Those Without God

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By Blakeledge

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          If it wasn’t for the green and blue eyes that saw my soul on those rocks, I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t be writing all of what happened amongst the Highlands and the years that have gone past like the flitter of leaves in the wind. They were strange eyes for a creature. Strange eyes for this world. I see them sometimes and even see how Alex had bent back my roads in life to lead me here. Towards pain and suffering. Towards loss. Towards Alex. Towards measures I never thought of. I often question now if a man’s life is based on his betrayals or his failures when all of those he loved are gone. If that’s the case, then mine is measured by a dog called Blue.

        You see, the day before I lost my left leg was when the pines broke out into a clearing and the midday summer sun shone down onto the dew-filled blades that morning. I saw the back of his head—blonde and fair, hell it was even glowing like some used to say when we were younger.

         See, Alex was always a different player, and he was in essence always my friend throughout my life, but over the last twelve months I noticed a change. It was as if he just stopped playing “life” entirely. He became a ghost in my life that would appear and reappear. He had his own faults and that just as complex as my own life journey we all take but it didn’t matter when the iron teeth of a bear trap shot straight through my left shin, splintering the bone in the middle and holding me there.

           Snap.

           It was him. I knew it was him and that’s what killed me on the inside. That’s what took away my smile and my zest for life, because of him.  

           He’d always had failings after college, and they eventually turned to bite me when I left for home again during university. He sounded rough on the phone, said he was going into AA down by the Methodist Church by Wigan’s bus station one night. Said he’d been let off another contract by a family friend for hitting a deer at sixty on Chorley New Rd, all in a thirty and twice the legal limit.

          “Like real deep shit lad” he said. Told me that his dad had kicked him out and said, “no fucking son o’mine and one that’s bloody twenty-one is gonna piss on my grave lad” and I could imagine that old bloke’s furrowed brow and greasy head bob up and down and boil redder as the words came out at concert level decibels. I felt bad for him as he mumbled some brash comments at me, clearly overcome with a red wine haze, said it was my fault at some point in the night, but I didn’t think much. He wasn’t thinking either.

         One of the final things he said before he disappeared – drunk and amongst many things – was that he’d questioned his own father’s choice to have children. Like that would change anything? Said he’d be hating on his dad for the rest of his life, because he was the one to blame, but I knew Alex didn’t understand that none of that was his burden. But finally, as if I could see his piercing blue eyes and pouted lips, he’d just said “fuck you” through gritted teeth. “You’ve left me in the dust” he said.

           I let it go and he disappeared into the annals of time.  

          Lying there as I did with my leg ensnared; it all made me realise that I could filter through my mind like a great library as I swung between open-eyed awareness and sleep. I saw Alex’s failings and his own miserable life. I saw the oversized hoodie he wore whenever he came to visit me at university and the flutter of cigarette smoke into the atmosphere. I then saw something flash in a burst of light and the world seemed softer. It was my mother. She stood there on the rocks and she smiled.

        My dad called me first about her, stating that thing all dads do when it’s something important.

        “Erm, hiya lad it’s your dad” like I didn’t know who it was?

         “Yeah, erm, it’s your mum. Someone’s got her lad. Someone’s fucking got her” and that was it. He started to pray and I didn’t need any more information. It all came back to me piece by piece. Almost like I was back there again in the hospital after arriving an hour after she passed.

        “Nialdrith.” It was what the officer had told me and my father at the hospital over the hum of tube lights above and the sight of her corpse lying on the table in the A&E covered with a white burial shroud, her nose poking upwards to the fluorescents.

         We buried her two weeks later and Alex had bounced back in my life for a time. Said he was sorry and even wanted to bring his new girl with him, Faye. For his presence I am grateful, but I couldn’t help but notice he had a wry smile as they both sat like perched ravens at the back of the church. Smiled like he was too awkward for him to say anything. Like there was some joke I wasn’t part of.

           Alex called again eventually in the days leading up to the absence of my leg. Said he was off the drink. Said he wanted to be my friend again after disappearing. I swore he said he loved me. “Oh hello” he’d started off in the days preceding. “You fancy a break lad? Faye said it were a good idea mate” he’d asked. “Highlands like we always wanted?”

I accepted his invitation. Even after his infamous “fuck you.” The invitation to lay in a forest for five days sucking the water from the moss that grew on rocks and spitting out the shit tasting mud that I swore at the time rotted my teeth. The invitation to greet death in the face and feel a dragging downwards, downwards into the cold earth where only the worms gnaw at the crusts of it all. 

          After we made it through that clearing and dewed tufted grass, we bedded down our small camp, just by some trickling glacial stream under the shade of a coppice of elms that bordered the brook, the mosquitoes like a horde of the undead. The ancient mountains like a picture from an old Green Beans can, the one with the Green Man standing yay-high on it and he’d do the same for canned corn. Our cans, however, probably a mistake and contained something gold that smelled like sweet bread.

         “Nectar o’ gods that lad innit” Alex said slumped in his supermarket branded fishing chair. “Getting dark now anyways, I’ll start a fire.”

          After it was lit it wasn’t the fire or the cold or the mosquitoes that brought that night to an end, I’d say it was what we had in our hands that’d brought it to a finish. Brought the first night of life-recovery to a grinding stop. Brought it to a fight.

          “Fucking waited for this I have lad” Alex said as his throat lathered with a gulp-gulp-gulp.

           “Waited for what? This trip?” I swigged back the metallic tasting beverage knowing I’d have a hell of a morning.

           “That first sip lad. Like it’s a dream come true. Been half-year and I swear on Faye yeah, but this is just cosy-as-fuck innit” and Alex lifted his empty can and cast it to the foot of his chair, rose and proceeded towards the crate. “Want one lad?” he’d said with feet crunching on the tufted hair grass that swallowed our camp.

          “I can’t go at that pace man; I don’t drink this much but I hear you. Sometimes I get comfy myself off red wine, but I usually sleep straight away. No jokes there man but I think we’re getting old.”

           “You ever feel like we’re just waiting in life lad? Like to get old or summat?” he said. “I’ll tell you summat that I just thought of proper. Remember that auld story we used say when we were like, nine or ten? That spindly fella with the weird smile ‘ll come get yous?”

           I tried to remember the story he was talking about but I remembered the description of the figure more so, tall lanky fellow with greasy shoulder-length hair, a smile ear to ear and rancid yellowed teeth. It was the face I remembered the most out of it all, pale skin from years of aversion to sunlight.

           “No? Well story goes if you remember.”

           I didn’t.

          “That he killed his own father in the bathtub, was from Moss Green and went in on him when he was asleep. He smiled and took a cable tie to his father’s neck and stripped him. Put him in the tub and filled it with piss and bleach. No one knew why, you know. What was that thing we all used say? Funny man, funny man. That were it lad.”

          I didn’t remember that either, but it made me think of the fellow who’d got my mother and my stomach sank, remembered the word “Nialdrith” and how that was a funny thing to say. I didn’t show it and nodded for him to continue.

          “Got caught he did after that, having a wank by the bus stop three days later and coppers took him to Rainhill back in the day. Thatcher comes in right, shuts most of them places down and he’s out again.” His eyes were like portals to hell. “See, once he was out, we knew he went in waiting. You remember that?”

          “I do; I do but just keep going” I said. I didn’t want to speak; I wanted the story and the rush of wind to sober me up. I wanted him to shut up but he knew that. He smiled before continuing.

          “So, he waits underneath the Technical College in Mesnes Park, in that auld bunker from the war. Don’t know how he lived, what he did but fifteen years later when we were little’uns he somehow arose from that place as it were. Stinking and shittin’ like some rat-man from the sewers. Smiling he were through yellow teeth and pale skin and greasy black hair… as it were.” At this point in his little story, he began to sway and point at me.

          “Lilly, remember her who went missing? Yeah lad, it was him I’ll tell you for free yeah, it was him. And he did it smiling I’m sure, but you know what he wrote on the walls of that bunker? After it all and that?” I didn’t, so I glared. “Waiting never felt so good.”

          He swigged and then another beer was empty. He got up, got another one and made a little effigy of littered cans by his feet. “Another one lad?” and I shook my head.

          “I don’t know man, just I remember that line ‘waiting never felt so good’ and having the taste of this just reminded me of it. Like I don’t know, maybe he had some sense in him?”

         “That’s fucked up Alex, why would something a literal murderer say come to mind? Why does that make sense?” I stumbled over towards the crate and ripped another open. My mother was killed. Lilly was killed. I halfway expected him as I ripped another one to have said to me “that’s what I’d do if I snapped” but instead he carried on drinking and pointed at me again as I sat down.

         “What do you mean? You thinking I like the idea of waiting for someone to go missing lad?” he said through gritted teeth again and almost growled.

         “No, I mean the story and what you just said Alex. I just… I don’t know I’ve had too much and life is too much. I just thought it was weird that’s all” I said stoically but my heart, beat so far out my chest I knew he could see. “Sorry.”

          “Fuck you man, you’re doing that thing again. Pretending not to understand me so you can find holes in my own intellectuality and all that, real priceless lad. Just because you have a fucking job you little lord” and he didn’t even open his mouth when he said this, his teeth remained locked and his voice pitched slightly higher to that of a small dog, yapping.

         “Woah man, I’m here for a good time. Jeez, sorry I don’t understand where you’re coming from” I said again, plainly.

           We sat in silence afterwards, listening to the stream and wallowing. He got another one again and the embers dwindled like little devils in the fire caked in greying ash.                      “You’ll know” he whispered.

          “What?” I snapped.

          “Lad. Nothing.” and he mumbled his words and then he began to weep about his father. “I’m sorry.”

         We retreated to our waterproof tents. I didn’t sleep straight away but I remember seeing the shadow of his tall figure tumble and collapse into snoring and hearing loud groans coming from across the way.

         After drifting between drunken sleep and alcohol induced heart palpitations I awoke, which was sometime just before dawn and that is when I heard him. He was walking on the soggy tufted hair grass and his shadow was cast on my tent, tall and lanky. I brushed it off.

I awoke for the final time that morning and poked my head out and saw the flaps of his tent raised upwards to create an opening scene of a crumpled sleeping bag and an unpacked bag. Nothing. There was not a sound.

          I stood there with the red lace of my hiking boots reflecting on the tufted grass and shouted. Nothing. I walked forwards towards the stream, shouted and nothing again. So, I headed into a small clearing beyond the coppice of elm. Nothing, again.

          After a few hundred metres I came to a small grove of pines, then some more elm and then long open stretches of purple-moor grass betwixt more coppices and more elm. Finally, I reached a grouping of rocks in the middle of a small forest half a mile away from our camp. They jutted towards the canopy of trees in which they stood and out popped his head, smiling. “Look what I found lad!” he gestured and I followed. I walked around and found an appropriate climbing spot where I could hoist myself up and reach him. Each grab and stab of my boot against the rock felt like lifting pure lead, what the fuck is he doing now? I thought.

          The tops of the boulders were adorned with moss and Maram grass and a small sapling which grew in its centre. I looked up. “Hey, what the fuck are you…” and that was my home for the next five days.

           Snap. That was how it sounded. The bone and the clasp of metal ripping apart my tendons and my nerves. The teeth had entered my calf bone and tore through the muscle and surrounded my boot in its entirety. I was stuck. The pain was searing hot and ran up my spine and felt like acid was coursing through my eyes. I couldn’t move and Alex faced me, with the background of northern mountains and emerald pines he stood and worst of all, smiled.

         I screamed.

         “Told you you’d know, Haz” he said, unmoving. There was sound from behind me and as I bent down to try and pry the trap open, its teeth clenched tighter together, almost too tightly for me to move it, but with every pull and push I gave it scraped on my bones. I felt lava on my skin. Behind me, there was rustling and the thump of two feet landing and I collapsed backwards on that mossy blanket, looking upwardly at Alex’s tall Aryan figure. Above me, he cracked open another beer, and his breath was pungent with yeast. “AA told me Haz, only in ritual if I was to ever stumble in my ways against this horrid substance, only in ritual lad. But Faye, oh she showed me the ritual lad, showed it me good and I bloody waited” and from behind I expected her. Faye to come outwards towards me but I was mistaken.

           It was him.

           The greasy hair dangled down over a floral dress and his pale legs like two clothes pegs jabbed into two musty brown hiking boots, he smiled too and his teeth were indeed a venomous yellow. “See lad, I fucking told you didn’t I, waiting is the best game we can play.”

          “Alex, what the fuck, my leg!” The pain reached my head all at once, making me lift upwards towards hell.

           “Come on Faye, where to next?” Alex said and turned.

          The funny man. He was right there in front of me. He pecked Alex on the cheek and mouthed “Nialdrith, always to him and unto him; but first we wait, so come with” and their jaws clicked out of place and dropped. Revealed a black abyss in place of teeth and tongue. The holes in their faces looked dry and vantablack. Hands held and clasped tight together they fled.

           He left me.

           They left me. To lie and stew in that forest under the weight of my own memories and above the pain of my leg.

           And my leg, it went blue and black and red and swelled over the days. I awoke and I could see the rust of the metal trickling into my wound, causing my leg to puff and stink with the arising of some lemon-coloured pus leaking onto the moss below. I screamed and my vocal cords gave in. I slept some more in that nursery of boulders and mossy grass; I screamed and cried and pleaded with God until my eyes shut and my mouth dried up.

           Then Blue came for me. First the lick and then the growl. Then it barked and howled and bayed. The trap was removed and Blue’s green and yellow eyes scrutinized from behind the sapling. I swore the eyes had measured my life then and there. Blue’s face smiled naturally and my own smile rose. I didn’t know anything in the world.

            I do know that the rangers of the Highland’s service found my car and soon they found our camp, managed to find my tracks with Blue – one blue eye and one green – and they found the boulders towards the northeast. I was barely alive they said. Said the dog had licked my face and I coughed, said Blue had saved my life that day. I know that my father gave the farmer cash from his stocks and said, “make sure that fucking dog gets to heaven, and if it ever comes to it that you find the bastard, send her with her teeth and claws” and thanked the dog.

          My father stayed with me in the Edinburgh royal for another week before he left for Greater Manchester again, said he’d wept all the way home and pleaded with God about my mother. Said he’d prayed for me.

          I won’t see my left leg again and I look down to see a stub, wrapped in white bandages and my hospital robe dangles over what’s left. Coppers told me they found evidence of Alex in the woods, said he’d drunk himself into a stupor and fell from a cliff in the Glen Coe region, another shepherd dog had found him. As for the funny man they said, they only found a floral dress atop a traffic light in Stirling and nothing more. Said they’d never heard of a girl called Faye.

           In the end, I look up at the TV. The news of the bombs going off in Iran and the US-Israel plans to dismantle another nation. My left leg – or what’s left of it – aches. I press the button for the nurse to see if I can swindle more morphine. All I see through that lighted black mirror is the cries of the many. The weeps of humanity and I pray that help comes for them, maybe in the measure of a dog called Blue.

Flash.

           It comes from outside and then people slowly disappear on the TV; clothes left behind on traffic lights, pines, Maram grass and houses. I look out the window and hear a million car horns, I feel myself lighter. Much, much lighter. The TV finally switches over, and a reporter speaks how the praying had risen into the sky. Said it really is the end, and I think of Blue, my mother and my own praying father. A spokesperson in London just off Camden Bridge, says he has one message “don’t go, stay and follow us. Nialdrith!” then his jaw stretches open like that of a snake, dismantling itself and showing a chasm of abhorrent blackness inside. Then the camera shuts off and the TV is static.

         Now, a warmth of something new fills me, it feels like a new smile. I never called on a God in my life until towards the end, and if a prayer or a scream inside my dreams or memories constitutes and allows me mercy, then surely this is it. Outwardly, I see the clouds open and the streets litter with fires and panic. The windows of buildings nearby shatter as bodies drop and I feel myself rising and I swear, I swear just outside on the horizon, I can see my dad, and he has embraced my mum.

           And they are smiling.    

End

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       Samuel is an employability advisor turned author turned filmmaker from Wigan, proving that straight lines are not his thing. He is responsible for the horror short They See You, which screened at Manchester's International Horror Society, and the novella The Deadlands. When not writing or making films, he can usually be found adding yet another book to his four walls of books and being supervised by two cats who remain ever unimpressed.