Gary McMahon - Nightsiders

Corbeau moaned, and rolled slowly onto his back. The carving knife was sticking out from his stomach at an angle. Blood pumped freely from around the blade, shockingly thick and copious. He was breathing heavily, his naked, reddened chest rising and falling. His porcine face was white, bloodless. One of his hands crawled across his belly and clutched the knife handle. The fingers had fused together, forming a crude hoof.

“So you had it in you after all? I thought as much. You’re all the same, you fucking yuppies: all you need is the right amount of pushing.” He laughed, and blood sprayed from between his lips. “You know how this story ends, don’t you?”

Robert fell to his knees, the pain finally becoming too much. “How does it end, Corbeau? You tell me…tell me fast, before you bleed to death.”

Corbeau’s grin was wide and red and ragged. “It ends like it always ends: with death and desolation. It ends with no winners and far too many losers.” He gripped the knife handle, his knuckles turning white. “It always ends the same way.” Visibly straining, he pulled the knife sideways across his belly, dragging the blade through the layers of flesh and fat and gristle. Then he raised his other hand and plunged it into the wound, hooking his misshapen fingers around his intestinal tract and tugging it out into the open, gutting himself; laying bare the metaphor and making of it the meat of cold, hard fact. “It ends…like this .” He gave one final tug on his slick, wet innards; blood sprayed like spilled paint across the floor and up the walls.

Then at last, Nathan Corbeau was still.

There were no sounds coming from upstairs, and Robert feared the worst, yet still he could not move. Instead, he stared at the body of his enemy, puzzling over the meaning of his death. His story, like all stories, had eventually reached its end, but Robert was none the wiser for the spilling of blood and the opening of a gut. He stared into the wound, looking deep inside Corbeau’s corpse for answers to questions he could not even bear to ask. If there were tiny words written there, on the man’s insides, then Robert could not read them. It was all just so much red upon red: wet red words upon a wet red background. It felt like a message but try as he might he could not even begin to understand what he was being told.

Finally he struggled to his feet, bones creaking, head spinning, and limped toward the bottom of the stairs. He looked up, thinking it was such a long way to climb, and put his hand against the wall. It was wet with blood. He glanced at his hand, and what it was concealing. Then he took the hand away and gaped in awe at what was uncovered.

Along the wall, all the way up the staircase, was now written the very ending he had dreaded: words and pictures, all drawn and written in Corbeau’s blood, the same blood that had sprayed so poetically, so finally, when he had opened himself up for inspection.

It depicted a holocaust.

Robert saw Sarah’s death, and how she had torn out Monica Corbeau’s throat with her teeth as the last of her breath left her body. Then, in yet more violent slashes of red, he witnessed Connor falling, slashed and torn, as he tried to protect his sister from Ethan Corbeau’s killing blade. Molly had taken down the boy with her cleaver, only to have him slash her throat with a knife as he fell.

They had died together, his children, brother and sister, side by side. At least they had that, in the end.

Weeping and wailing, he reached the top of the stairs and fell down among the remains of his family, trying to put them back together. But the pieces would not join; the glue had run out and they would remain apart, torn from him by something larger and more complex than he could ever hope to fathom. What he did understand, in that moment of extremity, was that he was the only one left alive for the sequel.

His mind ripped to shreds, Robert smiled through a layer of blood.

This story, at last, was over; a new one was about to begin.

They came for him much later, after the police and the ambulance crews had arrived at the scene to catalog the list of atrocities.

They had watched the aftermath from the trees, realizing they were now free and wondering what to do with that freedom. They watched as the bodies were carried out, nodding as they recognized three of them: the man, the woman, and the boy—the older one they had never really liked. These people—these intimate strangers—whose remains would never properly be identified.

It was dark again. He was sitting in the woods, crying into his fists, when they emerged from the tree line, hand in hand. They were barefoot, their faces were dirty and they did not seem to know where they were or where they had come from. They approached him with caution, as if he were a wild beast, but when he looked up and smiled, they began to run toward him.

They fell into his arms, feeling like they were home at last. The man and the woman and even the boy—had never treated them well, had beaten them and raped them and made them do things to each other that should never be done, not between brother and sister. They still remembered the time before the man and the woman, when they had lived somewhere else with people who had loved and cared for them. This man, they felt, might care for them, too.

They waited for the man to finish crying, moving away from him, but not too far. They wanted to keep him in sight, within reach. The girl sat on a tree stump and watched the man, wondering what his tears would taste like. The boy ran off after a squirrel, baring his teeth and hissing like a snake.

The man continued to cry. The girl thought he might never stop, just go on crying forever, until he finally stopped living. But soon enough he did stop; and he smiled at her with a look that meant she could trust him, and that he could trust her and the boy in return.

The boy emerged from the trees with the squirrel in his teeth. There was red on his cheeks, and the squirrel still twitched, its hind leg jacking like a little piston. The man laughed, and the boy laughed, too. The girl did not see anything funny, but she joined in because she knew it would please them both.

Shortly thereafter, they left the scene, the girl and the boy each holding one of the man’s red hands. They walked into the woods, going deeper and deeper, until finally they came to a place where mist hung at ground level and the spaces between the trees were black as night. The man leaned down and kissed both the boy and the girl on the cheek, and then he straightened and led them into that darkness; the darkness between scenes, between pages, the invisible gaps between stories as yet untold.

Nightsiders started out life as a straight homage to films like The Straw Dogs and Last House on the Left— the kind of grungy, violent 1970s extreme cinema for which I have a real (and slightly guilty) fondness. I wanted to put my own stamp on the now slightly clichéd setup of a middle-class family being attacked and forced to turn to violence in order to protect themselves… or in this case, themselves and their home.

Then, as I sat down to write, something peculiar happened. The story refused to bend to my will. It began to twist and turn in my grasp, taking on a new shape, becoming something entirely different from what I’d originally envisaged.

So now, rather than a tough, noirish thriller with sociopolitical overtones, I was dealing with something much more ambitious and problematic.

That was when I decided to hand everything over to my muse and just go with it, and it led to the strangest writing experience of my life. The story basically told itself, with no apparent gap between thought and page, no room to react to what was forming in my brain before I saw it on the laptop screen. It was if I were simply transcribing the words being whispered in my ear by a particularly giddy psychopath—perhaps it was even Nathan Corbeau himself.