Gary McMahon - Beyond Here Lies Nothing

Erik felt power flood through him. It wasn’t rage, nor was it hatred. This was a purer force, and it came from somewhere outside his body. Like an alien sun shining down on him, the energy warmed his body, cleansing him like a balm.

“This is it,” he whispered. “This is where it all ends.” He tugged the gun out of his belt and clenched his right hand into a fist around the handle. He brought it down, hard, on the top of her head. The sound it made when the base of the grip struck her skull was like a hammer blow. He hit her again, this time with the barrel on the side of the face. He felt her cheekbone crack. Her skin split and blood spattered, splashing the carpet and even the weird tower she’d made at the centre of the room.

He only wanted to scare her…

Erik was blind. He could see nothing beyond the violence.

He hit her again and again, shredding the skin of her face, shattering the bones of her skull, and yet still she continued to chant those words, through mashed, bloodied lips, and even when her broken teeth began to fall from her mouth.

…to scare her into loving him again.

When Erik stopped she was lying on the floor, curled up like a baby. There was blood everywhere. Still she chanted the rhyme, taunting him.

He was breathing heavily, as if he’d just done a tough workout. His gun hand ached, the knuckles were swollen. He raised his face to the ceiling and let out a wordless wail, an animal sound of pain and self-hatred. Then he returned his attention to the room, and what was in it.

Abby continued to mumble from the floor. She’d stopped chanting and was now trying to speak, but he couldn’t make out the words.

“Look what you’ve done,” said Erik. “This is your fault — you did this. I only wanted to scare you. You’ve made me into something that I despise.” He raised the gun and stared into the barrel. It would be so easy to end it all now: one bullet for her, one for him. Maybe that’s what had been coming all along. Neat and tidy: a smooth little suburban death. He pressed the end of the barrel to his cheek, and then moved it across to his temple. After a second, he pointed the gun at Abby, his finger tightening on the trigger.

“Please…” Her voice was weak. She was speaking through a mouthful of blood and shattered teeth. “Don’t kill me…”

“No, I’m not going to kill you. I love you… all I’ve ever done is love you. Can’t you see? Don’t you understand? I’ve loved you ever since I first met you, and when we lost our baby I would have kept on loving you, but you wouldn’t let me. Instead you went with other men and told me about it. You rubbed my nose in it, like a fucking dog that’s puked up on the carpet.”

“Sorry… hurting… everything hurts.” Her voice was unrecognisable.

For a moment he was acutely aware of the selfishness of his actions, the intensity of his feelings, but then he shoved that insight aside, ignoring it. Why the hell shouldn’t he be selfish? There was no one else to look out for him, to protect his interests. Ever since he was a kid, he’d been forced to look after himself. That made a man hard; it toughened him to the point that nothing could penetrate the armour he had worked so hard to put in place.

“You bitch… look what you did. Look what you did to us. We could’ve been happy. We were a family… a proper family…”

He could no longer bear to look at her, so he raised his eyes and stared across her collapsed body.

Behind her, there was movement. Thin silver branches, leafless and grasping, were slowly emerging from between the gaps in the conical mound of Tessa’s belongings. Like long, thin arms, the branches slid out, swaying in the air; gnarled twig-hands reaching for something that wasn’t there.

Erik tightened his grip on the gun. He approached the mound. The branches appeared to sense him and twitched towards him, turning from silver to brown. He raised the gun and took aim. His hand was shaking so he used the other one to steady the gun, just like he’d seen in the movies.

“No…”

Abby, still on the floor, was speaking to him. He turned around.

“Don’t kill it… our baby… our Tessa… she’s come back…” She spat out blood. There were gaps where a couple of teeth had been.

He swivelled and watched the branches. There were now patches of skin on them, like pale pink bark. As he watched, the patches grew, the skin, spreading like a stain to cover the rest of the branches. The branches became thin arms; the spindly twigs at the ends turned into small hands. Pieces of the construction fell away from Abby’s sculpture — jumpers, paintings, a My Little Pony duvet cover — and parts of a body were visible beneath. The sapling child was quickly transforming into flesh and blood, as if the process were speeding up because he was watching it happen. Like a low-rent Pinocchio, the lifeless simulacrum was gaining sentience.

His finger twitched on the trigger — a reaction that he was unable to control — and the gun went off. He managed to twist his wrist so the shot went wide, punching a hole in the wall near the window.

“Tessa?”

Her face formed quickly, like reversed footage of plastic melting, and he began to make out her lovely features beneath the mess of creation. What at first looked like a long, beaklike snout shortened to form her delicate little nose. The eyes opened, trailing strings like pizza cheese between the upper and lower lids. The eyeballs pushed outwards, and then settled back into the sockets. The eyelids blinked.

Erik dropped the gun. He fell to his knees and clasped his hands together as if in prayer.

The Tessa-thing stepped from out of the hollow cone, parts of her makeshift sarcophagus breaking away, the whole structure tumbling and falling to the floor. She walked towards her father and embraced him, enveloping him in her warm, damp flesh.

“Baby… my baby…” He was weeping now. He could hold back the tears no longer.

Abby had crawled across the floor and now lay at his side, reaching out towards them both. He felt her hands grabbing at his legs, and angled his body so that she could be included in the embrace.

The three of them, together again, reunited at last, right at the centre of the black hole.

The family unit was coming back together, reforming. The damage had been repaired. He had no idea what kind of magic this was, but he didn’t want to question it too deeply. In his experience, those kinds of questions usually led to trouble, and he didn’t want to wreck what had been made here, in a dim bedroom in a council house at the back end of nowhere.

This was not the kind of place where wonders were meant to happen. But here it was: here was wonder. Here was awe.

Then, weary and aching, he became slowly aware of a faint clicking sound.

He moved back, pushing Tessa away to create a gap between them, and what he saw made him question everything else he’d been thinking. The thing that resembled his daughter stood there, naked and genderless — with just a bare patch of skin between her legs and no navel or nipples –wearing a strange white mask in place of her pretty face. The front of the mask jutted out to form a hideous beak, and its eyes were hidden behind small black shades.

She raised her arms to the ceiling, spreading her legs and bending her knees to brace herself against the floorboards. Black leaves that fused together to become a long black cape or overcoat cascaded downwards, seeming to flow from her open hands, to cover her body, flapping at first like wings before moulding itself to her shape.

In one hand she was holding a short pointed cane.

It was only when she looked back down, staring directly into his eyes, that he realised the clicking sound was coming from Tessa. And then it occurred to him that this half-formed creature was not Tessa at all, but something that was using her image in an attempt to gain entry into this world.