Blueinkedfrost

I remember focussing on my gut for a second. Dad always said to trust it, but I never knew what he meant by that until then. It felt like a jar of marbles was jammed between my ribs, occasionally turning over and over in a rhythm that even my sleepy brain could figure out.

It was footsteps. Or something like them. The sort of footsteps you’d expect if an entire stampede of creatures were somehow walking in synch.

There were footsteps in the alleyway outside.

Dead silent footsteps, sure. But they were there.

My bed was below the window, directly looking out into the alley. I heard the clatter of a plastic wastebin, but otherwise it was silent.

I wasn’t exactly the brightest child. Or adult, for that matter, but when I was a kid, I didn’t have the good sense god gave a rat. If it weren’t for the feeling of rattling marbles in my gut, maybe I wouldn’t have known to look out of the window.

Fuck those marbles, to be honest. Fuck them for making me crawl up, past the pillows and the glass of orange juice mam had left on my bedside table. Through the curtains, to gaze out into the street.

You didn’t get a lot of light in my room, which looked right out into the alleyway, no streetlights. One curtain was already open for me to peer through. I remember that I looked out into a pitch-black sky with nothing beyond. Nothing in sight, not a sound except for the rhythmic marble-rumble in my chest. The world was empty for the several long moments it took my eyes to adjust and realise what was making the silent footsteps.

All of them.

All of their hundreds and hundreds of bodies.

They moved the way I always imagined ghosts would.  Or maybe I imagine ghosts that way now because of them. There might’ve been a rough shape of a humanoid somewhere in the middle of all that darkness, and you could see that shape, if you focussed on one of them for long enough. Everything else about them was just… branches.

Even now I don’t have the words for it. Branches isn’t right really, nor is filaments or cords or spiders’ webs. But they were many, and they were slow and careful, crawling their way across the walls and fences that made up people’s backyards, like Well’s Red-Weed in the colour of ink. A crowd of not-quite-people filling the alleyway like a slow, dark tide of molasses.

Every now and then they found a rubbish bin and rummaged around inside of it with their countless thready fingers. Then they’d leave. They crawled across the walls and cobbled slabs, absorbing the tattered rubbish people poured into the streets. It was still silent, except for the way in which it wasn’t. I felt, rather than heard, something almost like faint laughter and muffled words, the sort of banter I’d hear coming from people returning from the pub late at night.

Like the ghost-creatures were speaking to one another in words I wasn’t supposed to know.

They were passing my house, a silent procession of movement and endless hands, the rattling marble sensation in my chest ever constant, when I saw what was behind them.

The lumpy shape that followed seemed to suck the light from the world. Imagine tar and dirt given form, a golem-like construct of endless, rolling earth, subsumed in smoke. Colossally huge, filling the whole alley and seeping over into people’s yards, knocking over plant pots. A cat yowled somewhere and was cut off, like someone had plunged it into water. I gelt me breath until I heard it hissing, escaping into the night.

And somehow, that comforted me. The neighbours wouldn’t be looking for their cat tomorrow.

The hugest form had no face… no body, really. No form of propulsion but the spindly threads underneath, like those coming from its followers, seeming to drag it silently forward. It was the source of the marble-rattling, I know, but I couldn’t see feet. I could barely make out anything but the blackness, like my eyes didn’t want to see what it might be beneath the dark.

You know, looking back, it reminds me, weirdly, of the rubbish collectors? I know that sounds laughable. It does to me, too. But that’s what it reminded me of: the deep disruption of the people who would drive their huge vehicles down that very alleyway at ungodly hours. Right down to the sound it finally did make, the loud, gut piercing shriek that turned the gut-marbles into fine dust inside of me. Like a sound designed specifically to break bone. Or to wake up people that needed to be awoken.

Nobody did. So far as I’m aware I was the only person who looked out my window that night.

The followers reacted to the sound the way the dustbin men would, too, scattering forward into the alley, bodies crawling across fences and signposts, dipping into drains, like insects trying to escape a downpour.

I got a clue to what they were doing when they reached the older parts of the street.

Some of the houses, you see, still had the old walls. Most of them had been replaced with newer painted brick of wooden slats, but some people still had the bones of the world before: The walls from a century back which had small, wooden slatted doors in them. Coal hatches. From back when we actually used our chimneys. The source of the stains around the bottom of every wall in the street, even now, fifty years later. I remember my dad telling me about helping his grandmother shovel coal that the company left on the ground into the hatch. These were the same hatches some of the… creatures crawled into and never came out. Like birds finding their nests.

The windows were closed, but I could still smell something. Like the burning coke in my nanna’s old fireplace. And even though their not-faces turned towards me frequently, I don’t think they saw me.

And then it was gone.

I woke up to daylight, with a glass of orange juice soaked into my carpet, and the feeling of a long-gone history aching in my bones.

And no, I never looked in the hatches.

I’m not that stupid.