“You don’t want to see that, Christine,” she had said.
Now her mother was gone. She had died old and gray and peaceful in her sleep on a blustery day the previous autumn. Christine had a child of her own. A two year old with bouncing blonde curls that she refused to trim.
Her father lived with them, supported by a walking stick those days. Countless times Christine had tried to move from Murrins, but life had always gotten in the way and thwarted her plans. Now her father did not want to leave her mother and she, Christine, must look. For the sake of her son and all the unborn children she and her husband wanted to create, she got up with her boy at dawn and stood at the window on Easter morning, to see if the legends were just horror stories, or history.
CHRISTINE DRAGGED HERSELF TO her feet, her legs shaking. Her gut contracted and her whole body screamed at her to run away, but her traitorous hands once again reached out and lifted the curtain. Her heart beat like a drum when she saw that she was still there and it had not been her imagination, her tired eyes conjuring falsities.
She stood on the lawn, looking down at the grass. She was naked, scraggy black hair sprouting in patches from her wrinkled skin. Her hideous, saggy breasts dangled like excess flaps of skin against her stomach. As Christine watched, she squatted low over the ground. The window was open a crack and the smell of her wafted across the garden on the breeze; the smell of blood and filth and sex.
From the dense black bush at her pubis something began to emerge. A gelatinous goo slipped from between her legs and hung there like a string of clear snot. She shifted on her feet and an oval, membranous thing fell to the ground with a wet plop. Blood and amniotic fluid splattered with its exit.
It lay there, pulsing between her feet. Something moved beneath the transparent shell; something pink and green and monstrous.
She moved over a few paces and squatted again. Christine could see her tense up as she forced out another seed.
And as if her eyes weren’t abominated enough, they took in something worse.
A thousand ‘what-ifs’ lashed at her in a successive assault: What if they had thrown out the rancid meat they found in the fridge the night before instead of feeding it to the dog? Then it wouldn’t have started to squirt its reeking diarrhoea all over the floor and have to be put outside for the night. What if Carl had pushed him out the back door instead of the front? What if he had not gone to bed so early and hence been so befuddled that he had not latched the door after him? What if Christine had been watching her son instead of the gorgon on the lawn with her slimy discharge?
All those little links created a chain of events that led her to the point where she was now watching them both.
Christine was frozen in fear as she watched her little boy wander into the garden, his blonde curls bouncing as he walked. The two outside were unaware of each other.
She willed the hag not to turn around; she tried to catch her son’s attention; she struggled to make her legs move.
But nothing worked.
The hag suddenly pivoted, her black and red eyes fixing on the unsuspecting toddler. She bounded across the distance between them like some grotesque rabbit. His curls sprung when she grabbed him. His high-pitched wail of terror pierced Christine’s heart. In a single movement she cracked him in half like an egg. His juices flowed, his cries ceased.
She lowered her horrible head to his back and with teeth as sharp as razors, tore away a chunk of fabric and innocent flesh. She spat it aside and ducked down again, ripping away pieces of his little body until she got to the good stuff, the marrow in his bones, the fluid from his severed spine. She drank it down with relish, her horrible lips wrapping greedily around the bone.
Inside the house Christine found her voice. She screamed until her throat felt like it was going to bleed.
A hand clamped over her mouth and she was dragged away from the window. She spun around to face her father. Tears streaked both their faces.
“My baby!” she wailed. “What’s she doing to him?”
Her legs went from under her and her father followed her to the ground, his arms gripping her tight with a strength that had not wasted along with his body.
“You have to let him go,” he whispered, his voice cracking with emotion. “We must bear the sins of our forefathers. It is the burden of our town.”
Christine hiccuped huge sobs that racked her body.
“My baby,” she moaned, lying down on the floor and curling up in a protective ball while her father tried his best to soothe her through his own pain.
How some things always stay the same. Just as people never asked where the newborn babies came from that were carted from that house long ago, now they turned a blind eye when the younger members of the community failed to show, their presence replaced by red rings around the eyes of their parents.
Nothing much had changed in Murrins over the years; nothing much at all.
THE GREATEST SIN
by Kevin Wallis
Lawrence opened his eyes into blackness.
“Brooke?” His throat ached with the words. When only the rasping of his own breath replied, his chest tightened and a wave of terror descended. “Brooke!”
“Here.” Her voice was steadier than his, but thick with her own fear. “I’m here, Lawrence.”
His sigh sounded like a November gale in the silence. His wife’s form started to materialize several yards away as his vision fought the darkness. Realizing he was lying on his back, Lawrence tried to sit, but pain hammered his head and he fell back with a moan. He felt the back of his skull with a shaky hand and found a lump the size of a walnut. A crusty mass flaked beneath his touch. Dried blood, he assumed, and the darkness deepened at the thought.
“What happened?” he asked. Brooke had always been the smart one. He prayed that strength would surface now. “Where the hell are we?”
“No idea. But my head hurts like a bitch.”
“Mine too.” Inhaling and holding his breath against the pain, Lawrence sat. His head threatened to drag him back to the deep, but he managed to get upright and suppress the dizziness. He dragged his hand across the ground towards his wife, needing to feel her skin, her hair, her breath. He shook his head, growled as the lump throbbed and stabbed, but managed to clear his sight enough to find her in the lessening dark; despite its dampness and palpable tremor, her hand had never felt so warm.
“I feel dirt beneath us,” she said.
The darkness had ebbed enough to allow Lawrence his first view of his surroundings, and his flesh chilled in the humid April night. They sat in a space the size of a child’s bedroom. An odor of wet earth saturated the already moist air, and a glimmer of moonshine flickering through a crack in the ceiling granted them just enough light by which to see. The four surrounding walls, either caked with or entirely comprised of mud, seemed to pulse, throb, breathe with the threat of constricting them into pulp. A nonsymmetrical box was described into the dirt of the far wall like a crudely carved door. The ground consisted of the same muddy substance as the walls, and chunks of it clung to his hands and feet…
Oh God.
His feet were bound by chains as thick as a giant’s thumb; the other end of the chains vanished into the hard-packed earth. He looked at Brooke and found her chained to the ground, as well. Terror licked his spine.