Authors: Gary McMahon
I shook my head. They probably thought it was simple confusion, but I was just trying to focus my thoughts.
“I believe you know my mother.” Pru moved her hand to indicate Carole, who was still on the floor, still motionless. “But let me introduce you to my aunt.”
She stepped to the side, moving toward the cellar wall; Kyle did the same on the other side of the cellar. It seemed like such a dramatic gesture, like a parting of human curtains.
The couple had been blocking it from view, but now they’d moved, I could see a high-backed wooden chair set about a foot away from the rear wall, with something sitting in it. I realized quickly that it was a cadaver, but it took me longer to understand what was wrong with it. At first, I didn’t register that it was naked, and wrapped up tightly in long strips of cellophane, like a shiny mummy. The skin beneath the wrappings was dark, slick, and bulging in places. I got the impression that the transparent material was all that was holding the corpse together.
The body was tall and unnaturally thin, as if it had been stretched and had most of the meat flayed from its bones. But the weirdest thing, the most disturbing thing, was the head. The body lacked its real head, and in its place was a massive hollowed-out pumpkin. The features that had been carved upon it were rudimentary, but this only made them more terrifying. There was a huge gouge of a mouth and triangular holes for eyes. As I strained to take it all in, I saw that the bony nub of the neck, where the head had been severed, was pushed up hard into the body of the vegetable, forming a tight, puckered joint.
“It took Ben ages to dig her up and get her back here without anyone noticing.” Pru’s voice was horrible; it held a note of what I could only describe as glee. She loved this. She was in her element.
The reality of the situation hit me, and I almost went down again. These two psychos had dug up the body of a dead serial killer, brought it back here, and cut off its head and replaced it with a Halloween pumpkin. Delirious laughter built up inside me, but I knew if I let it out, it would transform into a scream.
I’d been taken in by Pru—her act had fooled me, I’d thought she was a poor little lost soul just looking to connect with someone. But all the time, she’d been reeling me in, grooming me for…for what? Kyle had even beaten her up to convince me of her vulnerability. Had they done all of this simply to get their hands on Jess?
“My daughter…” I took a long step forward. “I want my daughter.” At last the rage started to come. I opened myself up to it, letting it grow inside me like a terrible dark flower. “Tell me where she is or I’ll kill you.”
“Oh, really,” said Benjamin Kyle. He slipped a hand behind his back, reached into the waistband of his jeans, and brought out a small handgun. He didn’t even point it at me. Sight of the weapon alone was enough for him to win the standoff. “That’s a trick I’d like to see.” Again, he spoke to me in that mocking tone: he didn’t just want to hurt me; he wanted to humiliate me first.
“This is a very special night for us. For all of us.” Pru’s voice had become high-pitched. She no longer sounded in control. “Katherine was born on Halloween, you see. She died on Halloween. So it’s only fitting that the transference takes place on Halloween.”
I didn’t want to ask, but I had no choice. “Transference…what does that mean?”
Neither of them said anything for a few seconds, which seemed to stretch into minutes. The lights had stopped flickering, but they’d dimmed: the room seemed filled with too many shadows, none of them natural. They moved across the floor and the walls like huge spectral snakes.
“It’s simple. Katherine’s soul needs a new vessel.” This was Kyle. He said it as if he were talking about his laundry list: his voice was calm, assured, and perfectly normal.
“So this was all planned? You’ve been planning this since she died?”
“Sort of,” said Pru. “Not every detail was in place yet, but your arrival made it easy for us.”
Kyle sniggered, like a child. “You just stumbled onto the scene when the plans were still being made. You became the plan…or rather, your daughter did.” He sniggered again. It was a horrible sound. “There’s a darkness in you, man. A darkness that likes getting busy. I can sense it. My own busy darkness responds to it, reaches out toward it. You’ve passed that darkness on to your kid. She’ll make the perfect vessel for Katherine’s big return. She is such a…
radiant
child.” He smiled, and it made him look hungry. It made him seem ravenous.
It was at this point that I understood just how insane they really were. These two freaks actually believed that they could somehow force the soul of Katherine Moffat into the body of my daughter, and that she could carry on her work. I glanced at the cellophane-wrapped body, the oversized pumpkin head. I knew it was my mind creating the illusion, but I could have sworn that the body was in a slightly different position from the last time I checked. The arms had moved. Before, they had been hanging straight down by her side; now they were folded neatly in her lap.
And that wasn’t all that had altered.
The wall behind the mummified cadaver was seething. I strained my eyes, trying to make out what I was seeing in the dim light. At first I thought it was just the shadows again, boiling on the wall, but as I watched, the whole thing became clear. The wall had been turned into a mosaic. It was like something from a nightmare. Children’s body parts were attached to the brickwork, perhaps nailed or maybe glued in place. I saw arms, legs, torsos, heads, faces…and they were all writhing, caught up in some terrible dance.
I looked again at Katherine Moffat’s body, then back at the shifting wall of death. The movement stopped. It was just a blank wall again, with darkness billowing across it like a vast black sail. For a moment I thought the images inside the dead killer’s head had been released, and that’s what I had seen: her dreams, her hopes, her fantasies. I felt tainted, unclean. I could never
unsee
those images; they’d stained me forever.
Her dead mind had touched mine, and I doubted I’d ever recover.
“Before we get really busy, it’s time to tie up some loose ends.”
I moved my gaze back to Kyle. He was holding the gun out from his body.
“Please…” I felt weak, almost beaten. “My daughter…”
Kyle shook his head. “Loose ends, man.” He raised the gun, swung his arm around and pointed it at Pru’s head. Then he pulled the trigger. She didn’t even know what was happening until the bullet entered her brain. Her eyes were still focused on me; she was grinning. An arc of blood that looked black in the dim light shot from her head. Her knees buckled, her shoulders slumped, and she went down like deadweight. Calmly, without looking at me, he pointed the gun at the floor and shot Carole once. She didn’t even twitch. For all I knew, she was already dead and he was doing this for show.
Kyle walked away, moving off to the side. He was swallowed by darkness. Seconds later, before I had the chance to react, he emerged from the shadows carrying Jess. He set her down on the floor, gently, respectfully. He was still holding the gun. It was pointing at me.
Jess was unconscious. From what he’d told me, it sounded like he wanted her alive for his purposes. I had to believe that he hadn’t killed her, that there was still a chance I could save her.
She was still wearing her pajamas. There was a thick swathe of duct tape across her mouth. Her body had been floppy when he was carrying her; her muscles were loose and her limbs were rubbery. I stared at her, willing strength into her small, soft form.
I’d failed to notice while all this was happening, but the light was intensifying. There was a glow in the air; it was the same as when I’d started walking down the stairs into the cellar, as if fireflies had entered the room.
(
Bright-dark
)
I looked around to see where it was coming from. Kyle had noticed it, too. He looked less certain than he had only minutes before. A soft buzzing sound started up. It wasn’t coming from one place; it was coming from everywhere, from the air itself.
“What the fuck is this?”
I couldn’t answer him; I had no idea. But then, in a flash, I remembered what Jess had told me about the little girl in her room, and the way the box of books in the cellar had been a clumsy kind of warning. Then I knew exactly what this was…
who
it was. It was them. It was the Radiant Children.
They appeared in the corner of the room, but they didn’t look quite real. It was a clump of light, and it moved slowly, steadily, in the direction of Benjamin Kyle. He didn’t see it at first. He was looking at me, pointing the gun, as if I were the one causing this. Then, when he noticed my attention was not on him, he looked into the corner and saw them, too.
The clump of light was pulsing. It was glowing and making that soft buzzing noise. It sounded a lot like singing, but heard from a distance. The Radiant Children were chanting that same nursery rhyme I’d heard outside, the one about Little Miss Moffat…
As the wavering clot of bright darkness moved toward Kyle, it slowly broke apart, flowering into separate forms. As this happened, the individual images became clearer. First one, then two, then three children were walking or floating toward him. The three became six; six became twelve. Soon the room was filling up with the ethereal figures of dead children, each of them chanting that rhyme.
Kyle finally jerked into action. His finger twitched on the trigger, and he fired bullets at the glowing crowd of newcomers. They kept moving toward him at the same unhurried pace, beatific smiles on their pulsing, light-filled faces. The images had stopped clarifying, but I could make out eyes, noses, mouths…and they all seemed to be held together by a diffuse light that had no source in the real world, the world in which I was standing. I realized that this place—this killing room—was not a real place at all. That was how the police had missed it. The cellar they had entered was not the same as this one; this space existed solely in the imagination of Katherine Moffat, and somehow we’d been able to access it.
And now the Radiant Children had found their way here, and they were helping me.
They closed in on Benjamin Kyle, lighting up his terrified features for a moment, and then, as I watched in a fascinated kind of horror, his features began to melt. It happened quickly: one second he was starting to scream, the next the skin of his face was like molten wax. The bright darkness was acting like acid. It liquefied his flesh on the bone, dripping down onto his naked shoulders, setting off a biological chain reaction that stripped his torso down to the muscle, then to the bone.
Kyle raised his hands and started raking at his face with clawed fingers, pulling away the molten skin like lumps of congealed fat. He sank to his knees but the Radiant Children lifted him, bore him aloft, and stared to carry him away.
They took his thrashing body into a corner, and then their weird light went out.
I stood there for a few seconds, staring at the spot where they’d been, expecting to hear something—even if it was a distant scream. I was disappointed when all I heard was the silence they’d left behind.
Even then, immediately after the event, I began to doubt what I had seen. I didn’t believe in ghosts; the supernatural was not part of my mind-set. I knew I’d think about it again later and apply some kind of rationale that explained everything, but right now I had to go and help my daughter.
I moved quickly, rushing over to where she was lying and going down on my knees. Ignoring Pru’s body, I tore the duct tape off Jess’s mouth and started to rub her cheeks, her forehead. “Wake up, baby. Wake up…” She didn’t move. I felt for her pulse, and after a few panicked seconds I found it. The pulse was weak, but it was there. She was still alive.
Then, with her eyes still closed, she whispered something: “Bright-dark.”
It was all the evidence I needed that she was okay.
I picked her up and carried her in my arms, moving toward the stairs. The cellar was just a cellar; there was nothing else to fear. The lights flickered above me, but it was just a faulty connection. The ghosts had gone; the killers had been dealt with.
Behind me, I heard the delicate crinkling of cellophane.
I stopped, turned, and faced whatever was waiting for me in the shadows.
Katherine Moffat’s body was slowly, stiffly rising from the high-backed chair. She rose, and kept on standing, towering at the back of the cellar. If she’d been tall in life, she was colossal in death. Whatever remained of her fevered, nightmarish imagination was fuelling this display. The cellar walls seemed to flicker around us along with the rhythm of the lights, and it wasn’t an effect of the old, unstable wiring. This version of reality was breaking apart; she couldn’t hold it together for much longer.
Katherine Moffat lurched forward, her huge pumpkin head wobbling on the stalk of a neck. The carved eyes blinked; the slash of a mouth opened wide, wider…and a strange, heartbreaking sound came from the depth of her, like an ocean floor splitting up into pieces, or cave walls coming down inside an underground cavern. It was the sound of internal destruction: the death-knell of the world. I still hear it now, in the worst of my nightmares, and I’ll probably hear it again at the second of my death.
I didn’t have long to act. It had to be now or never. If I didn’t exorcise this hungry demon, it would hang around forever, waiting for a chance to return and try again. I put Jess down on the floor, making sure she was in a comfortable position, and then I paused for a moment, clenching my fists, before running full tilt at that thing from the blackest dream, that monster from the longest night, that beast from the endless, shit-smelling sewers of the afterlife.