Chapter 37
A wren trilled in the branches above. A blackbird rustled through the undergrowth below.
Remnants of the mist snaked through the trunks and the grasses, like pale fingers clutching at the air.
I pulled my hoodie around me. The light was dimming and I felt cold, but not cold enough to go back.
It was time to admit it. I wasn’t a good person.
I was barely a person. My neighbour had done a better job of it than me, and I had no idea what the hell she even was.
Maybe it was better if I stopped pretending to be a person at all.
Maybe it was safer if I just left humanity altogether. Let the thing that was my neighbour take the house, take my life, my identity. I’d disappear into the wilderness never to be found, never to be seen again. Pinkie promise!
I hoped that’s what she wanted.
I hoped that was all she wanted.
I trudged on, forcing myself through ferns and fine saplings, cursing my jeans each time they caught on bramble or hawthorn.
I imagined myself slipping out of my clothes and casting them aside.
I imagined letting the hair on my legs and my arms grow long.
I imagined it spreading over my body, a fine grey pelt.
As the light dimmed, I imagined myself crawling along the forest floor, the skin on my knuckles and my knees growing thick and leathery.
Instead of words I would grunt and bark and howl.
I’d never have to think of the right thing to say again.
No more tripping up over my words. No more worrying if I’m saying too much or too little.
I wiped my forehead with the back of my hand. Despite the evening cool, I was drenched in sweat. Well, I could sweat and stink as much as I liked now.
What a joy it would be to shrug off all the layers of structures built to reinforce an order I clearly did not fit into.
School, jobs, offices, hen parties, football matches, social media, timesheets, spreadsheets, active listening, wellness programmes, disciplinary meetings, sick notes, questionnaires on how often you feel like punching your supervisor right in the teeth, official cautions, red cards, court summons, prisons, block buttons.
They were all casts upon splints upon bindings upon a bone that would never straighten.
The further I walked, the darker it got.
I couldn’t tell if it was because night had fallen or if the canopy above me was so densely packed no light could make it through.
Either way, the forest floor slipped into a silvery half-light.
Everything—ivy, boughs, trunks, creeping things—was cast in a monochrome of shadows and the soft light of the unseen moon.
I’ve been told I shouldn’t be so black and white, but look, the world is black and white here.
Goosebumps prickled where the soft down of my secret fur covered my skin.
My chattering teeth felt pointed and broken.
My fingers, rubbing my arms, now sported a set of sharp claws. I gazed at them in feverish wonder.
Oh, there I am. That makes sense.
I didn’t know if it was the cold or the lack of sleep or the mind-numbing fear, but my vision started to swim and the world shifted.
Suddenly, I got a sense of others in the forest.
I dropped down behind a rotting tree stump, the chill and dread shaking my limbs.
Fading out of the darkness, I saw figures coming in dribs and drabs into a dim clearing ahead. Their movements were loping and strange. They twitched and sniffed and made guttural grunting sounds.
As they wandered closer to my hiding place, I shuddered with surprise.
I recognised their faces!
I saw Fergus rooting through the undergrowth, tusks protruding from his wide smirking mouth.
I saw the teens from the village, screeching from the trees and throwing branches at the others below.
I saw Viv, the landlady from the pub, an actual zebra now, with Maggie from the café riding around on her back, pecking at her mane.
I saw my old colleagues, squirreling together along the forest floor, tails flicking up and down in some secret code I couldn’t understand.
I saw the Grayson girls, their golden arms and cheeks covered in soft white feathers.
A crane came down from the canopy wearing my father’s glasses and spread his wings over them.
I saw an elegant woman on deer legs, hooves painted a bright pink, long ears flicking back and forth despite her fearless countenance.
I saw Rowan, his ears pointed and his eyes red.
They were a herd of humans, picking their way through the forest, digging up the earth with their clawed hands, sniffing the air.
The wind shifted and then the woods felt airless. A shadow circled them from the trees on the opposite side of the clearing. It flickered, just in the corner of my eyes, shifting and changing. Watching the human herd.
One of the teens threw a rock at Fergus.
He reared up and with one swift move pulled the kid from the branch and thrust him onto the floor.
The teenager screeched and clawed, but he was nothing compared to Fergus.
Fergus ran his tusk into the kid’s stomach as easy as plunging a spoon into whipped cream.
The forest floor erupted into screaming as the rest of the teens descended upon Fergus, tearing at his hair and face. One of them plucked out an eye.
The crane lifted off into the air and left the two feathered girls to be poked and prodded by my many fingered colleagues.
They investigated the pitifully cheeping children, bending their arms and fingers to find how far they would go.
Once bored of their exploration, they bit down on the girls’ necks and started to eat them.
My body trembled at the violence, half terrified, half thrilled.
This was how most animals go. Eaten alive.
I’d always been convinced that we, humanity, were little better.
That this was what was hiding underneath all of our civility.
That’s why I never trusted it. I knew that under all of the forms and the processes and the laws was that quiet pressure to be productive.
Produce or be the product.
Be the food.
Eat each other alive.
The shadow on the edge of the clearing cackled. Cackled with a too-wide grin.
Fergus cracked open the teenager’s ribcage and reached his hand into the meat inside, while the teen gnawed at his attacker’s exposed calf, tearing mouthfuls of bloody flesh that would appear again in Fergus’s hands, gathered from the boy’s stomach.
My scrambling thoughts snagged on the sight.
Wait, Fergus wouldn’t actually eat someone alive.
Rowan pulled the head off one of my colleagues, bloody froth around his mouth.
I’m not sure I want to be out here.
The deer-legged woman placed her painted hoof into the split of a splintered tree.
I don’t want this.
I backed away, out of my hiding place, picking up speed.
I don’t want this!
I ran, chill forgotten, hoping beyond hope that the bloodthirsty creatures wearing the faces of the people I knew wouldn’t come chasing after me.
My heaving breaths echoed in the darkness.
I didn’t dare look back. My route was scattershot through the trees.
But whatever direction I went, it wasn’t long before I was back at the clearing again.
Only now the forest floor was an open grave filled with skeletons and rotting corpses. At the top of the heap, on the hill of bones, sat that shadow.
It perched on its haunches, mouth wide, feeding off something from the pile.
I cast my gaze about, desperate. Where could I run to?
I couldn’t be in the city. I couldn’t be in the countryside. I couldn’t be someone new. I couldn’t be human. I couldn’t even be animal. Everywhere I was, so was this. Gnawing away in my guts. There was no escape.
You know who you are, don’t you?
I was the disappointing progeny nudged from the nest. I’d been cast out from the tribe at the office. I had lost the competition for the Sgàthan Sìth cottage. The cuckoo removes the warbler’s egg, the crow pecks out the lamb’s eyes, the runt is left behind.
A crack of bone. A neon pink fingernail.
You know who you are, don’t you?
Yes. I knew what I was. I was a fucking monster.
And I belonged here.
I clambered onto the hill of corpses and lay down among the bodies.
The air was still and cold, but the hairs on my arms fell flat.
Up above me was the wet click and suck of the creature feasting on those who had come before.
Death crept up my toes into my feet and my legs.
My arms went slack and numb. My sphincters loosened, my bowels emptied, my stomach acid started to dissolve my organs.
My eyeballs shrivelled up into their sockets, my gums receded back from my teeth, my brain slowly turned into a brown soup, all the connections that held my thoughts and memories and fears and hopes lost to rot, a jigsaw puzzle never to be put back together.
The rot crawled up my limbs and soon I was covered in moss.
All the while the shadow slurped and crunched and smacked its lips.
At least she would not eat me alive.
She.
In the corner of my eye—vision blurred from its wrinkled rotting—something glimmered.
I turned my fleshless head to look. The skeleton next to me had something in its mouth.
A glint of something metallic pierced the darkness between its broken teeth.
I turned and reached out with my rotting, moss-clothed arm and creaked the skull open.
Inside the mouth was a key. Another Yale key, but older than mine.
I checked the next skull, prying open the teeth, and it, too, held a key, though older again this time.
The eating on the top of the pile stopped and the creature went silent.
Arms still rotting, ligaments barely holding my bones together, I searched through the other skeletons around me.
Each one held a key in their mouth. I kept searching until I came to a smaller skull still partly fleshy, with a birthmark over one side of the face.
Inside the brown glop between his shrunken lips was another key.
Every skull around me held a key, getting older and older as if going back through time.
Square-head keys became small brass keys became sturdy iron keys became simple picks of metal became a slab of wood.
All these bodies. All of them suffered the same thing I was suffering now. This wasn’t just me. This was something bigger. Something older.
A screech came from the top. Then a spark of light caught the corner of my eye.
The old woman from the pub sat in her wheelchair at the base of the pile.
Only now she was awake. And watching me.
I reached out to her, offering the key in my hand.
Help me, I thought, as loud as my brain soup would allow, I want to stop this, but I don’t know how.
The old woman huffed.
“Enough,” she said to the creature on the pile. She’d barely raised her voice and yet it shook the trees and rang through the hill of bones.
The shadow screeched then scampered away into the darkness.
I turned my withered skull to face the old lady.
Now she was sat by the fire of The Curtyard. In her lap she had a spool of red thread. She wrapped it round her finger, pulling a scarlet end through the loop.
My bones were barely holding together.
“Time we had a chat,” she said.
Then she pulled the knot tight and I woke.