Now

Cloth and wood and smashed glass. But where was the blood? Pages torn from the guest book like a tooth from the root. Two keys missing. Stable door left open. Raindrops singing from the gutters into the sodden hay.

*

Through the front door, down the dimly lit hallway and into the reception clad in its mourning colours.

The barking? Norris, the brindle coloured mastiff, slobbering, overcome with a forceful urge to inspect the body, straining toward the corpse, desperate to be released from the white knuckled grip of the maid who has hold of his collar. Wrestling him into parlour, she closes the door and presses her ear to dark, heavy wood. Shafts of dust falling sluggishly around her as she listens to the doctor’s diagnosis.

Ad Mortem, irrevocably, indubitably so.

She finds herself surprised to hear it.

The body, for she had been the one to find it when she had gone down to light the fire early that morning, well to her, it looked neither dead nor alive.

*

The innkeeper does not take her eyes off the mound of hard black fabric on the cold floor of her reception. Frayed tartan dress, decorated in pinchbeck jewellery, she is a tall, spare looking woman who has the practised look of grief on her face. Twirling the crucifix between the tip of her calloused fingers, body frozen to the spot as if in a fit of paralysis.

Should she have known?

Names had been recorded, rooms assigned. She thought nothing of it. Not at this time of year when business was quiet. Not after everything that had happened, with the endless rain. Not after the disappearances. Not after they returned, in bags, more skin and hair than human, less than half of what they were before. 

No, the innkeeper does not turn down paying guests.

*

Her boy, crouching in piss-damp trousers, all pale skinned and dripping in the corner, where he hopes the darkness will swallow up his shame.

He had seen them.

Three came in and only two left. Bent double, cloaked in rags. They frightened him, like the Lost Ones that loitered by the railway station. Except these men were different. They moved in odd, birdlike ways. He cannot tell his mother of what he saw, does not know the words for the aberration that was committed while she was asleep. He can still smell the acrid, earthiness that had followed them through the reception, past his bedroom and up to the the second floor landing.

How the boy longs for the soft comfort of his bed now, for sleep to take him far away from the images playing through his mind. But instead the doctor sends him to fetch the constable forthwith.

*

Now the doctor stands, declares that the coroner will have to open the body once the constable has made his investigation of the locus delicti. He busies himself with his various instruments and tinctures, trying not to look at the face of the deceased.

Grotesque? Unquestionably.

Unnatural? Perhaps.

Obscurum per obscurius.

A slack jaw hangs open to reveal a dark chasm where the tongue should be. Hands, present, but have been sutured together in eternal prayer. It is different from the ones before. The skeleton is still intact. He has no explanation for the drooping eyelids that reveal orbless sockets. Nor the watery blisters that pepper the brow bone up to the hairline.

He becomes taken by the notion that if he stares into those voids for too long that he may lose himself within them.

The doctor thinks it. The maid thinks it. So do the innkeeper and her son. This one has been returned, a little more than half.

What would happen when one came back whole?

*

And what of those missing eyes? Those two spheres, yellowed by pipe tobacco, wrapped in the phlegm stained handkerchief of some wanderer who rides atop a stolen horse. Sigils have been gently branded where the optic nerve was once attached. Once the wanderers could only sense the shape of things, the outline of the knowledge. They desire it so voraciously it makes them clumsy, violent. They take too much.

Yet now details come into focus, their vision clears and they see. They stare out, beyond the leather satchel and through the downpour that has begun beat its ictus on the loam. Out there into the wide expanse of raindark nothingness.

________

R.L. Summerling (she/her) is a part-time fiction writer and full-time squirrel watcher from Southeast London. She has fiction upcoming in the Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror Volume 5. Her stories have been published in Interzone, Maudlin House, and Seize the Press and poetry in TOWER magazine and Orion’s Belt. Her zine, FLESHPOTS, is a short collection of decadent poetry, short stories and flash fiction and can be downloaded for free online.