Mezzanine and Other Curiously Dark Tales Read online

  Mezzanine and Other Curiously Dark Tales

  By Allan Watson

  Published By

  The Candy Seance Press

  Mezzanine and Other Curiously Dark Tales

  Copyright © 2013 Allan Watson

  All stories in Mezzanine and Other Curiously Dark Tales are works of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form, electronic or mechanical without permission from the author.

  Cover Design and Photography by Caitlin Sagan

  Other Books Available by Allan Watson

  Dreaming in the Snakepark

  Carapace

  The Garden of Remembrance

  1-2-3-4

  …And Other Stories

  Acknowledgements

  Over the last year I've had more than a few short stories published both online and in various anthologies around the world. So many thanks to Paul D. Brazill, Luca Veste, Lily Childs, Col Bury, David Barber, Brendan Gisby, Rich Freeman and Kate Laity for showing a little faith and making me feel I'm not completely wasting my time.

  A huge thank you as usual to Caitlin Sagan for designing me the perfect book cover. Massive thanks, too, to Julie Adams and Fiona Johnson for keeping my mistakes to a minimum while pointing out the glaring holes in my stories and providing a puncture repair kit when required.

  Now for the heavy-duty name-dropping bit. Other thanks go to Phil Rickman, FG Cottam, Christopher Fowler, Mark Billingham, Graham Joyce, Bill Booker, MR Hall, Stephen Booth, Ian Rankin, Simon Maginn, Rebecca Lang, James Oswald, Neil White, and Russel McLean for taking the time to chat with me about their own writing while giving me tips on what sort of hat a proper writer should wear and how to get free drinks at the bar.

  Contents

  Mezzanine

  The Mystery of the Seven Suicides

  The Crocodile of Corfu

  Mother’s Ruin

  Memento

  The Driving Instructor

  Cherries for Lady Jane

  Memphis Belle

  Talking Book

  Vinegar Hearts

  The Allotment

  Family Snapshot

  I Love You

  The Perfect Wife

  Stand and Deliver

  The Christmas Card

  Dowsing for the Dead

  Mezzanine

  Death isn’t cold like the old tales say. Death is like swimming in lukewarm tar, an existence with no sharp edges to navigate, no pain to endure, nothing abrasive to keep a wandering soul fighting for survival. Death is nothing less than a long slow fade into the background radiation of the cosmos.

  There were nine of us. Nine women. Nine victims. I was the last to be seduced and taken apart at the seams by the man they called the King of Hearts. His name was Nathan and we met in a wine bar while I was out with friends. He came across as charming, but not in the slick, oily manner that would make me want to grind a stiletto heel into his instep. His was a more innocent, guileless charm. He was well spoken and educated, not the sort of man you would ever have imagined to be obsessed with blood sacrifice and ritual magic.

  He killed me on our second date after slipping something into my drink. We were in the same wine bar where we’d first met and I remember feeling strangely disassociated from everything around me – the wallpaper jazz music, the frantic conversations, the alcohol-fuelled laughter, everything tangible receding at stellar speeds. I was isolated in a cold void feeling as if I were collapsing in on myself like an ancient decaying sun. I dimly remember Nathan’s hollow voice remarking I looked unwell and he should take me to hospital.

  Then the blank empty spaces kick in, memory becoming a stuttering slideshow of images and sounds and smells. Nathan slowly driving up a steep incline in the darkness of the countryside - the wheels of his car making scrunching sounds as the tyres slewed over loose stones - headlights illuminating raindrops falling from unseen clouds - then a vivid snapshot of the car, now stationary, parked outside a tumble-down row of terraced brick cottages half-covered in creeping vegetation – watching Nathan hauling at a sheet of corrugated metal sheeting to uncover the dark maw of a skewed doorway. I remember being manhandled from the car and dragged through that black opening into a room that stank of rot and ruin from untold years of abandoned neglect. Feeling broken glass and old ashes crunch beneath my feet as Nathan’s hand-lamp revealed a fleeting glimpse of scrawled graffiti on mildewed walls.

  Then came the descent, being half carried, half dragged down a steep set of uneven stairs into a small cellar with an arched brick roof and a stone slab like a butchering table. Only then, through the fugue of the spiked drink, did I realise Nathan’s true intentions. But even as a scream welled up in my throat like a flowering stamen of thorns, the cold bite of a hypodermic needle filled my head with the noise of a scouring desert wind and I fell into oblivion.

  I awoke naked and numb on the slab. I should have been wracked with shivers but Nathan’s narcotic poison kept physical sensation at the vanishing point on a distant horizon. I was safe in my own flesh but unable to move so much as a single muscle. Nathan, too, was also naked except for a black peaked hood that covered his face and shoulders. His pale body was adorned in tattoos, astrological glyphs surrounded by violent slashes of mystical runes. He was chanting in a guttural foreign tongue as he burned foul smelling herbs in a metal dish, the bitter smoke clogging the small cellar with a perfume fit only for a charnel house.

  When he adorned my body with similar markings with a long silver knife I felt nothing at all. Even when he carved his magical sigils and cyphers into my face there was barely a whisper of discomfort. From behind the masked hood his breathing was ragged and I could smell the rank odour of his sour body sweat. I wanted to scream for him to stop. Plead with him to free me. Dump me in a field and call an ambulance. I could live with the scars. But all that emerged from my lips was my own soft exhalations as my lungs continued to function without any instruction from me.

  After the ritual of the inscribing came the defilement. Nathan used a metal tipped scourge to arouse himself, flaying his own skin until droplets of blood splattered against the wall. His penis unfurled from its flaccid state, transforming to an angry, red sabre - and then he was upon me, a sweating, thrusting beast who scratched and tore and bit and used his closed fists to batter my face to a bloodied pulp until he was finally spent. I expected him to simply cut my throat as I was no longer of any use to him, but he had one final grand gesture to make, an act to appease whatever insane gods he worshipped.

  Through swollen, half-shut eyes I watched him slice me from throat to groin and peel me open like a ripe pomegranate. As the chill air of the cellar played freely over my internal organs, I heard the sound of splintering bones as he cut through my ribcage with a pair of medical shears. It occurred to me that whatever pain-killing drugs he’d administered wasn’t for my own benefit. It was so I couldn’t escape him by slipping into unconsciousness or dying too soon through shock from the massive trauma he had inflicted upon my flesh. But thankfully merciful death was mere seconds away.

  Nathan removed his hood and smiled lovingly down at me before picking up his bloodied silver knife and neatly severing my heartstrings. As the last of my earthly life pumped from severed arteries, the last thing I saw was Nathan carefully placing my dripping heart in a wooden box and closing the lid. Then darkness came and led me by the hand, down into the cool depths of total oblivion.

  I awoke into a second life days or weeks later. Time doesn’t mean much in this state of existence. I was still in the cellar of the derelict house and despite the meag
re grey flange of light from the floor above, I could clearly see the cellar had been cleaned and my mutilated remains removed elsewhere. I was still naked and my body, such as it was, still bore the road map of arcane symbols Nathan had so carefully inscribed there. When I traced cool fingers across what I thought would be the shattered ruin of my face, the skin was whole and undamaged except for the raised tribal scars Nathan had given me. There was no feeling of panic or grieving for the life I’d had stolen away from me. The dead are passive and accepting of such things.

  I mounted the cellar steps to find something that did force a mild jolt of surprise. I was not alone. Eight figures swathed in wraps of diaphanous white stood waiting for me. As a living woman I would have screamed with abject terror to see such grim spectres pressing around me. It was their faces, or lack of, that would have caused me to swoon or lose control of my bladder. These visages were almost featureless, the topography of facial landmarks smoothed away except for the etched esoteric markings my own sharply-defined face reflected back. There was still a hint of eyes and noses and mouths hidden beneath soft shadows as if they had been despondently erased by the hand of an unsatisfied artist. But all the distinguishing features that signify identity were lost. I, too, would come to resemble these women once I forgot what I looked like.

  On that first day of my second life, they communed with me. I discovered they were all victims of Nathan. We had suffered the same fate down in the cellar. Abducted, mutilated, raped and rent open for his pleasure. We were a sisterhood, bonded by the act of quite literally losing our hearts to the same dark suitor. They instructed me on how to drape myself and hide the worst of Nathan’s sigils that claimed us as his. They told me their names and taught me the limits of my new world. We were tied to the ruined house through some ancient law of murder and sacrifice and couldn’t travel outside a radius of half a mile or so before being hauled back to the house like chained dogs. Mostly we kept to ourselves, only occasionally sparing a word of comfort to each other. Sometimes I would find myself standing on the one spot for days on end watching the slow ballet of the skies and the wondering if this was how I would spend eternity.

  I think each of us instinctively knew that our spiritual journey wasn’t supposed to end with being bound forever to the derelict house. It was a temporary stage of stasis, an enchantment waiting to be broken with a dark incantation or the spilling of fresh blood. Perhaps only Nathan had the power to free us from the bindings he had painted upon our flesh with his knife. I had studied architecture in my old life and came to think of this state of existence as nothing more than a mezzanine level, an intermediary space between life and true death. When I shared this thought with the others it brought a rare sense of warmth and camaraderie. From then on I would think of us collectively as the Mezzanine Maidens.

  A great tree grew in the middle of the derelict house, poking through the shattered remains of the roof. It was here that we all gathered and sang on stormy nights as rain bled through the roof and electricity filled the skies. The songs had no discernible words as there was no language on earth to fully articulate the horror and tragedy of our deaths. But we sang all the same, a haunting lament that spoke of sorrow, rage, loss and travesty. It was a love song wrapped in coils of razor wire. A sonnet which tasted of bile and blood.

  The house itself was part of a tumbledown row of mill workers cottages set high on a hill leading to the desolate moors beyond. A block of stone by the entrance was chiselled with the date 1758. Going by the ramshackle condition and advanced deterioration, it seemed the houses had been unoccupied for at least a hundred years or more. The sagging walls leaned against each other in exhaustion and, if they could speak, I imagined they would plead to be humanely demolished by a wrecking ball. Being so far off the beaten track, no-one came near the cottages. The fading graffiti adorning the walls was proof teenagers must have used it as a meeting place at one time in the past, but now the cottages stood alone, ignored by everyone except the occasional sheep or fox – and Nathan, of course.

  There were times when I would drift down to the occupied houses at the foot of the hill - the furthermost limit of our boundary in that direction. I would find myself peering through the kitchen windows of these abodes, watching the living go about their daily business of eating, washing, laughing, fighting, talking, arguing, kissing and loving. I was like a child gazing into a toy shop window on Christmas eve. Occasionally a few of my Mezzanine sisters wandered down to stand silently beside me as we bathed in the wash of domestic bliss behind the glass.

  It was in one of these houses that I next saw Nathan.

  A small television set was perched on the kitchen worktop and suddenly Nathan’s face was filling the screen. Gone was the boyishly handsome face. This man looked haggard and wild-eyed, his hair sticking up as if he’d been sleeping rough, and there were signs of bruising as if he’d been in a fist-fight and come off worst. But it was definitely Nathan. Within seconds, I was joined by all eight of the Mezzanine Maidens, blank faces pressed against the window glass. The news story told of how a brilliant young heart surgeon had seemingly gone insane during open-heart surgery on a female patient and instead of repairing the heart, he had ripped it from the woman’s chest and ran off with the dripping organ, making it as far as the hospital car park before being overwhelmed by security guards.

  All this had obviously happened days before and the media were already calling Nathan the King of Hearts. We stood there in the dusk, listening as the news report explained how police had found the desiccated hearts of nine women in sealed wooden boxes at his home. The remains of nine bodies were then quickly discovered in the woods behind his home. Faces began flashing across the screen. Our faces. Faces that had once been. Our bodies had already been identified and memorial services planned by grieving families. At least we would be put to rest with our hearts. We also learned that it was unlikely there would be a trial as the King of Hearts had been despatched to a secure hospital for the criminally insane.

  I suppose we all wondered if our time on the mezzanine level would soon draw to a close when our remains were interred or cremated, but nothing changed. We waited for change to come, waited to be dispersed by the wind or embraced by the earth beneath our feet, but nothing happened. We went back to our secluded wanderings, only gathering together beneath the tree to sing our song of desolation on stormy nights.

  Then one day a handsome young man came to visit the house. We never saw which direction he came from, he just seemed to materialise as if performing a clever conjuring trick. He was slim with long, raggedly cut, black hair. He was dressed like a rambler, wearing stout walking boots, jeans and a heavy plaid shirt. He carried with him a notebook and a black leather case full of old measuring instruments of a like I’d never seen before. With these brass implements he first adjusted cogs, ratchets, pinions and glass lenses and then proceeded to survey the house from top to bottom, scribbling furiously into his notebook and smiling quietly to himself.

  One strange device looked like a cross between a sextant and a gyroscope which he took down into the cellar. This was the one place we never ventured. We gathered at the top of stairs while he worked down there by torchlight and we heard him laugh aloud. The sound was so unnatural and disquieting that we wondered if Nathan himself had sent the handsome youth for some unknown purpose.

  The following day there were only eight Mezzanine Maidens. Elizabeth, the first of Nathan’s victims, vanished from our midst. Someone said she had been sitting upon the crumbling drystane wall watching the flight of a flock of geese when she simply ceased to be. From then on instead of wandering alone and keeping to ourselves, we stayed close together trying to work out what had happened. Was the young man responsible in some way? Or had the threads that held us to this spot finally frayed enough for Elizabeth to break them and move on from the mezzanine level? It was unspoken, but I think we all wondered if there really was another level of existence beyond the mezzanine. Perhaps there was only eternal dark
ness and sleep.

  A week later, Veronica, Nathan’s second victim, vanished in full sight of me. It was like the stiff easterly wind had caught hold of her and snatched her away. The rest of us huddled closer knowing proximity would be no protection against the predator in our midst. Days later, Mary was next to disappear, then Fiona, to be followed by Deborah, Susan, Caroline and Francis. Each had been sucked out of existence in the exact order Nathan had killed us. Finally, I was alone.

  I spent the next few days taking a last lingering look through the brightly-lit kitchen windows at the bottom of the hill, cherishing the warmth and sustenance of the lives within. When I finally broke away and returned to the derelict house on the second day of my isolation, the handsome young man was waiting for me.

  ‘It’s time,’ he said in a cheerful voice.

  ‘Where are you taking me?’ I asked.

  He smiled. ‘Why, to Nathan, of course.’

  I turned to flee but the young man was swifter and immediately clasped me tightly from behind. Into my ear he whispered, ‘Be not afraid, little mezzanine sister. No more harm shall befall you. I give you my word on that.’ He spun me around so we were face to face. His breath held the sweetness of honey but also the bitterness of cloves. In his eyes, I could see distant galaxies and universes rise and fall.

  ‘Who are you?’ I asked.

  He released me from his grasp, pushing me back a step, his hands resting on my shoulders. ‘I am the cloud that darkens the mid-day sun and the morning dew at daybreak. I am the destroyer of worlds and the water of life. I am the avenging angel and the crawling snake. I am the bridge between the stars. I am everything you will never understand.’

  I sensed pride in his voice and couldn’t stop myself from saying, ‘But can you be in all place at all times?’