I wonder if the bead of sweat on the shopkeeper’s brow is a reflection of some discomfort caused by my presence. The man standing behind the counter of Stone Street’s Everything Shop – ‘Everything,’ in this instance, refers to a range of home and garden goods – looks much as he did when I first started to frequent the strange little outlet, more than a decade ago. He is greyer, wears glasses now, but mostly he’s the same.
I envy his sameness. My own changes, wrought partly by time but mostly by a near-lethal accident, are not nearly so subtle. My skin is a jagged network of scars. Beneath that wretched shell lies a blasphemy composed of titanium, ruin and strife. The surgeons had pieced me back together, filled me with other people’s blood, and told me that I’d most likely walk again. Told me my organs would heal, my scars would fade. They told me these things with a conviction that suggested they could speak them into being, bend the stark arc of reality with will and vigour.
My turn at the till. The shopkeeper scans my purchase, a pair of garden shears. He asks if I’d like a bag. My response is a grunt and a single, jerking nod. I lean my stick against the counter, pull open my puffer jacket, and retrieve my wallet from the depths. The transaction completes wordlessly, the only goodbye a moment of eye contact and a forced smile from the shopkeeper. I take my bag, let it swing perilously close to my ruined left knee as I lean heavily on the stick I hold with my numb right hand.
My journey begins slowly, painfully. The gears are sufficiently greased by the time I reach the door to the outside world that not every step is ecstatic agony, though I must pause to steel myself nonetheless.
The world is a cacophony. Since my accident, I find myself overwhelmed by the shifting faces and half-formed whispers that follow me. I’m sure I scare people, my furtive twitching and unkempt appearance with my crippled gait and Karloffian scars. There’s a twisted comfort in knowing I’m not the only one forcd into fight-or-flight by my presence in public, I suppose. Not a sadistic pleasure, of course, but rather a sense of community with those who look upon me with some cocktail of disgust and pity. We each feel similarly towards me.
My left hand reaches for the door, pushes it open. I wince as the bag with the shears bounces against the glass of the door. As I pass through the threshold, I examine the glass for any new imperfection. I see none that appear fresh. Satisfied, I turn my attention to the wilds of Stone Street. This side of the bridge is quiet this time of day, though I must pass over the railway line before turning left and escaping to my neighbourhood, one of many crowded residential streets near the train station. My bad knee complains as I make hasty steps towards the bridge. The old drug clinic passes by on my left, followed by a housing association which is used to home those making an effort to mend their ways. Not even a whisper can be heard on Stone Street, nothing besides the dull thunk of my walking stick striking the ground and my heavy breath as I force a quicker pace than is comfortable.
The bridge approaches. It looms, languid in its advanced age but no less intimidating than the day it was constructed. How many hearts beat their last on the apex of that concrete hill? How many souls sought to end their torment by stepping off the edge and meeting the train tracks below? A great many, I’m sure. That would go some way to explaining why there was always a menacing breeze atop the bridge, no matter how still the night. Air always moved perpendicular to the path, always produced a noise like a moan as it passed underneath. Echoes of a thousand needless deaths calling for company.
My ascent is rough, slow. I pant and grunt and my wool beanie grows slick with viscous sweat. My right hand shudders when the stick it holds contacts the ground. My heart quickens, forces my motley blood to my skin, reddening my face. A pause is necessary. My lungs fill with brittle winter air and my head leans back, eyes closed. I open my lids and perceive the sky ever so briefly. The regret is instant.
Ever since my accident, I’ve been aware of the seams. The fraying stitches that hold our sky together, occasionally revealing the roiling miasma behind the curtain when a thread snaps. This patchwork firmament shifts and shirks from my gaze. I don’t know what this means, why my mind is conjuring such visions, but it unsettles me and so I keep my eyes to the ground as a rule.
I continue my trek, begin counting my steps, a simple repetitive mental action to sooth my soul and distract me from my labour. It helps. The wind drops off as I approach the peak.
At the top of the bridge, I can see the length of Stone Street. My turn is left opposite a pub called the Bloody Duck, a favourite haunt of those who work late. In my younger years I’d spent many evenings there myself, throwing darts and downing stout. But those days are over. My body and mind are disaster enough without the ravages of sociability and I’m hardly good company on my best days in my altered form.
The road is reasonably quiet. Not too many eyes to avoid. With luck, I could be home and dry without meeting the gaze of a single other person. One foot in front of the other, I grit my teeth as I begin the downwards march. My ruined knee is at its worst when going downhill. My stick is essential, unyielding, dependable. So unlike my after-market anatomy.
Back on flat land, cold trickles down my spine. The near-empty street had filled. How long had my journey down the bridge taken? I’d grown accustomed to small parts of my day disappearing but rarely did I find myself this off-guard. I hurry as much as I can, swinging my stick and pounding the path, raising my left hand to wipe my eyes, trying not to stab myself with my new shears as they swing in their plastic bag. I avoid the gaze of my fellow travellers. I’ve learned from experience that some people are safe, such as the keeper of the Everything Shop, but strangers are always a gamble. Despite my efforts, I end up locking eyes with a squat woman beset by a brace of cackling young girls, her own no doubt. I whimper as her face melts, wince as her nose falls away to reveal the cavity underneath and her cheeks rot. She doesn’t seem to notice as her hair rises up, granted its own life by whatever dark forces mock me. Nobody ever notices. It seems only I see these things.
I reach my turn and escape Stone Street. Escape the faces, the strange looks and the evil visions. A hundred metres farther and a lone man stands outside the Cantab Arms — another pub; Stone Street and its appendages are drenched in drinking houses — with cigarette in hand. He wavers slightly, a steady side to side motion like a leafy plant atop a cliff. He’s bone thin bar a drinker’s gut, could be anywhere from thirty-five to fifty years old. He doesn’t appear to notice me. This I consider a mercy. I ignore him and proceed. There’s a thick patch of shadow in the hedge opposite the pub, a well of blackness in the foliage which surrounds the Methodist church. Immediately I’m drawn to it. There’s a familiarity there. Not all darknesses are created equal; some have weight. The darkness that I fell through during my accident, the darkness that lead to the proverbial Light, that was viscous and rich. The darkness in those bushes is much the same, albeit contained in a discrete location rather than all-consuming. I cross the road for a better look.
As I approach that shadow, it takes form. Bile rises in my throat, slides right past my erratic heart and meets the nervous energy dripping down from my skull.
I know that shadow. Or rather, I know the being made of mostly darkness that some would mistake for a shadow.
A single, baleful blue orb that serves as its eye looks straight past me, its many indistinct limbs tether it to the ground of our world even as its simultaneously ephemeral yet infinitely dense form marks it clearly as something not of this plane.
That is the hound which met me when a drunk driver knocked me from my body. It’s the herald of death that dragged me halfway to oblivion before I slipped its grasp and returned to my twisted meat.
I rasp: Lo, psychopomp!
When I writhe in my bed at night, my body distorted by nervous shocks and ill-set bones, flashbacks and paranoia, I often think back to that night. The eternal half-second I spent knowing the accident would happen, my utter inability to do anything to prevent it, and the subsequent journey beyond the veil. I’d managed to escape the thing before me now, fell unceremoniously to Earth and re-entered my body. It had been an act of will, a defiant push towards light and life.
My pain, my scars, my altered perspective have often made me wonder if I made the right decision.
Now that creature is before me again, my heart almost vibrating, and I wonder if the cocktail of opioids and antipsychotics, SSRIs and Irish whiskey, have finished the work started by a stolen late-nineties hatchback.
The hound doesn’t register my greeting. Its gaze is locked elsewhere. I follow that eye, and see the man smoking outside the pub across the road, white as the paper of his hand-rolled cigarette, staring at the creature with an open mouth. The left side hangs lower. His left eye begins to quiver, his face droops, and then the whole left side of his body collapses, dragging the right with it.
I shout for help. A couple of folks emerge from the pub, a man and a woman. The man crouches down, tries to talk to the quivering mess on the floor while the woman dials emergency services on her phone. I start to cross the road, but retreat as a car comes past.
The smoker, the man on the ground, tries to scream, to shout, perhaps to speak his final words. A gargled whimper is all that emerges.
The hound is on him, circling the dying man, passing through the bodies of those helpful souls that do not see it.
The man’s right eye follows the hound, half his face locked in an expression of pain and fear while the other half dances spasmodically. I’m frozen watching this man, watching as his movement slows, as the other man crouched with him panics and shouts to or at the woman on the phone to emergency services. Their powerlessness crushes me, though I do envy that they’re oblivious to the circling hound.
The dying man stills, the crouching man puts a hand by his mouth, calls out that he feels no breath.
A chunk of the black below the hound’s blue orb splits, forming a maw. Each movement of its body is a maltreatment of physics and rationality. It’s as though there is so much more of the thing, only revealed in movement, only for a moment. It’s apparent to me that I only perceive it as I do because of my limited perspective, that I would not be able to hold the true shape of the thing in my mind. I did once, on the night of my accident, when my unleashed soul did not have to contend with human eyes and mortal neurons, but trapped as I am in my patchwork prison, I see only one facet of whatever the hound is.
A spark rises from the dying man and the hound snatches it in its new mouth. It releases its hold on our world and moves elsewhere, sliding off in a direction that can’t be described, folding away into the spaces between and beyond our primitive notions of time and space.
An ambulance arrives, blocks my view of the dying — rather, the dead — man. I’m grateful for that. I continue on my walk home, feeling a dense weight in my gut that does little to distract from the acid in my throat.
I dump my new shears in a public bin by the train station, near my home. Living, as I do, in a second-floor flat and having no garden, such a thing is useless to me.