Still Waters

Prologue

Now,

And Then…

The girl is beginning to return. She takes possession of her own unconscious skin as if wriggling into a wetsuit. Graceless, she slithers her way into fleshy cul-de-sacs and dead-ends. She comes to life as if somebody were blowing air into a deflated rubber doll. She can’t work out where her arms and legs should go. Can’t decipher up from down. Can’t remember how to breathe.

Gradually, she realises she cannot see. Her senses are all jumbled; smells and sights and sounds all swirled around like wet paint. She fancies she can touch colour; can taste crimson and iron. Can reach out with her hands and grope at great liquid handfuls of darkness.

She considers herself. She feels somehow waxy. Oddly soft. A pig-fat candle. Drowned flesh.

At length, she becomes aware of the high, ringing sensation in the centre of her skull. She thinks of piano wire, pulled tight and then plucked with a coin.

My name, she thinks. I don’t know my name…

The fear is coming, now. Fear, and pain. Adrenaline is flooding her. Sensations and feelings start to log-jam at the knot of muscle and bone and nerve-endings at the top of her neck.

Suddenly, she is gagging on scent. Scorched feathers and yesterday’s rain. Sandalwood and oil. Mushrooms past their date. Meat: all sweaty leather and mildew.

She realises she can taste a little. Herbs and tobacco. Her tongue is swollen, too big for her mouth. Her lips tingle. There had been a drink. A cold, brown soup slopped from an earthen bowl. It had plants in. Some wormy tuber had touched her lip as she lapped at the brew like a cat with a saucer.

Memory again. Music. A guitar on a strap. Bare feet and the shimmering puddles within the underpass. The honey-drink. She can taste its sweetness. Can remember the touch of the green-gold bottle upon her lip – the reckless way they had passed it between them, brim unwiped, giddy on their new friend.

She tries to move. Blood rushes into her fingers, her toes. It cuts through the numbness. It’s as if hundreds of pins are pushing out through her flesh. She squirms again. Her face is constricted. It feels like she’s being squeezed. There’s pressure behind her eyes and across her sinuses, as if she were hanging forward.

She’s on her belly, on the table, looking down, staring at...

...and now she realises she can see a little. Darkness. Shapes. Soft edges and hard edges and something just out of sight.

The floor is moving. Snakes and eels wriggle beneath the thin carpet of leaves and paper and dirt. She blinks again, hard: eyelids pressed together like lips refusing the spoon. A fast, feathery panic flutters at her chest as she forces herself to see through the hallucinations and to focus on what is really there.

A memory, sudden and vicious. The girls. Her friends.

Following the stranger. Smoking his cigarettes. Drinking his honeyed wine. Tripping after him like ducklings after their mother, heads swimming with the sweet golden wine…

There had been a fire. Branches blackening around a small, red-gold flame. They had danced, and smoked, and drank. And then he had begun to tell them what he believed. He had begun to talk about his great undertaking. About the journeys. His gift. And he had made them drink. They’d gagged on it, scared and shivering and each wanting the other to do something, to say something…

She croaks, pitifully, and from somewhere nearby she hears a small, snickering laugh.

She smells sweat. Smells the high, keening song of earthy skin buffed with moss and wild garlic.

She gasps as she feels the first of the small, cold objects being placed upon her back. She tries to buck backwards but cannot seem to be able to get her body to obey her commands. She feels insubstantial, floating like a kite above herself, the thread gossamer thin.

She pictures them again. Her friends. Her best and only friends…

There is an electrical charge within her – a copper wire inside her bones. For a moment she is a mosaic; a whole made up of a billion parts. Inside her skull, an orange glow, like watching a bright sun through closed eyes.

Again, the sound of drums. Wood and leather, rhythmic and swift: split wood beating a thunderous pulse on a perfect circle of taut skin.

She opens her eyes. They bulge like fish straining at the trawl. Through the haze she sees the earth below her begin to shift. Opens her mouth and feels her tongue flop forward as the leaves and the stones and the broken twigs rise up as if something is tunnelling upwards out of the earth. She tries to rise. There is a sudden weight upon her back; a bare, sweaty knee in the well of her spine, a warm flat hand pushing her head, stuffing her deeper into the face-hole.

A face appears from the darkness beneath her: a full moon emerging from black cloud.

She blinks: tears and ash. Tries to make sense of the thing that leers up at her from the ground.

Teeth. Eyes like gobstoppers. Bristles and hair and crusted spit.

A mask?

A face.

It’s all leather and pig-flesh - a mess of tusks and furrowed snout: the whole stained a dark tobacco-brown. She thinks of bog bodies.

Beneath, the ground bulges, rises; stones tumbling down; the stench of turned earth and bad meat rushing up to fill her nose, her mouth…

She stares into the eyes of the thing beneath the table; the thing that has lain in wait, submerged in the warm, wet earth. She glimpses dark, wrinkled skin.

She opens her mouth and sees the grotesque, porcine face extends its tusks in mimicry.

She sees the face beneath – the one that peers out through the open mouth of the boar.

Sees eyes she recognises, in a face she has smiled into a thousand times.

It lunges up from the earth.

And darkness falls.

Rowan Blake @Ro_Blakewriter

Just took a call from a Neo-Nazi with zero sense of irony. Threatened to burn my hands off if I didn’t apologise for last week’s Guardian column. Here’s my response, mate. Just try it, you prick.

6:11PM August 23, 2020

19 Retweets, 42 Likes

Antony Lukaku @h8crimez8m

Replying to @Ro_Blakewriter

You’re going to burn.

6:19PM August 23, 2020

2 Retweets, 19 Likes