Saga

[Dogs231]

The wooden, hidden wicket at the back of the building opened a meager crack; a loud, audible creak accompanied it, breaking the silence like the unfortunate reckoning of a shattered mirror. It was as if the whole house was alive—as if it, once dormant, was now awakened to the intrusion performed upon it. It was as if each of its walls could talk, like they were each sobbing, shouting, screaming for the eternal pain of their entropy to stop. A single slip of light streamed through the small gap between the bedroom's wall and the portico, the sun's light invading the ridden darkness and driving it out, conquering the shadows and spilling their black blood across the floorboards, where they retreated from it.

Its call went unheeded.

S091: CLAIRE HAIG — CONTINUED FROM "Danse Macabre"

Inside, with the golden hook-like blade of the khopesh lingering at her side, clutched tight enough to strain her fingers as if it had become an extension of her arm, Claire stepped through the door, taking a silent breath as she entered. The dust kicked below her feet, each stamp of the floorboards sending another screech of pain through the creaking wood. Immediately, the stench of blood and rot shot through her, its scent unmistakable—she had passed enough broken bodies on her way to recognize it anywhere. Her eyes darted to the floor, catching on a stain. It was black, and even from so far above it, she could sense the telltale scent of iron wafting up from the flecks scattered across the ground.

She couldn't be sure, of course, but there was a feeling in her chest, a strong feeling, like an iron weight pressing down on her. It had drawn her here, pulled her by the hand, and led her to this place, where, unknown to her, her fate had so completely changed from its initial course. She took another step forward, gazing around the bedroom, watching the specks of dust and decay, visible in the light like stardust, as they fled through the room. The drapes hanging over the windows were decaying, eaten away by time and by moths, the robes of the bed similarly decrepit and eaten away at, the remains of the eiderdowns and coverlets spoiling and fetid, the whole house awash with the horrid stench of abiding death.

Her vision flicked to the door on the other side of the bedroom, barely attached by its metal hinges to the rancid wood upon which it seemed bolted; the lower hinge was almost entirely detached. The door was left hanging open, its brass knob twisted and stuck. It was too small for the entrance, and the walls concealed the closest two corners of the hallway around it, leaving a blind spot where any number of imagined monsters could lurk—unseen but by the malingering cortex of an imagination gone berserk. She could see down to the opposite end, the hallway's vanishing point, where it terminated in a downward stairway. Pressing her left hand gingerly to the wall as if to prop herself up, she entered the hallway.

She swallowed. Here, the stench of death was more intense than before, the whole house stinking of corruption and blight—as if the hollowed-out walls had an untold number of skeletons to hide away within them. Behind her, the door drifted forward and shut, the knob coming unstuck long enough to shut itself behind her as if the dead had come back to haunt her. Her head turned to face the ghosts, but all it came to see was a closed door—no turning back—and the shadowed corners, where there were no monsters—only the intricate cobwebs of the many-legged arthropods there, weaving their own little stories. She turned back in the other direction and steeled herself against the environment's atmosphere.

After a moment, Claire was ready, and she advanced down the hallway again, its claustrophobic confines bearing down on her. The pressure was intense here as if something was trying to keep her far away from the destination she sought, but she brooked the feeling and continued, even though the whole place weighed on her as if she was carrying the whole on her shoulders—for an instant, she was Atlas. Her every footfall, careful and light as they were, resonated out through the whole building, the staccato sound of an instrument—each time sending another force into the wood, which, in turn, released their rasping song of imminent death, her movement creating a percussion and melody that spread throughout.

Through a small crack in the roof, the dead tendrils of an unfamiliar plant crept in. It stretched across the wall, clinging and cloying, zig-zagging and running across the ancient, leaded, green-daubed walls—something which, to even exist within the vicinity of, was hazardous to health—ending in an arrow-like shape, pointing Claire in the direction as if this was a message from a higher power. She followed it down the hallway, shorter than it looked from a distance, towards where it ended, evaporating into the staircase. At a glance, she could tell there was a mistake—the first step down was placed too low to be uncomfortable, a literal misstep that could prove fatal to anyone not careful enough to look before they leap.

Forewarned, she lowered herself down methodically onto the first step, careful not to lose her balance—unstable as it was, it held, and she safely descended. The stairs roared as her shoes pressed down on them, the whole house seeming to shift and shake with the motion, treacherous foundations lurking below and promising a swift end. Broken, aged railings traced the jutting contours, flaking chips of paint lingering on the walls on either end of the staircase—a reminder that nothing ever lasts forever. She stepped forth, unheeded, into this place—not a dwelling in its truest sense, but a tomb, a mausoleum to futures left drifting on the sea of life, derelict ships on an open sea of fates intertwined with one another.

As she moved down, her body swayed, entranced by the lingering depths of the wavelengths that carried her soul to this place. Her world was a fugue, and she was wandering through the fog of her conclusive moments in a universe so foreign to the one she had departed. That fateful day, where she left the familiar, had only been a little under two weeks ago, but it felt like centuries. About halfway down, the stairway cut, leading into a wall, where it then turned about ninety degrees down and to the left. She braced herself against the wall, feeling the floorboards give like putty beneath her shoes. Then, she looked to the left and saw a sea of blood that seeped into the floorboards, staining them red like heartwood.

She swallowed hard, her trachea like a lump of iron in her neck. A chill of fear and certainty ran down her, making her body twitch like a current of electricity had just run across her spine and spread itself to the nerves, chain lightning. Then, she took another step, letting herself lumber down the rest of the stairs and entering the room where the stairwell enveloped itself. Once there, she glided to a halt, her creaking footsteps ceasing unceremoniously. She stared down, through the glass windows over her eyes, at the broken form of a familiar figure, its mangled contours framed in the shadow. The stench was the worst here, an inescapable and suffocating miasma that made her stomach heave and twist inside her.

"Oh," she murmured, a hand moving towards her mouth to cover it. Her eyes darted away and closed, hiding the imagery from her mind—but slowly and surely, her gaze returned to its original place, shooting back like silver bullets to the visage of the corpse. "God," Claire prayed, though she was never religious herself. For one long moment, she stood there, half-turned and mum, except for the occasional retch or keck, her voice struck dead and witless by the atrocity strewn across the ground in front of her, the body's structure broken like a Cubist painting sent through a shredder. Her hand darted to cover her face, splayed out like a skin-weaved cobweb, trying to conceal it—failing to hide the horror away.

It was the body of one Alex Avanesian, though even telling that was a matter of great difficulty. The cadaver was long past rigor mortis, finding itself deep into the process of putrefaction; his bruised skin sloughed off his bones in thin shrouds, half-liquidated, adipose tissue melting into the furthest crevasses of his remains. The eggs of houseflies and the larvae of maggots twitched inside his green-hued skin, behind the openings of which lay red-hewn, unbleached bones. His neck was, by someone—or something—entirely dehisced, splitting open from the cut in its center and radiating out from there, his spinal cord visibly jutting out of the neck. For a moment, she gagged again at the thought as she processed the sight.

There was a cavernous, concave grotto in his chest that burst out from the place of the wound in his back, from where the blood had leaked, exsanguinating the corpse as it moved down and out. His arms splayed outwards as if to be crucified where he lay, his whole body haloed within the circular reservoir around him, slipshod splinters and fragments of wood strewn about his body like ritual rites. His entire rib cage was visible, crimson as the skin of the Devil himself, the ruins of his lungs visible inside, both withered and half-rotten, the whole tableau remaining eerily similar to a gruesome scene ripped from the blood-inked lines of skaldic poetry—medial to a blood eagle. After a point, she couldn't bear to look.

"God—that's horrific," she muttered, below her breath, as if to condemn as heretical a Lord she had never worshiped. She heaved and convulsed again, saved from emptying her body of its contents only by the fact that there was nothing to evict. Then, out of the corner of her eye, she spied the broken skeleton of his glasses, one of the legs of his spectacles torn off, cracks spiderwebbing across the lenses, and spelling shapes like a church's windows without intentionality. With a rash, halting breath, she sucked the air into her mouth, trying her hardest not to take in the malodor of the ragged corse draped in clothes that had long rotted away. She swallowed the air into her lungs, trying to build resolve to its zenith.

Then, holding in the disgust that flatlined on her tongue, she looked back down at the corpse, at where its melted, white-stricken eyes should have been, meeting nothing with her own. "Alex, I know you can't hear me, but—God almighty, I hated you. For days, I hated you. I hated you with every atom of my being. And, even now, a part of me still hates you—revolts against even looking you in the eyes. If we'd found you—me and Evie—we were ready and willing to kill you. We thought you were a monster. God, we thought you were nothing more than a monster, Alex. Why did you do it? For God's sake, why?" She stole a breath, voice cracking into a million little fragments—resolve like shattered glass, how it fell to pieces.

"Why? Why did the world decide to make us into monsters? Before this—God, no—before all this, we were kids—we were kids. Why did they do this to us? Why? Aren't there some answers?" By this point, Claire had already shattered, her voice coming out like a collage of sobs to wrack her world. "And now," she murmured, "they'll just—they'll just bring us back home, just like that, as if nothing here ever happened in the first place; as if there's even something out there for us to even go back to. How can we live like that? Before all this, I had nothing to live for. I was ready to die. And, when it all happened, I was terrified. I was afraid. The fear of it all drove me to live. To make my last moments mean something.

"And now, it all ends like this—returning to a world that won't understand. There's—and, God, I hate to say it—a part of me that I hate, a part that wishes I was going to die here. Because, even though I'm alive, and my heart's beating, and my nerves are firing—I feel like I died here. We all died here." She just fell back for a moment, sitting on the lowest stair. Her head fell into her hands, and she sobbed for a moment. "I was ready to live for something. I don't have anything to live for. I don't have anything to die for. I'm a ghost and I'm still here." At a juncture, she was silent, unable to speak, nothing to say—on the verge of returning to a world that she could never understand. Was that what Remarque felt as he wrote?

She looked away, down, her face disappearing wholly from view—framing her body entirely within the inside eventide, a cloak of living shadow. In the last moments, her expression was an untranslated glyph, unreadable. "Every single one of us on the island; we're already dead in every sense of the word that matters."

On that, her story—the one she wanted to recount, the one that was ripped from her by the hands of fate, all-powerful as they were to control the whims of destiny—ended. Her existence, if one could call it that, would go on, as it always had—in whatever parody of life she could find the strength to muster—but the told-tale had ended, its conclusion one last anticlimax to close the book of the island, one last bitter tale to read at the darkened crescendo of midnight, her final anecdote playing out across the lightened, glowing monitors and screens of those who watched her die there, who watched them all die, who watched and let themselves enjoy their suffering—whose fingers never lifted from the keys.

S091: CLAIRE HAIG — CONTINUED IN "The V8 Rescue"