Author's Note: First of all, I want to give a huge shout out to Cobainlover4ever, who actually created a real category for Shallow Grave, and also inspired me to write this story. That being said...this really is just the rambling of a madman (AKA David): far from my best work. I apologize in advance. :P
Second of all, I don't think I've ever cursed so much within my writing. If anyone's offended by language...well, sorry.
Disclaimer: Unfortunately, I don't own Shallow Grave.
Click.
Finger bones were strange things, he thought, turning his hand this way and that before the dim beam of light emanating sluggishly from the old and tired torch. They were so very small, so spindly and fragile, like the wings of the birds that he had caught as the gangling, bug-eyed child he had been so many years ago. He had wondered, then, how it was that such little and hollow things could possibly support the weights of the creatures that soared high above all the cares of the earth with them; he had tried to catch them in hopes of discovering their secrets, learning their ways, but instead had only ever been able to hurt them, crushing their spirits between too-eager and too-clumsy human hands and breaking them beyond repair, condemning them to the sorrow-ridden ground forever.
Now he stared at those same hands through new eyes, and wondered how such tiny and delicate bones- carpals, metacarpals, proximal phalanges, intermediate phalanges, distal phalanges- could piece together solid muscle and skin that held and did so much so often. His own had done the lot- healed and hurt and created and destroyed- and he had forced them into it, sure, but looking at them now, they seemed...different. Alien. No longer the bony digits wrought of pale and calloused flesh that he had used and known and trusted for so long, they now appeared to be strange and nebulous things, nothing more than indistinct blobs of hazy red with thin wires of black threading through their lengths. Red on black, black on red on black, besmirched with yet a darker red scattered over their surfaces in spots and streaks and spiderwebbed cracks...no, there was no way in Hell that these devilish things were his own hands. No fucking way.
X X X
But yet...they were. They moved as his own hands moved: open, close, open, close, curl. Index fingers tapping one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight against cool, empty air. Fingers crossing, uncrossing, stiff joints cracking loudly in the stillness of the loft, silent but for the rasps of his quick and shallow breaths.
Click.
Lights out like a promise, and blackness was surrounding him, pressing its immeasurable weight down upon him, choking the breath that struggled to rise from his lungs where it lay and pinning where he sat, stone and noose and knife all at once. Slowly, achingly slowly, he waved his hand back and forth through what he perceived to be dark tar, drowning him, and felt it part, letting his hand surface briefly before being sucked under again. Click. Red, red everywhere, the tar no longer tar but blood, but at least he could see again, and the red-on-red-on-black-on-black blob was flapping frantically back and forth as his hand was; he could feel his arm beginning to ache from the intensity of the frenetic movement. When he made himself still his hand, the thing stopped moving, and his arm stopped protesting, leaving him to stare fixedly at it, stupefied. No more tar, no more blob, no more blood: just ragged breaths puncturing tranquil silence, and burning eyes scouring a trembling hand as they struggled to recognize it as their own.
This thing, this hand, was warm, unnaturally so, and sticky with something crusted and dark: not dirt, but something of a more...reddish...tint...and he suddenly felt cold all over as he realized that he had been wrong. He hadn't imagined all of that blood- far from it! He had merely put it in the wrong place. Goddammit, there had been blood on his hands, this entire time, and...he hadn't...bloody hell, how had he not seen?! Alien blob his arse; there was fucking blood on his hands. God, he could see it, feel it, as it dried and etched itself into the grooves and cracks of his skin. Burning hot with fever, stinging keen with cold, stinking of heroin and dirt and sweat and death, it glowed that same strange, deadly crimson by which he'd been so perturbed in the flickering torchlight: a thousand demons' eyes winking up at him, whispering in his ear a hellish chorus of damned-damned-damned like Hugo's head and feet and hands-damned like the bloody money your bastard friends just spent-damned like the pictures in your head-oh damned-damned-damned, over and over and over until he thought that the words might ride up the tide of blood flowing from his abused and sorry ears to choke his mind, once and for all, to peace in death.
Click.
Darkness again, now settling thickly over him like a blanket: still too heavy, still too warm, but the whispering had stopped, which in itself was too great a blessing to doubt. Unable and unwilling to spend any more time contemplating his filthy hands, he gathered his knees to his chest and folded his arms around his legs, letting his mind wander, in the safety of the blackness cloaking him from his demons' sight, back to the words...no, the word, that only a moment before had so plagued him. Damned. An odd one, that: ungainly, awkward. Never rolling off the tongue smoothly so much as clunking off of it like dropping stones. It wasn't a word that he would ever think to attribute to himself, but...well, here he was. Damned...damned and alone. Alone in the dark, save for the voices and visions that refused to leave him alone, with Hugo's blood indelible on hands that refused to stop shaking and his own blood salty on lips that refused to form the words his mind begged him to scream...like he'd said. Damned.
Help me. Help me, please, I'm drowning in the dark…. It's so dark, so dark, and I can't see- I can't see. Give me light, please, real light, not this blood that's suffocating me. I don't want to be damned; I don't want to be alone in the dark, please, please, PLEASE-!
Click.
There. Never mind that it was still the blood from which he could never seem to escape (and wasn't that just bloody fantastic: knowing that none of his pleas, no matter how vehement, would ever, EVER work); the light was back, which meant that he could see, and if he could see, then that meant that he could breathe. Breathing...breathing was good, he knew, in that small part of his mind that remained his own, blissfully free of tangled webs of desperate words and rivers of strident red and the creaking rasp of blade on brittle bone. In, out, in, out- it was a pattern, a rhythm, logical and constant like nothing else in this place of angle and edge and shadow ever was or could be: a constantly repeating cycle of IN-two-three-four-OUT-six-seven-eight that laid itself over his turbulent thoughts like a cool, soft hand, smoothing away all the jagged tears and sore places and leaving in its wake a sense of calm, the likes of which he hadn't had the pleasure of succumbing to in veritable ages. IN-two-three-four-OUT-six-seven-eight...yes, he could get used to this: this tranquility, this peace. Down below he had been chained to the infuriatingly banal idiocies of those he'd deemed friends prior to their making a mockery and a monster of him, but up here, there was only this peace, and he was slave only to himself; he'd be a fool not to reach for even that little bit of freedom and run with it for all he was worth. Better to live at the mercy of one's own insanity than to be made a fool by the schemes of wretched traitors.
X X X
Sod all, but they ought to have been dead to him now: Alex, Juliet, and all the rest of that cursed lot down there. Ought to have been, of course, being the operative condition, because they haunted him still, fevered visions little more than phantoms taunting him with their refusal to leave well enough alone. Their faces, frozen into hideous masks of devilish laughter and wily grins, swam tantalizingly through the sea of blood that wavered before his done-in eyes, and in the privacy of this attic retreat, suspended within an eternity of silence and fluttering heartbeats, he longed to grab for them, to grip them tight between his hands and tear away the masks as they had torn away his very self, splitting their vain, silly ears with a cacophony of why-you-fucking-bastards-WHY because for Christ's sake, they bloody well deserved it all…!
...So he did. He let the torch drop, neither noticing nor caring where it fell, and reached for Alex's cheeks with unseeing eyes, digging spidery fingers into feather-soft flesh, clenching his eyes shut as a thousand hollow twigs of bone crumbled and snapped beneath his crushing embrace and rivulets of blood, thin and warm, trickled down his wrists and arms, burning him where they flowed, branding him with the ink of that tosser's life: ink that he knew would never wash out. The words spilling from his lips were garbled, broken: a whispered mess of desperation that stung him in its reluctance to come forth freely (for he knew that the questions would drive him mad if they remained unvoiced any longer): why me? Why me? WHY ME? Why, for fuck's sake, why, when you knew, you bloody wanker, you KNEW that I couldn't do it, why, WHY?!
Click.
The discarded torch went out so unexpectedly that for a moment, one blessed moment, he wasn't even aware of the sudden influx of darkness pervading his blood-soaked field of vision; all he remained conscious of was the velvety dead weight of the broken face he held loosely clasped between his hands. It was so light, so very light without that damned red to give it burdensome life...was it even possible for a human face, human head, to be this light? Because if it wasn't- and he knew full well that it couldn't have been, for a human head weighed approximately 1.36 kilograms, 3 pounds, .21 stone (the numbers were real, real, not like this head-that-wasn't-a-head: focus on the numbers, focus on the numbers….)- if it wasn't, then...what? Heads didn't float about without bodies attached to them, and the numbers didn't lie; they never lied, not even in bloody swamps of delirium like this. This...not-a-head, this thing...it had no weight, no life. No face. Not even the slightest gleam of an eye.
Panic rose up within him, an all-too-familiar wave of stinking black bile bearing down upon him with the weight of countless worlds and strangling him as he dropped it and scrabbled for the fallen torch, fingers flying desperately in a darkness that took away all sense of up or down, right or left, right or wrong. The weight of solid plastic tapping against his hand after what felt like hours of frenzied searching was grounding, reassuring, keeping the wave of terror at bay ere its final deleterious breaking and setting his narrow world to rights once more. Click. Light. Light was good. He wouldn't be fooled by the blood this time, no matter how strongly its crimson gleam toyed with his wary eyes, because for what was perhaps the first time in his too-old young life, he wanted...no, needed disillusionment. Knowledge. Truth.
X X X
The broken body of the pigeon lay limp and twisted upon the dusty wood of the loft's floor, its blood seeping pale and clear from wings crushed to a feathered pulp, its plump grey breast pierced with shards of frail bone scoring it through from skin to silenced heart. Its eyes, once as bright as the darkest night's twinkling stars, were shuttered and glazed now, clouded with the silvery mists of death, doomed to eternal blindness in a world where even the light was cursed with Hell's fire. Its wings, once as strong as a thousand breaths of wind, were now forever stilled, rendered useless by hands that had only ever longed to fly, but managed merely to destroy all they touched. Those hands twitched now, restless, nervous, tapping scores of numbers out against empty eir in time to the broken, delirious whispers pouring from cracked and quivering lips: I've never seen a dead body before; I've never seen a dead body before...never seen, never killed, never, never…. Those hands trembled as they reached for the little shattered body and cradled it to a scratchy jumper and scrawny chest, shook as they struggled to lift the lid of the old water tank that reeked of the million pounds of blood money ensconced within, and the words being repeated endlessly, mindlessly, by the distraught lips changed tenor as the lid finally scraped open, revealing the yawning black abyss beneath. Get it out of sight, out of sight, quick as you can, out of sight….
The dull splash of the bird's body hitting the stale water was drowned out by the clanging of the lid as he let it fall shut and stepped back from the hulking thing in a daze. Staggering, his mind finally blank (though there was no peace to be found in this silence), he returned to his place on the floor, letting his blood-soaked fingers drift over the imprint of the bird's form in the thick dust on the floor. He found that he couldn't bear to look at it, couldn't bear to see what he had so carelessly, needlessly destroyed...though he was loath to return to darkness once more...it had to be done. Even the light of the blood was too good for a monster like him, a monster that could do nothing in light but hurt and maim. If the promise of cruel condemnation was all that light held for him now, then did it not make sense to turn back to the dark, if it would let him be free? It would welcome him, hide him from the pain of his mistakes and torments...how had there been any doubt in his mind of its benefits?
With that thought in mind, his fingers willingly grasped the neck of the torch, eager to give themselves over to the embrace of oblivion, and the promise of peace that dangled just out of reach therein: blessed, blessed oblivion, where he would thereafter remain, safe, hidden away, to finally, finally fly.
Click.
Well, poor David's finally embraced the dark side for good, and there's no going back for him. God help us all….
Okay, that might have been the longest, most useless thing I've ever written, but...well, I enjoyed it nonetheless. I MAY have had too much fun with the metaphors, though: birds, numbers, blood….
Well, regardless of whether you think this deserves to be squirreled away to a water tank in a loft for obsessively treasured safekeeping, or whether you think it ought to end up inside a fucking binbag, I'd love to hear your thoughts!