.

  I slammed my fist into the pane of glass in front of me. Its structure remained intact, but pain shot from my knuckles up through my arm. My eyes blurred with tears, but some sadistic part of me instantly felt better.

  What the fuck was wrong with me?

  Perhaps that was simply what I deserved? After all, what sort of person was I?

  My own mother’s suicide would forever haunt me. I found her, lying in a bath of cold red water, skin so white it was almost blue. The image of her lying there will never leave me; her lips slack and moistened, the thick luxurious hair clinging lifelessly to gaunt cheeks. Eyes staring beyond the mortal life I held.

  I had known she was depressed, that something was seriously wrong, yet I had left her to it. I could have taken more time to talk to her, to get her to talk to me. Instead, I was too caught up my own teenaged worries. I was more concerned with her no longer being my mother, angry with her for not mimicking the happy, cookie-dough, soap-opera queens who managed to run a home, a business, and still look incredibly beautiful. Even then, I felt she had failed me.

  I had been so fucking selfish, wallowing in my own self-righteous beliefs that I was the one who should be supported, who should be getting the attention.

  Had I felt smug at her misery, at her pain, somehow felt it served her right? Had I seen her in distress and some part of me believed she deserved it? The distance she had put between us, all because of her little ‘secret affair’ had ultimately destroyed the whole family.

  It had been her fault.

  Yet, still I blamed myself. If only I had been different, if only I hadn’t been so damned selfish—for that is what I was, what I still am. Even now, almost ten years later, though I had thought myself to be strong, to be independent, courageous even, once the covers were pulled away I was nothing more than the selfish, insecure child I had always been.

  Disgusted with myself, I turned away from the mirror, focusing my attention back to the bath which was now close to overflowing. The pitch of the running water had changed and was now low and grumbling, like the sound of a stream running through a small underground cave.

  I reached over and twisted the squeaking taps until the water stopped.

  Bubbles frothed on the surface, their delicate forms bursting, sending kaleidoscopes of iridescent light to its neighbours. The scent of lavender filled the air, calming me.

  Resting my left hand on the side of the tub I l
ifted my right foot over the edge. Carefully I lowered my toes into the cloud-soft foam, the bubbles bursting as my skin made contact. My foot continued into the complete caress of the warm water.

  I sighed with pleasure as my calf disappeared into the white head and then lifted my other leg to join its partner in the bath.

  Gently, still wary of my injuries, I lowered the rest of my body into the water. As the water touched the freshest of my cuts, I sucked the air in across my teeth, wincing at the sharp pain. My body soon became accustomed to the heat and I relaxed, allowing my head to rest back against the hard porcelain, the soft foam creating a cushion around my face.

  The warmth swirled around my body, touching every intimate part. The heat fogged up my mind, eyes suddenly hot and heavy. Floating in this silent warmth, my limbs felt light and insubstantial. My breath slowed and deepened, and though I knew how dangerous it was to fall asleep in the bath, the warm darkness beckoning me away from my damaged body and overwrought mind was just too welcoming. I allowed myself to slip into its deep embrace.

  The water was cold. In my sleep-addled head, I knew the sensory cells in my skin were sending frantic messages to my nervous system telling me it was cold—too cold—and it was time to wake up and get out. But I clung to sleep. It was safer than having to open my eyes and find myself flung back into the misery that had become my life. It was easier just to continue ignoring my frigid surroundings and allow myself to be pulled back under by the strong current that is sleep.

  Only one thought stopped me from doing just that, and that was the promise of the blade I had left waiting.

  I forced myself to open my eyes. The cold white of the ceiling met my gaze and I stared back at it for a moment, summoning up the energy to get the muscles in my body moving.