Incarnadine
TAGS | fiction, local
Ajinkya Goyal
Ajinkya Goyal writes speculative and gothic fiction, along with smatterings of fluff and angst thrown in for good measure. Their work has been published in Creepy Pod, The Bitchin' Kitsch, The Junction, The Writing Cooperative, The Ascent, and more. He attempts a stab at the mortifying ordeal of being known on innocentlymacabre.com, and you can support his work on ko-fi.com/ajinkyagoyal.
0
The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things that seldom see even the dark of night because words seem to diminish them; words shrink them, and what was once boundless comes out simply life-sized. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? The most important things are markers. Headstones for graves. Pyres for endless cremations. The most important things are landmarks to your secrets, withering truths long forgotten, begging to be dug up and paraded around once more. Sometimes you’ll take them out of their box. You’ll take the most important things and give them a voice, only to be met with uncomprehending faces, confusion reflecting back on your sincerity, wondering why you silently cried as you spoke. That’s the worst, I think. The worst thing that could happen to your most important things, and for fear of its realisation, we leave the graves untouched, the maps unmarked, and the pyres forever burning. We leave our secrets locked deep within us.
I saw my first dead human being when I was thirteen years old. I won’t bother giving you the date because it doesn’t matter. Everything is still exactly the same as it was all those years ago. It’s as if life simply moved around Thadford End, deciding it was better that it remained untouched; not necessarily undisturbed, but preserved in its fragmentary.
1
“The Store is where the bodies are buried,” our father used to say. Mr Wensleydale was the father to fifty-odd children at Thaddington House, where I mostly got along with two: Clara Tyler and William Harkness. The rest weren’t so bad, but as far as I was concerned, two people was more than enough. More would just be showing off.
Clara and Will had shown up with neat little name tags in their midnight baskets, so out of respect, Mr Wensleydale carried forward their original last names. I was an anonymous drop off, so I had Mr Wensleydale’s. He also gave me my birthday – the day he found me – since the only thing I had on my person apart from a barely warm swaddle was a card that said NO ALLERGIES. I used to think it would be funny to have that inscribed on grave; like a from-whence-we-came kind of thing.
A few years after we had ventured to the Store, I was playing around with the wicker basket I arrived at Thaddington’s doorstep in. I don’t remember why; for most of my childhood, it had just lay in a corner of my room, collecting dust and generally forgotten.
While the reason behind its recovery may be cloudy, what I found wasn’t. On the underside of a flap partially stuck to the inside of the basket was an embroidered name: Winslow. Emile Winslow, my name would have been, had I chosen to share that information with anyone. For reasons I don’t think I fully comprehended at the time, I didn’t. I just tucked the basket back into its nook, and with it, the new name I had found. Emile Wensleydale was all I needed.
I’d never heard any one of us asking why, if he really was our father, we called him Mr Wensleydale and not dad, because no one ever thought to. Not one of us, the Big Kids, or even the Really Big Kids, thought it odd or too formal because that simply wasn’t the type of man Mr Wensleydale was. He was bright and sunny and made everyone happy, and, if I’m being perfectly honest, I’m glad I didn’t get foster parents because I didn’t want to lose Mr Wensleydale. He remembered every single one of our birthdays and always got us the most fantastic presents. When we were sad or hurt, he’d take care of us, pressing a warm cup of hot chocolate into our hands, and smiling for us to speak.
Most of us left town when we hit college and aged out of the system, spreading out across the world, with a few hanging back. No matter where we were, we all returned every year for Mr Wensleydale’s birthday. At first it was so we could celebrate with him, and after so we could celebrate in memory of him. We never let it become a sombre affair though – he would have hated that. They’re always cheerful reunions, just as warm and sunny as he was in life.
Once, after he heard us talking about the Store and rattled off his old saying, the three of us started talking about what it would be like to take a look for ourselves. The Store was the kind of place that you never wanted to end up in, but always wanted to go to. You know the sort – those places that leave you scared shitless (although no one would ever admit to that for fear of being branded a spineless baby) but draw you in anyway. That was the Store. The lawless land that existed outside the boundaries of our town, where the bodies were buried, and the lost footballs roamed.
The Big Kids who claimed to have crossed the boundary and made it back told us stories of discarded claws and talons; animal carcasses with gashes in them; witches having taken the forms of ravens, crows, and eagles; and all manner of things that a thirteen-year-old would both believe and be terrified of. Then the Really Big Kids told them to shut up and told us it was a scary, unsafe place, but not like the Big Kids described. They described it to be closer to home. Missing socks, old papers, signs for missing children and pets – that sort of thing.
“That doesn’t sound very scary,” I once retorted, trying to sound tough in front of the Big Kids.
The Really Big Kid just smiled at me. “No, it doesn’t. None of it sounds scary until you start to recognise the items. Faces they put on every milk carton and streetlamp for half a year, socks with the special mark on the label that only you and your friends use, the exact notes you could have sworn you saw in Brad Mossley’s hands a week ago during physics. When it all gets real, it gets real spooky, and the only thing you can think to do is to book it.”
I stayed silent after that.
There were no Really Really Big Kids so we had no way of knowing if they were taking the piss or not. I’d wanted her to bring up lost footballs and tennis balls and other things of the sort because then I could shout HA! and not believe her at all – that wasn’t scary, that was fact. We lost almost a ball a fortnight to the Store – that’s how it got its name. The idea of going though was ultimately dropped, mentally filled away as an undertaking for another day.
2
The day we went to the Store did eventually dawn, of course. We had planned to leave, rather poetically, at dawn. The only other time I had ever woken up that early was when Mr Wensleydale took all of us strawberry picking. He said we had to get there before it was too hot out so that we could enjoy the weather and pick strawberries in peace and that, for some reason I do not understand even as an adult, they closed soon after it was dark. I accepted his reasoning, but that didn’t make me hate it any less.
So, it surprised everyone, myself included, when I was the first awake that day. I had fully anticipated having to be dragged out of bed by an irritated Clara – she has always woken up at ridiculously early hours.
I think it was the Store that woke me up. Before I was even fully awake, it felt as if it was calling out to me, tugging at every little part of my barely conscious self to foray into its domain. It was almost as though it had come into existence especially for me, as it would instantly vanish as soon as I stepped foot there, its purpose fulfilled. My bespoke nightmare, never to be seen again.
I made it all the way to the canteen purely out of habit before realising it was far too early for breakfast to have begun. Not that it would have mattered – entertaining the idea of food was a fool’s errand. There was just the usual group of assorted Kids, Big Kids, and Really Big Kids that never seemed to leave the canteen (I couldn’t be certain, but I suspected they even slept there). Morgan, one of the Big Kids from the group, was something of a chef and always snuck into the kitchens in the back to make a little something for everyone present, so everyone had trays of food in front of them despite the time. One of them nudged another and I thought they were going to call me over, but they pointed in the opposite direction, referring to an unfamiliar face sitting in the corner. I smiled, knowing exactly what was going to happen.
We had something of an initiation at Thaddington. A ritual, if you will. The three of us landed there far too young to have experienced it ourselves, but it was easy to see how much it helped the slightly older arrivals acclimatise to their new home. I watched on as two people peeled off from the group and took their trays over to the unfamiliar face, puffing out their chests as they sat themselves down on either side of them.
“Oh lookie, lookie. Fresh meat,” one of them remarked in a voice laced with false gruff.
“Whatcha in for, rookie?” the other one said, bringing up the other end of the prison-make-believe.
The new person looked from one to the other hesitantly, unsure of how to respond. The two seasoned vets coughed and guffawed a little more for dramatic effect before promptly breaking into laughter, unable to keep the charade up any longer. They introduced themselves as Mort and Milo, and explained the little song and dance they do to cheer up their new siblings.
“And, judging by the little smile I see making its way across your face,” Mort began, “it worked!”
“Come sit with us, kid. Morgan’s making their famous pre-breakfast breakfast spread. Trust me, it’ll ruin every buffet in existence for you – they’re a genius in the kitchen.”
I smiled and slunk off, silently agreeing with the sentiment. I would usually have grabbed a plate and joined the line, but the feeble light beginning to filter through the windows told me I should get going.
#
We set off immediately after everyone was ready and out of bed, all three of us having forgone breakfast after discovering that the jitters had spread throughout the group. I understood the sentiment from Clara and I, but Will’s participation struck me as odd – they ate all the time. We once saw them eat an entire Christmas dinner at school, then come back home and eat another immediately after, apparently having previously asked the cooks to save him one. He was also Morgan’s favourite test subject, with the two of them carrying out tasting sessions long into the night, and Will taking little bits of his favourites for me and Clara to have the next morning. (Morgan never let him touch their cooking supplies though. For all their infinite love of food, Will was an absolute disaster in the kitchen.)
The Store sometimes felt like it was alive, like it had a mind of its own, and for a brief moment, a frightening thought entered my mind. I thought it was perhaps the Store interfering with Will’s appetite, ensuring he was weak enough to subsume once he stepped foot on its grounds. I took Will’s hand protectively, deciding decisively that wasn’t going to happen.
“Maybe you should have had breakfast,” Will laughed, looking down at my hand in his.
I let go and punched his arm, saying, “Don’t need any energy for that,” and then slipped my hand back into his.
Looking back, there were several warnings I attempted to give myself before we left, but I ignored them all in favour of satiating my curiosity. They say satisfaction brings the cat back, but I don’t think any of us truly recovered from the visit.
3
Our first task was securing transport. The Store was right behind Thaddington, which was rather unhelpfully situated just about as far from the town boundary as you could be. One main road ran through the town, serving as both its entry and exit, with our little town finding itself nestled away at the end of the world: the last line of defence against the Store. So, in effect, we would have had to walk a very, very long way to end up in our back yard.
“Are we sure we can’t just climb over the wall?” I asked, probably for the twentieth time.
“Find me a ladder that fucking tall and I’m in,” Clara said, rightly fed up with the question.
“We wouldn’t need a ladder if we were Spider-man. Just one of us would be enough. They could just swing the other two up,” Will helpfully suggested.
“Wings would also work.”
“Wings are a good solution to everything,” Clara concurred, relenting to our nonsense.
#
Mr Wensleydale couldn’t possibly give every one of us pocket money – it would run him into the ground – so the only kids with bikes were those who had jobs and had managed to save from those jobs. But we were thirteen and unemployed, so we had to get a little, let’s say creative, with our acquisition. There were a couple of Big Kids who had bikes, but nicking theirs could prove risky. If they caught us or found out in any way, they’d never let us rest easy. That left Le Chevre.
The shop’s name translated to “the goat”, although the owner had no French – or goatish – affiliations, which led us all to believe she had named it that purely to have a name that would stick, and I guess she succeeded, because here I am, years later, with perfect recall of the shop. As horrid as her naming was, there was a far bigger problem with the shop: Le Chevre was infamous for its security.
“Oh, hell no,” Will exclaimed when I suggested it.
“You got any better ideas?”
“You forgotten about Brandon Bliss?”
I had most certainly not forgotten about Brandon Bliss. No one could. Brandon Bliss was a kid a couple of years older than us who’s family moved away years before our plan went down. The guard at Le Chevre caught him sneaking in and instead of calling the cops on him, he took him to Clausius Rose. She cut off two of his fingers to make an example out of him and had her dogs trained to chase him down the street whenever he passed by her house. The official line was that they moved because of one of his mums’ job, but we knew better. I shuddered just thinking about it.
“Boys, boys,” Clara interjected, jerking me out of my fingerless memory. “As usual, I’m here to save your asses. Two words: Mill Hayber.”
“The junkyard guy?” I asked confused. I looked to Will to see if he understood what she was on about, but he seemed just as confused.
“The junkyard guy,” she confirmed, quickly switching to a bad impression of a mafia pit boss from a movie that was old even then. “Clausius Rose sends all her rejects to Mill Hayber’s yard for processing or recycling or whatever he does there. Personally, I think he just lets everything collect into one big metal pile, but that’s trouble for another day.
See boys, the only thing Clausius prides herself on more than her security is her quality. Anything she doesn’t like gets chucked. Lucky for us, “anything she doesn’t like” includes bikes with a tiny little dent or a slightly underpadded seat. But our asses aren’t too rich for an underpadded seat, are they?”
“No!” Will exclaimed, swept up in her horrid impression.
Questionable presentation aside, she had a point. Hayber’s yard was on the way out of town too, so it wouldn’t even be a detour.
“Hayber’s it is.”
#
Getting into the yard was easy enough – all Hayber had by way of security was a half-rusted lock holding a wiry door in place. Clara kicked it open with ease. The lock clattered to the ground, shattering the curved metal in two and we pushed the squeaky door open. It was clearly no Le Chevre.
It seemed Clara had been right about Hayber letting everything pile up. All around us, there were cars along various points of their rusting cycles, defunct pipes, broken sawblades, dented wrenches, and all manner of other junk.
Will let out a low whistle. “Tetanus city.”
“We should split up and look for the bikes. We’ll find them quicker that way,” I suggested.
“Just keep a look out for Milo,” Clara warned.
Milo was Mill Hayber’s guard dog, which usually wouldn’t have been a problem – Thaddington House didn’t discriminate when it came to strays. We had all manner of dogs and cats roaming around at any given point, and a few of our (generally younger) siblings had, on occasion, even taken a particular liking to lizards or snakes.
Word had it though, that Milo was trained to maim on command and, if reputation was anything to go by, sicking Milo on trespassers was one of Hayber’s favourite pastimes. And trespassers, unfortunately, we were. I shuddered at the thought of being caught between Milo’s frothy, rabid jaws and broke off immediately, suddenly wanting to get this over with as quickly as possible.
I scoured the piles on my side of the yard, looking for any sign of a handle, a wheel, anything that would indicate a bike buried under the rubble, but it was slow going. Aside from mounds of scrap metal and a malicious old man, Hayber’s junkyard was full of rats who’s slightest scuttling set me off, my mind preoccupied with making sure Milo didn’t call dibs on one of my organs.
After three false positives (a remarkable number of tyres of other vehicles are worn out enough to look like bicycle wheels), more than a few scrapes, and a frayed sweater, I finally found two of Le Chevre’s rejects. Just like Clara said, they had a little dent in their sides, but other than that, they seemed perfectly useable; they were probably the only non-rusted things in the entire yard. At almost the same time, Will found another, completing our set.
That was just about the end of our luck.
Dragging out our new acquires caused the mound of rubble on top of it to come crashing down, the resulting cacophony alerting Mill Hayber to our pinching presence. A little light from the hut in the far end flickered on, followed quickly by disgruntled grunting.
“Who’s there?” a rough voice screamed. The hut’s door flew open and a pot-bellied man in a poorly fitting white tank top covered in suspiciously yellow stains filled the frame. “What are you kids doing here?” he demanded.
Naturally, our response was to turn tail and book it. We quickly heaved our respective bikes from under their piles and got on, heading towards the gate. The gate that we broke. Breaking and entering and thievery. If we got caught, things were not going to go down well.
Then came the dreaded command.
“Milo, sic ‘em!” Hayber roared, the alcohol on his breath strong enough to waft across the field all the way to us. (One summer a few of the Big Kids nicked a couple of cans of what they described as “cheap beer” from the Really Big Kids, who I’m sure had in-turn pinched ‘em from Haddock’s, the local store, and gave us all a taste. It was, without a doubt, the worst thing to ever pass down my throat, and that was including the disastrous attempt by the three of us at baking cupcakes. Pro tip: too much baking soda won’t make them fluffier, it’ll just make them yuckier.)
Now, I wasn’t exactly what you would describe as an athletic child, but I seriously doubt anyone would have been able to cycle faster than I was as I was fleeing for my life. Will crossed through the gate first, followed closely by Clara, but just as I was about to cross the threshold to safety, my front tire caught on a rock, sending me tumbling forth and my bike skittering off to the side.
I swore. We all swore – Milo was gaining on me with alarming rapidity.
“Emile, get out of there!”
“Get up, Em! Run! Get out!”
I scrambled to my feet and made a mad dash for freedom, my heart beating with a greater intensity than my chest had ever felt before. Pretty sure that was another personal best I set that day. What can I say? Imminent death is quite the motivator.
It would stand to reason that the next few seconds of my life be the clearest of my adolescent memory, but whatever I did in that minute or less exists as no more than a brief acknowledgement of existence in my mind. According to Clara and Will, I jumped out of Milo’s jaws twice, sidestepped onto and subsequently bounced off a junk mound like a video game character, and finally jumped away from the rabid dog once more as I crossed the fence, leaping onto the back of Clara’s bike and screaming Go! with all my might while squeezing her hard enough to have bruised her ribs. We didn’t stop until the yard was no more than another dot on the horizon and I could no longer feel Milo’s panting running around my spine like it was its personal playground.
4
We’d been cycling for quite the while and I began to hear the sounds of the town waking up. It was a weird sort of feeling – by the time I usually awoke, the town had been up and running for hours and a bevy of blaring horns, ceaseless chatter, construction noises, and annoyingly shrill birds streamed through my window. Hearing that start up this late bred a dissociative sense, as if the day so far had just been a fever dream.
“Hey, so anyone think to bring any food?” Will called out, snapping me out of my haze.
“Will! You were in charge of food!” Clara complained.
“Come on, man, that was your job!” I said, backing her up.
“Why was it my job?” Will complained, squealing to a stop.
“Tell me, William,” Clara interjected. “Out of the three of us, who gorges themself like a bear going into hibernation on the daily?”
Will only grunted in response, which kind of supported her point about their bearish resemblance.
“Alright, jeez. So Will screwed up, big surprise there,” I said, dismounting, in reply to which I received a punch to the arm. “Anyway, failing food of our own, how much money do we have between us? Come on, you two, empty those pockets.”
“What good’s money going to do us out here?” Clara objected.
“Someone who goes by Old Man Ferguson has got a shop just a little ways down. We can get stuff there. I looked it up before we left, just in case we worked through all the food Will was meant to bring.” That earned me another smack. I got him back this time and told them to fork over their cash once again.
I stared at the measly sum we had managed to accumulate and sighed. Maybe Ferguson didn’t get very many customers and would let us take whatever I want? The shop was a little out of our way, so we flipped for it: odd person goes. Naturally, I pulled the short straw.
Old Man Ferguson’s shop stood out on the landscape, on account of being the only building around for miles. It also blended in with it, almost shimmering in and out of existence, as if it were a mirage taunting this weary traveller. I didn’t know why someone would choose to set up shop there, but I didn’t really care. I was positively starving, having last eaten over twelve hours ago, and not very well even then.
The place turned out to be less shop, and more pillars-in-the-sand-with-cloth-draped-over-them. Despite outer appearances though, Old Man Ferguson had kept up the inside remarkably well. It felt bigger on the inside than it looked from the outside, owing to the lines upon lines of products traversing the grounds; was extremely well lit (you know the kind – the lighting that makes you forget all concept of time and space and leads you to believe that you and the half-off tomatoes are all that exist in the void that is the universe); and there was even a baked goods section! I couldn’t see a kitchen in the back, so I assumed Ferguson baked them elsewhere and brought them in every day. I looked over the prices on everything and bought five croissants and a drink each, which neatly came out to the exact amount of money I had. That place was remarkably (almost suspiciously) cheap. I returned to Clara and Will who were impatiently waiting to be fed, and we settled down for a bit.
“What do you think we’ll find?” Clara posited to our merry band of three.
“I don’t know what we’ll find, but I want my football back,” Will asserted. “The Store’s had it for too fuckin’ long and it’s about time it pays up.”
“Oh, big man, are we?” Clara mocked. Will punched her arm in reply and we all laughed.
“I think we’ll see a dead body,” I whispered, bringing the mood crashing down. Good going, Emile. “Well, it makes the most sense!” I protested upon seeing their disbelieving faces despite the realisation. “The Big Kids said they saw bird carcasses and ripped up feathers and stuff, right? Well, those are technically dead bodies. And the Really Big Kids said the Store is more personal than that, that it’s got all sorts of stuff that people would have had no way of losing to the Store. What if…”
I stopped.
“Well, what if what?” Clara urged.
“Nothing. Nothing, come on. Let’s get going. We can’t be gone all day or we’re going to be in a world of trouble with Mr Wensleydale,” I dismissed, suddenly feeling reluctant to share. I didn’t feel silly, per se, but the words I was about to let out into the world struck me as imminently personal.
I was going to suggest that the Store might have lured those kids there, just like it was luring me. It had some sort of hold on me, that much was for sure. Something strange stirred within me, simultaneously stretching me between wanting to speed there as fast as possible and wanting to fly half was across the world to get away from it. It tugged and pulled at me, unsettling my insides and causing my guts to twist into so many knots that snapping it apart would have been infinitely easier than trying to untangle the mess.
Yet, at the same time, it calmed me. Usually, no matter what I was doing, there were a billion thoughts racing through my mind, all twisting and turning over one another, refusing to let me think of the singular task at hand. They were all in constant competition for my attention, an incredibly limited commodity to begin with, and resultingly, one over which I had little control. On the rare occasions when I was allowed singular focus, there was something else. An incessant hammering on my skull, a tap, tap, tap, beating away, agitating me from within, sending unwelcome ripples through that which ought to remain undisturbed.
When the Store was on my mind though, everything else quieted down, as if recognising some inherent importance that it held. That morning was no different. I hadn’t had a single intrusive thought since I’d woken up, and my mind was mercifully clear. Clara had noticed the change too – said I looked “less daydreamy than usual”.
Neither seemed very convinced by my abrupt dismissal, but they mercifully dropped it and we cycled on, having switched places with Clara to give her “poor ribs” a break. The sun had begun to shine in earnest now, beads of sweat forming at my temples, threatening to streak down my face and I once again began to question Clara’s affinity for the season.
“Across the Seas in Eighty Days,” she said, providing a welcome distraction from the sun’s torment.
“What?”
“For my book’s title. You know, like Around the World in Eighty Days, only I’m going to sail it.”
Clara was the kind of person to have intense obsessions for two weeks, talk about them ceaselessly, then move on to the next object of her fascination. The latest in her long chain was Amelia Earhart and the book she mentioned. Combined with her adoration for the open sea, she was determined to become the first woman to ever sail across the world in eighty days. “I’d do it in seventy-nine, but wouldn’t want to upstage Jules Verne, you know? Besides, “eighty” has a much nicer ring to it,” she’d often boast.
“I’d keep workshopping the title,” I told her, laughing.
“What about “Across the World in Eighty Seas?”” Will proposed.
“How many seas does the world have?” Clara asked them.
“I don’t know, but there’s got to be at least eighty. Isn’t the planet mostly just water?”
“Seven, Will. There are seven seas. There are whole songs about it!”
“Eh, I still think it sounds good.”
“I’ll take it into consideration,” Clara replied, laughing.
“‘I wouldn’t,” I muttered quiet enough such that only Clara heard, sending her into a mini fit.
In the end, we’d entertained Will’s suggestion, if only as a joke. Clara took the voyage last year, with Will and I joining her – all or nothing, we’ve always liked to say. We named the boat The Eighty Seas, and would chuckle to ourselves whenever someone asked us about the name. We’d etched our names just below the boat’s, making it less visible than the paint, but still very much there, and scrawled “Thadford End” below them. Clara had liked the idea of carrying home with her on the journey.
5
Five minutes out, I thought, when we were exactly that far away. I knew because I had the same feeling I had when I woke up that day, tugging on my insides, but I didn’t say anything out loud. Clara and Will may have dropped my corpse theory, but they definitely would have had questions about my impeccable internal GPS, especially when I’d gotten lost going somewhere as commonplace as our go-to ice-cream spot one too many times.
The terrain changed maybe three minutes after the thought, as if the very earth knew it had to be cordoned off. We had been cycling on a sandy plane thus far, kicking up an almost cinematic dust trail in our wake, but that abruptly cut to nothing but gravel. My stomach began churning around once again, jitterily shaking this way and that, and not just because of the suddenly bumpy ride. Clara and Will, who were in a rather heated debate about whether or not a turtle’s shell qualified as its home, seemed to be unfazed by our proximity, but I fell silent; what we were about to discover was the only thing on my mind.
6
“The Big Kids were right,” I whispered, pointing to the ground. As if marking the entry to the Store, at our feet lay the tattered, beaten, defeated carcass of a crow. Its legs were bent at an excruciating angle and there were claw marks slashed across its wing as if it had bestowed its miserable fate onto itself.
No one said a word. Silently, we dismounted and left the two bikes at the edge, having silently decided it would be safer on foot. The silence continued as we stumbled along, the gravel gradually transitioning back to a more earthen flavour. Vines grew upwards from the ground, tumbleweed billowed like the climax of an old western movie, and grass taller than I thought to be possible – and then taller still – dominated the landscape, making each step forwards harder than the one before.
It was Will who finally broke the silence, and even then, it was only a terrified whisper,
“Why are there so many dead animals here?”
Their fingers twitched nervously as they pointed to a pile of bloody rodents just a few paces ahead of us. I wiped the sweat off my palms and took their hand to steady them. The other unconsciously searched for Clara’s, but she was staring stilly in the other direction, a mangled cat having captured her attention. I pocketed the hand instead, perspiration pooling in my pocket.
The Store was covered with rotting carcases. Before the image of one could sear itself onto my mind, another one cropped up in the field. My eyes clicked across the landscape and spotted various birds, all having received the same sacrificial pillaging as the initial crow.
They disturbed the flow of the army of grass, almost as if each was a checkpoint we had to pass. Where the actual animal wasn’t present, there were collars and tags that had strayed and thinned. That was almost worse.
When there’s something like that burning across your mind, you try to justify it in any way possible. Crows, rats, strays? If you really had to – and we did – it could all be chalked up to an accident. A gory, macabre accident, but an accident nonetheless. But collars? Collars were personal. Collars meant someone had likely come all this way with a pet they loved just as dearly as themselves, and that something had gone horribly, irreversibly wrong.
But there was something more disturbing still tugging at my mind. A question I didn’t want to ask concerning something that wasn’t there, but really ought to have been. If the pets were there, where were the people?
No matter how long it had been since the accident (which was what I was adamantly calling the unknown happening), there ought to have been remains of some sort there.
Abruptly, the warm overhead sun ducked behind clouds and a harsh wind blew, ruffling up everything around us, sending blades of grass flying through the air like knives. The three of us had been keeping our distance from each other, each too stunned to utter a word, but the wind huddled us together.
I squeezed my eyes closed, enveloping the other two in a death grip. An ominous whisper carried through the air, billowing in the sinister gust, but no words escaped those phantom lips.
Hybrids, I decided, having managed to still my brain’s focus on one thing – one far away thing that could carry me away from here. If we weren’t where we were, if the things happening to us weren’t happening, Clara, Will, and I would be talking about the weird hybrid creatures our brains could dream up.
I’d probably start us off.
“A weird mushroom-chicken fusion, with a toadstool for a head and a chicken for a body.”
“So, Toad from Mario, then?” Clara would probably counter.
“But as a chicken. I’d name him Hobbles.”
“A squirrel, but with wings, so that we can have real flying squirrels,” Will may have suggested.
On and on, I went in my mind, cycling through pigs with tusks and six eyes, monkeys with seven arms, humungous hummingbirds that could talk, and other creatures that belonged in a post-apocalyptic dystopian (or utopian, depending on your persuasion) world.
I continued holding on long after the winds died out, almost as if I was convinced my life depended on the contact, but that was something I had to take as fact. The wind chilled me to my core, making it feel like my clothes were on a rapid cycle of being drenched and dried and I have little memory of those few seconds (though truthfully, I must take that timeframe at the others’ word too – to me they spanned several eternities).
When things finally calmed down and I loosened my death grip on my siblings, my eyes slowly and gradually began to open to the sight of an entirely different landscape. The grass was still just as large and maze-like as before, but it was no longer unruly and wild. Instead, it swayed calmly in time with the now gentle breeze lulling us into a sense of security; false or not, we didn’t yet know. It seemed like the type of field we may even have co-opted as a default hangout spot, had it been close enough to Thaddington. The aching twist in my stomach was gone and we could now see the reason behind the Store’s namesake.
Seeing all the footballs he’d lost, Will happily rushed forward to collect what was rightfully his. Clara and I started poking about for the shuttlecocks the Store had ensnared from us while keeping an eye out for anything that felt familiar to return to the others back at Thaddington. No one thought it prudent to question the change in landscape.
Will seemed to have shared my proposition for this being a hangout spot, and began suggesting changes that would have made it even more appealing to him, an ice cream truck being top of the list.
“It would have to sell some really strange flavours,” he decided, “since it would be in such a strange place. You have to have a theme.”
Clara laughed, untying the flannel from around her waist to fashion into a makeshift bag to carry everything. Will and I, wearing similar ones, quickly followed suit, making the carrier bigger.
I tried suggesting flavours such as mango-berries for Will’s ice cream truck, but they dismissed that as too mundane. As chief food officer (or CFO, as Will often liked to remind me), their decisions in these matters was final. We’d finally come to a census on stick in the mud surprise, charcoal-waffle, lemon-thyme, and vanilla, and not a single scoop more, when we stepped back to admire our loot. All in all, we had a just shy of a dozen shuttles, four footballs, some basketballs, an assortment of tennis balls, and two leather cricket balls. We were riding high! We had ice cream on our mind, we’d ventured to the Store, conquered the beast, and were going to return heroes with the spoils of our victory in tow.
7
Things didn’t come crashing down instantly. In fact, I’ve found they rarely ever do. It happened slowly, with each successive find upping the ante bit by bit (or, I suppose, bringing it down). We had moved deeper into Store territory to continue hunting and our spoils were getting gradually harder to explain. The sporting equipment changed from balls to rackets, clubs, and bats – all manner of things that shouldn’t have made it over the wall.
The Store sometimes felt like it was alive. It was one of those things that swarmed your head and took up valuable space but refused to rear its face. It eluded reason and explanation, just as well as it did all possible slivers of doubt.
If it was indeed alive, as all evidence seemed to suggest, it had been very clever about where it chose to set up shop. Our town wasn’t exactly what you’d call “well-off”. We had no upper-class or middle-class or poverty because we were all the same. We were all simply people of Thadford End. But the thing about the people of Thadford End is that no one has ever made a fuss about us, and no one ever will. Life just moves around us. We try our very best every time someone disappears or someone gets hurt or something bad happens, but the fact of the matter is that there’s not very much we can do. And no one’s going to come out to little old Thadford End, all the way on the edge of the map, so there’s no one to help. I realised then, looking upon the cricket bat inscribed with Adrian Last’s initials, that that was how the Store always won. If the Store and the house played a game of poker, you can be sure that the Store would take the house for all its worth.
“The handle must have been real slippery…” Will nervously stuttered with a half-laugh.
We muttered half-hearted agreements but none of us believed in it in the slightest. It would have taken one of the Really Big Kids all their might to deliberately chuck a bat over the wall and get it this far into the Store. There was just no way it was done accidentally. And since no one in their right mind would do that…
Still, we pushed on. It could happen, I kept reasoning in my head. Maybe someone was really angry. Maybe they were having a stupid competition. Maybe they were only trying to throw it to someone across the field but didn’t know their own strength. Maybe, maybe, maybe. We piled on the maybes as high as we could, and then topped off the tower with a few more for good measure.
But then the maybes ended. They turned into a jumble of jitters and nerves and fright, with every inch of my being tugging me backwards.
There was no dramatic landscape change this time. The grass stayed put and continued to sway in time with the wind that continued to pass us by. Yet it was obvious all the same that something had changed. Clara and Will suddenly appeared by my side, and one look at their faces confirmed that they felt it too.
There was no errant conversation hanging in the air this time. No ice cream flavours or hybrid creatures or book titles. No sailing or food or money. No goats or wings or comic book characters.
Everything was urging me to turn tail and book it, just like the Really Big Kids described. It was the only thing that made sense. It was what Clara and Will wanted us to do. They urged me and tugged on my sleeves and tried forcing me back with them, but I wouldn’t budge. I had my sights set on something else. Something shimmering on the horizon, jumping in and out of view.
I told them they could go back but I needed to see this through.
“See what through?” Clara cried.
“This. The Store. Whatever this is. There’s something left to find. One last thing that neither the Big Kids nor the Really Big Kids found. I know there is.”
I turned to her to explain everything. To explain that it was more than just curiosity that brought me here. That the Store called me, practically dragged me by the neck. That the Store was made for me and me only, that it was hiding something deep within it for me to find. But what came out was, “You don’t have to come with me.”
“God fucking damn it, Em,” Will muttered, before dropping my arm and taking my hand instead. I smiled. Loyal Will. Loyal to a damn fault. The three of us had gotten into more than our fair share of scrapes and troubles, and William always went down with us, whether they were involved or not.
Clara silently took my other hand and nodded. I nodded back, grateful she was staying. Will may always be there in a pinch, but it often took Clara to get us out of them. (Of course, it was her who often got us into them too so it kind of evened out.)
I swallowed hard and braced myself for what was to come. The next few steps were the scariest of my life. We mustn’t have walked more than thirty yards but each step was a struggle (although my spatial estimation has always been a bit off, if I’m being honest, so it very realistically could have been far more). A constant battle between surrendering and turning back, and forging ahead, not quite bravely, but stubbornly. I wasn’t sure how far I had to trudge before I found what I was looking for, but I was certain I would know when I saw it. The Store would tell me, just like it had been the entire time.
8
I saw my first dead human being when I was thirteen years old, but it took a long time for it to register as such.
The first thing you notice about a dead body is how utterly devoid of life it is. You don’t notice the life in the living, but its absence is clear as day. A corpse’s rest is not a peaceful sleep, but rather a restless, relentless badgering. There’s no colour in the cheeks, no activity in the eyes. The chest lies still, its gradual palpitations brought to a grinding halt, and not even an occasional twitch disturbs the fingers.
In front of me was a seemingly freshly dug grave with an unmarked headstone unceremoniously jutted into its head. It looked like there was something writhing under its surface, but something stranger had caught my attention. I hadn’t yet been to a funeral, but I was fairly certain the body was supposed to be buried six feet below the ground, not rest on top of it. I dropped Clara and Will’s hands and bent down next to it, only vaguely aware of my actions from here on out.
Something about the body felt familiar and I wanted to reach out and comfort it, as if that would help it pass into the ground where it belonged. I ran my hand across its features, outlining the face that felt like I’d seen it before.
I had, I realised.
I reached forward and opened an eyelid, and almost stumbled backwards at the sight of a little nick that resembled the top of a pinecone on the underside of the right one.
I had seen that body before. Every day.
The body called to me because it was my own. The face felt familiar because it was my own. There were differences for sure, the most notable one being a scar running across the length of the face’s left cheek, and it was obviously much older than I was at the time, but there was no mistaking it. It was me.
I pulled the eyelid up again to get another look at the scar we shared, only this time everything cut to black. It all reappeared in a shimmering flash, only this time, I wasn’t me. Well, I was me, I just wasn’t in my body. My body was there, but I was somehow seeing everything from above. I didn’t see a ghostly body of any sort, so I had to assume it was more an eyes-in-the-sky situation. As strange as it felt to be staring at myself, I found my attention was drawn towards the version of myself resting above the custom-dug grave.
I stared at that body, shimmering in and out of existence, not quite there but all too real all the same. I took in every detail of the corporeal phantom with a morbid fascination, as with all things Store, lost entirely in the image. My mind must have spent the rest of time losing myself in what was in front of me, but at the same time I was acutely aware of the fact that it was mere seconds that had passed. It was a strange feeling, like being stretched across two entirely different planes of existence, but a strangely calming one at that. For a moment – for a shining, beautiful, fleeting moment – there was not a single thought running across the unruly landscape of my mind. There was no torrent of thoughts, no quiet humming or gentle beating, not even a single shining focus. For the first and only time in my life, I had a blank canvas and an empty palette, and it was, without a doubt, the most serene moment I’ve ever experienced.
I hung on to that moment for as long as I could – as long as the Store allowed me to – before everything once again faded away and I found myself back in my body. My knees immediately gave out from under me and I fell to the floor, Clara and Will’s protests of concern fading rapidly as I blacked out.
#
I don’t know how long I was out for, but when I finally came to, chaos reigned supreme. I was being shaken around like a rabid dog, my body’s flails punctuated by my siblings’ screams. The moment my eyes began to open, they yanked me up by the arms and dragged me away until my body recovered from the fainting and I could join in on the mad scramble away from my grave.
When it all gets real, it gets real spooky, and the only thing you can think to do is to book it.
I took one last glance over my shoulder at the headstone and almost lost the footing I had only just regained. What had previously been empty, now had my name inscribed across the top, my birthday below it, and space left for my epitaph just below that. But what really got me was my death date.
It was a timer. A timer set to the exact second it was right then, keeping time and counting up with my rapidly beating heart.
Several weeks later, as I lay in bed trying to go to sleep and my brain played Wheel of Intrusive Thoughts, I realised something that I hadn’t quite registered in the heat of the moment: I was relieved.
Had it shown the exact date I was going to die, I would have spent the rest of my life deathly afraid of approaching my last day on earth and would have grown steadily more paranoid. A timer meant nothing had changed. Not really. It meant nothing was set in stone, not even in a headstone guarding your own aged up corpse.
That, however, didn’t change the fact that there was a timer. On a grave. That would one day belong to me. I ran so fast, I might have broken the record I set with Milo back at Hayber’s.
9
We didn’t stop running until the Store began to blend in with the horizon and the setting sun had obscured it to not much more than a smudged line. When we finally stopped to catch our breath, we realised, to our collective dismay, we seemed to have re-lost the affairs we had managed to recover from the Store’s jaws. We had also left the bikes we had worked so hard to steal back at the boundary, seemingly having been in too much of a frightened haze to stop and get on them. A general consensus of leaving them there and walking the rest of the way back was quickly reached.
We were accompanied on our return journey by complete and utter silence. Our arms linked, three hearts thundered through each body, but all inklings of thoughts or conversations passed us by. We stayed huddled against each other for the remainder of the walk home, like hikers trying to make themselves larger in the eyes of bears.
I wanted to suggest we stop for food – as, I suspect, did Will – but I never saw Old Man Ferguson’s shop, so I saw little point in doing so. Besides, I didn’t want to have to break off from our sardines formation. Human contact felt reassuring, especially when it wasn’t with the looming sceptre of death.
I shook loose a creeping thought about Old Man Ferguson’s shop and pushed on in favour of our narrative of blankness. I’d had quite enough trouble for one day.
#
We made it back just before dinner, which is when Mr Wensleydale took stock of us all; his rule was we either needed to be home by dinner or have updated him about our whereabouts around that time, with the Big Kids and Really Big Kids getting more levy. I personally thought that was a bit stupid since we were much smarter than a lot of the Big Kids and even the occasional Really Big Kid.
We managed to lose ourselves in the crowd so got away with not saying anything for the duration of the meal. And the one the next morning. We finally broke our silence around late afternoon, but even then, we didn’t mention the Store. Or my corpse. We didn’t talk about it until months later when there was a half-empty, ill-begotten bottle of vodka rolling around on the floor and the clock’s hands were angled at some time past three.
Epilogue
Visiting the Store is not something you forget about very easily, or even something you could begin to forget about. I suspect not even the Men in Black and their memory erasing devices (neuralyzers, as Clara liked to remind me whenever I inevitably forgot their name during our rewatches) would be able to rid the event from your memory, not completely.
It is, however, also not something you can allow to consume your every waking moment, or even something that can be permitted to take up active memory space. Instead, it ought to slide to a part of your mind that’s just outside your peripheral vision, like the relationship between a child and that terrifying monster they swear is lurking in the dark.
The Store may have elected not to present me with an exact death date, but that’s not to say it left everything the exact same. Instead, like everything it did, the Store had taken a more gradual approach to toying with my existentialist notions, seeding a thought that had taken its own sweet time to fester. It had made itself home somewhere in the back of my head, far away enough for me to have forgotten all about it…until three weeks ago.
Three weeks ago, I realised the Store had indeed told me when I was to die, it had just been indirect about it. It had even told me where I was going to die.
The latter had always been obvious to me, really. Of course I was going to trot on back home when it came time to die; I moved away so I could teach at a university, but I always knew I would be back one day.
The former had been a bit trickier to decipher. I glanced up at the rear-view mirror of my car as I made my way down for what would have been Mr Wensleydale’s sixty-fifth birthday and ran my hand across my cheek – across the scar I had gotten three weeks ago. The scar I now shared with the corpse I saw years and years ago.
The end was near.
In all likelihood, it wouldn’t happen the same night, and I was glad for it – I had no intention of forcing Mr Wensleydale to share his day. It might not even happen for several weeks. But just like something in me knew where to find the Store and just like something in me knew I would find a dead human being, something in me knew whatever was to happen would come to pass before the year did.
I suppose that's what compelled me to finally tell my story.
I bid you adieu.