Gary McMahon - Nightsiders

The kitchen was a mess. Food had been piled to rot in the sink, cockroaches scurried across the tiled floor, and huge chunks had been gouged out of the plaster walls to reveal the water pipes beneath. The legs had been sawn off the kitchen table. Someone had started to dig a hole in the concrete floor against the side wall, and again the walls were caked with dried food and shit.

Robert flew across the kitchen and grabbed the door. His hands did not seem to want to take hold of the key sticking out of the lock, but eventually he managed to turn it and open the door. Sarah stood there, mouth agape, and when she looked into his eyes, he felt reality flooding back into place, filling the corners of his life with things he recognized. Things he loved.

A line of deep red sunlight was eating into the horizon as he let his family inside. It was still dark, but that darkness would not hold out for long. Robert did not know if this was a good or a bad thing; all his old preconceptions had been destroyed, blown apart like flimsy huts in a tornado. He decided it probably did not matter either way.

He led them into the hallway, and stopped again at the living room door. This time, the room was empty, there was no one sitting on the sofa. He began to doubt he had even seen Monica Corbeau, and then his resolve began to unravel. What the hell where they doing here, he and his family? They were comfortable, middle-class—and spineless. No way could they win such a fight as this, against opponents such as these. They would be torn apart, their body parts used as ornaments, and no ground would be gained by their pointless deaths.

Just then, when he most needed her, Sarah came up behind him and laid a hand on his waist. His shoulder was no longer aching, a fact he took as a warning, but he felt her hand at his waist like a dead weight. It tied him to the earth, bound him into this scenario, and made him realize for the last time there was no way out.

He nodded. Sarah took away her hand, and he felt its absence like another kind of agony.

They climbed the stairs in silence, gripping their weapons, ready for the fight. He hoped his children would not flinch at the final moment; that they would be able to draw blood and rejoice in the thrill of battle. He knew now he was capable of such a thing, of becoming a beast not unlike the beasts he sought to vanquish.

Once again he passed by the story on the walls, and he was aware of the others gaping at the scrawls and scribbles in horror. The bloody mural’s meaning was vague, concealed, but the very fact that it existed at all was a terror well worth tasting.

“Pretty pictures, aren’t they? Pretty, pretty pictures.” The voice came from behind them, at the top of the stairs but above the bulkhead. Robert turned, but now he was at the rear. He stepped forward, moving aside Sarah and the children, so that once again he stood at the front of the group as they reached the top of the stairs. A door opened behind them, and he knew wherever he positioned himself on the landing he was unable to prevent an attack on his loved ones.

“Do you like our art?” Nathan Corbeau was naked but for a pair of tight white underpants. His muscular legs were shoulder-width apart, his arms held out at his sides, and his face jutted forward from his thick neck. “It took ages to do, but we’re quite proud of it.”

“This ends now,” said Robert, taking another step forward. Something crunched under his foot, but he kept his eyes on Corbeau. There came a hissing sound from behind, like escaping gas, but he refused to be drawn.

“Shit,” said Connor, his voice trembling. “They’re all here now.”

“We’re the flipside,” said a soft, low voice from behind and somewhere off to his left. “We’re the underside. We’re the nightside. And we’re never. Going. Away.”

“Fight or flight,” said Nathan Corbeau, moving slowly forward across his section of the landing and maneuvering his body to block the stairs. He was flexing his fists; they looked huge, bigger than before. It was as if his body was changing, becoming even more monstrous. His mouth gaped, the lower jaw touching his chest.

Robert realized he and his family had somehow moved backward, toward the other rooms. He spun around and saw that Monica Corbeau was standing there, having stepped from one of the doorways, and she looked like something from a nightmare. Her white nightgown billowed around her slender form, as if caught up in a wind, and when he glanced down her legs and her feet, he could have sworn that for a moment he glimpsed piglike trotters rather than human toes.

He blinked, hard, making his eyes hurt, and when he opened them, she was normal, a skinny woman in a cheap nightgown, arms held out as if expecting an embrace. Of the Corbeau children, only Ethan was visible. He stood on the landing to his mother’s left, brandishing a switchblade—perhaps the same one from before, when Robert had come here to confront them. His face was dead; there was no vitality there, just a forlorn emptiness that seemed to swallow his whole head.

“Come on, then. Come and fucking get it.” Sarah did not sound like herself. She had now fully embraced that side of her which had first been drawn out by the rape, the part of her that wanted to kill and would enjoy—even relish—the bloodshed. “Fucking come on, you monsters!”

Connor and Molly began to scream; a series of strange, wailing war cries that echoed down the stairwell. Primal screams.

Robert turned again to Nathan Corbeau, and he saw a look cross the man’s face that made him think they could just win this. That look was confusion, and he had never before seen it associated with Corbeau. It looked wrong, somehow, as if this was indeed the first time the man had ever experienced the sensation of not being fully in control.

A second later, without even thinking about it, he was charging at Nathan Corbeau, knife held aloft, a scream in his throat, murder on his mind. Corbeau, caught up in his own story, mirrored Robert’s actions and ran at him, his face a mask of loathing. The two men connected like vehicles impacting at high speed. Robert felt his shoulder blaze, and the blunt impact of a few ribs cracking. He slashed with the knife, catching Corbeau across the cheek and laying it bare to the bone. His teeth were bared through the wound; it was simply an extension of his terrible grin.

“Die!” He screamed the word, slashing again and again with the knife, and then he felt the other man’s arms around him, pulling him down. They twisted to the right, crashing against the banister, and as the wood cracked and the banister broke, they went tumbling down into the stairwell. Robert was only vaguely aware of more fighting above him, and he sent out his love to his fellow warriors in the hope it would gift them with strength enough to finish the fight.

The climax was approaching; the story would soon be told.

The men rolled down the stairs, thrashing and punching and biting. Robert found within him a savagery he had never expected, a bloodlust that took him completely by surprise. He revelled in the primal joy of causing pain to another human being, and realized he had now lost all sense of himself.

When he rolled to a halt at the bottom of the stairs, Robert realized he was no longer part of a human knot with Nathan Corbeau. He got to his knees, wincing at the pain; a sharp, slicing feeling that could have been anywhere or everywhere on his body. Corbeau lay a few yards away, his face turned to the wall. He was holding his side, his front obscured from view, and his legs were twitching.

Robert moved toward his felled opponent, feeling invigorated. If he stopped to think about it, he knew the agony wracking his body would put him on the floor, so instead he kept on going, making up the ground between himself and the other man. The knife was no longer in his hand, nor could he see it anywhere on the floor. But he still had his fists and his feet…even his teeth, if need be.