“Debs, Debs,” cried Gavin. “She’s back.”
“What?” Deborah leaned against the front door. It clicked shut. “Who?”
“Nan.”
Deborah sighed as she deposited her handbag on the stairs while she took off her coat and smoothed down her Joules dress. “You haven’t been listening to that old voicemail again, have you? You know how much it upsets you. You sure all this leave is even a good idea?”
“No, no, I…”
She hung up her coat, turned back to him. “One of those real-seeming dreams?”
He shook his head. “No, no, listen. When Mum and Dad died, Nan was my world. I know she was in her late nineties and couldn’t go on forever but I wasn’t prepared for it. Couldn’t accept it. I’d have given anything to bring her back. Anything. You know that.”
She did. It scared her. He didn’t sleep. At least, not at night. When she’d got up that morning, he’d rolled from side to side with a pillow wrapped around his head.
She slid her hands up over the front of his shirt. “Love, love, I know all this. But she can’t possibly be back.” She gripped and massaged his shoulders. “We watched her die, remember?”
She could still see his grandmother propped up in her bed in the hospice, inhaling, exhaling, inhaling, exhaling, not; a terrible stillness that went on and on and on.
Knowing his strange enthusiasms, his staunch love, she swallowed as she took Gavin’s hand and led him through to the ground-floor bedroom that had once been their garage. “Look.” His grandmother’s dark mahogany furniture occupied its familiar positions. The bed remained unoccupied. “See? It was a dream. A cruel, lovely dream.”
Gavin stared at the brown carpet. “Debby, you won’t be upset, will you?”
Deborah’s head wobbled.
Crossing and uncrossing and re-crossing her feet, she rested a hand on the dressing table beside a hairbrush that still had white hair in it as if used that very day. “Upset about what?” He twisted to the side. She bent that way. He twisted the other way. She straightened. “Gavin, upset about what?”
He grabbed her hand. “Come and see.”
She leaned back. Her heels dug into the carpet.
“Death is the real diabolical magic,” he said, tugging. “Someone you loved and looked up to is there one minute, gone the next, and you can’t find them, the real them, anywhere.” They turned into the lounge. “I mean, what could be more natural than life? More life.”
Deborah noticed the Zimmer frame. Why was that back out?
Her heart thudded when she spotted a white-haired head against the armchair’s antimacassar at the far end of the room. It can’t be…
She leaned back further. He pulled harder.
He dragged her round to the front of the chair. No… No, no, no. His grandmother, the woman they’d buried a week earlier, sat as she always had at this time of day, in a cream silk blouse, black pleated skirt and black Clarks loafers, hair immaculate, a sherry at her side, eyes riveted on the TV. “Gavin… Gavin, what have you done?”
“Ssh, she’s watching her favorite program.”
Debby looked up to see The Chase with subtitles on.
“Oh, what have you done? Gavin, what have you done?
He spread his hands out. “I was praying. Only after a while I realized, it wasn’t to God.”
#
The light blazed above them as she sat clutching her knees at the end of the bed. “Oh, Gavin, how could you?”
“Relax.”
She threw her hands in the air. “Relax? Your nan’s back from the dead downstairs. How can I possibly relax?”
He came and stood in front of her, placed his hands on her shoulders. “Listen, everything’s back to how it was, how it should be. That’s what matters.”
She stared up at him. “You did some kind of deal that you shouldn’t have, didn’t you?
He stretched. “Seriously, stop worrying. It’s like a loan I never have to pay back.”
“What do you mean never?”
“Well, payment only becomes due when heaven is hell and hell is heaven.” He beamed, as if unable to believe his luck. “I mean, when’s that ever gonna happen?”
She cocked her head. “And the payment?”
He glanced at the glossy black window. “I told you, irrelevant.”
“Gavin, what do you owe in return?”
He took her hands. “Debby, is it really so wrong to love someone and want them back?” Slowly, he bent to kiss her. “I’d do exactly the same for you, you know.”
#
On Sunday she woke up late, alone, and went downstairs to find him on the sofa with his elbows on his knees, leaning over the coffee table at right angles to his grandmother.
“You need the corner pieces first, Nan. The ones that are flat on two sides. Look, here’s one.” He sat upright. “Oh, hello, love. I’m helping Nan.”
Deborah smiled.
He just looked and sounded so happy, how could she begrudge him wanting to hold on to his grandmother with a love so strong and pure?
“Hello, Nan.” In her dressing gown, Deborah passed out of the back door into low, lateral sunshine.
Maybe he was right. Maybe they’d got away with it.
“Hello, Debby.”
Deborah jumped and turned to see a face overtopping the garden fence. “Oh, Kim, hi.” A redness to the eyes and little tremors under the skin betrayed the smile. “Everything alright?”
“Not really. Jinx has gone missing. Since Tuesday. We’ve put up posters and everything. You haven’t seen him, have you?”
“No, none of us have.”
“None of you?”
Deborah scratched her forehead. “Neither. Neither of us have. I really hope he turns up.”
Kim shook a strand of hair out of her face. “Sorry, I know you’ve had a much worse loss to deal with but to little Nicky… Well, it’s his first time. You know.”
Deborah nodded. Now that she thought about it, she had heard a lot of crying lately.
A hand waved over the fence as Kim turned away. “Bye, Debby. See you soon.”
“Yes, bye.”
Deborah swiveled in her slippers and hastened back inside. “Gavin. Gavin, you don’t know anything about next door’s cat, do you?”
#
Life went on, as it always does. She even forgot, most of the time, that Nan had ever, temporarily, left them. They just had to remember to keep her hidden from the neighbors.
Did she believe Gavin’s denials about the missing cat? She wanted to but each time she saw Jinx’s photocopied mugshot on a tree, she couldn’t meet those large green eyes.
Day by day, the crying from next door lessened in intensity, and stopped altogether the following week when Kim and Joe gave up the search and got a new cat, Izzy.
Deborah gradually put fears of Gavin’s possible involvement in a cat-napping, and worse, behind her. If guilty, he’d done a terrible thing. Yet if that was all he’d done, maybe they’d survived unscathed.
Well, everyone except for Jinx.
#
The following Wednesday, they got home late from work because they’d bumped into a couple they knew and had gone for a drink, which meant getting home late, which meant eating late. They’d barely sat down to relax before it was time to get ready for bed.
They helped Nan up from her seat in the living room and supported her, one on one side, the other on the other, while she steadied herself against her walker.
The doorbell went.
“Who the hell’s this at this time?” She patted Nan on the shoulder. “Sorry, Nan.”
Gavin let go of his grandmother but hovered at her elbow.
Deborah kept an eye on the old woman’s shuffling feet. “Want me to get it?”
“Leave it,” he said.
Deborah looked up. “What? I can manage if you want to go.”
He pointed at his nan. “We can’t. We don’t know who it is.”
Deborah smiled at him with the bottom half of her face, frowned with the top half. “Well, we won’t if we don’t answer it.”
“I’m not letting anyone take her,” he got out before she’d even finished.
She blinked. “What?”
His face twisted into a grimace. “You-You think the neighbors won’t alert the authorities?” He shook. “Or, or, or the papers?
“Okay, okay, calm down. We won’t get it.”
She didn’t think any more about his reaction to the doorbell till a week and a half later.
#
On the Saturday, she and Gavin sat down with a 12-inch pizza in front of the television to watch a DVD of the latest Charlie Kaufman film. Nan occupied her usual armchair.
Tap, tap, tap, at the rear window.
Having just picked up a slice, Deborah placed it back on her plate. “What’s that?”
He wafted a hand. “Oh, probably just twigs. Ignore it.”
Air roared as in a wind tunnel.
She peered out at bright sunshine, floaty clouds. “I can’t see any wind.”
The roaring altered in pitch.
“Either that or a plane going overhead.”
A detonation made them clap their hands over their ears.
Even Nan jumped.
“What was that?” shouted Deborah.
Another one rattled the house as if in surround sound.
Smoke drifted past the window.
Next door, Kim and Joe and a few of their friends carried on with a barbecue.
Leaping up and beetling over to the back door, Poppy grabbed the handle. It wouldn’t open.
She tried the window. Stuck.
Gavin stood up slowly. “It’s alright. He can’t do anything.” Head down, he spoke very quietly. “I did what he wanted.”
Growing louder and louder, the neighbors’ chatter and laughter nearly drowned him out.
She swung round. “It was you, wasn’t it?”
Gavin looked up. “What?”
“Jinx.”
He fitted the fingers of his hands together in different combinations. “I needed a propitiatory offering, to placate –”
“Don’t say his name!”
Another detonation rocked the house. She clutched the sideboard as the fabric of the building creaked and groaned.
Now everything vibrated to a hum. Nan’s carriage clock slid along the mantelpiece, turning as it went.
It smashed into the granite hearth. Nan flinched.
Gavin held his hands out. “It’s alright. We’re safe. Till heaven and hell swap places, remember?”
The room listed.
Deborah leaned the other way.
Like the deck of a ship slowly capsizing, the room kept on going.
Upper leg bending, bending, leaning further and further, she glanced out at the neighbors, the ones that she could see, standing upright, milling around, and her mind tipped over along with Nan’s standard lamp.
Facing down the slope, the bookshelf began to shed its books in ones and twos and threes, before the whole thing crashed to the floor. A candlestick dropped and rolled towards her.
She jumped over a brass vase, dodged a lamp.
The sofa squeaked and the squeaking got louder and louder and quicker and quicker as it careered down the room, till it slammed into the wall.
She and Gavin leaned as if into a headwind, at exactly the same angle, but there came a point when they slipped and lurched and staggered backwards.
“Nan,” he cried, sprinting up the incline to try and get to her.
Just a few feet from the rear of her armchair, he pitched to his knees and scrabbled at the carpet as it steepened further.
Deborah didn’t drop to her hands and knees. The floor came up to meet them.
The sideboard scraped its way past her.
Gavin knelt with his hands raised, ready to catch Nan’s chair, not that he would be able to. The floor continued to tilt.
Deborah flattened onto her front to gain a few extra seconds’ purchase.
She yelped as the carpet rubbed her up the wrong way.
Her heels knocked against the skirting board.
When she looked up, Gavin rolled, tumbled, righted himself and slid on his bottom down the room.
The TV unplugged itself and overtook him.
Yet Nan’s armchair remained fixed to the carpet.
Gavin stood up at the last second and stepped from floor to wall.
Deborah pushed off from the carpet and made the short crossing from one plane to another.
Now at the base of the up-ended room, the front window separated them.
They’d need a ladder to reach Nan.
“What the hell’s going on?” screamed Deborah, finding her voice again as objects blurred by.
They pelted the wall.
“Look out,” cried Gavin.
A clock flew straight past her head.
Having been caught by Nan’s sofa, the coffee table now toppled over the edge and plunged down the room. It smashed through the window.
Air rushed up from the hole as the empty street yawned at their feet.
Leaning over with her hands gripping her knees, Deborah glimpsed a car drive by.
She stood up, swaying, as the bookshelf streaked past without crashing. It had gone through.
The weight she put on each foot evened out. The wall had come level.
Leaning back, they looked up. The room had cleared itself.
All they could see of Nan was the back of her head in the armchair.
“No, no, no,” cried Gavin, as the room kept on turning, threatening to tip Nan backwards off her chair right over the rectangular hole left by the window.
The sofa stood on its end behind him.
He pulled the three-seater over, it thudded onto its base and hung over the edge, teetering.
Furniture and belongings now crashed onto the ceiling in successive waves.
As if on a giant slow hamster wheel, Deborah jumped from wall to ceiling.
Peering up the lessening incline, she saw Nan still sat in her chair at the other end of the room, upside down.
Gavin made repeated attempts to run up the ceiling and got a little further each time.
Eventually he made it past the light fitting rolling around at the end of its short flex and up to, or under, Nan.
He jumped, trying to reach her, but couldn’t.
Nan sat with her arms on the sides of the armchair, looking around.
Some of the pictures on the side walls were still up. They’d merely rotated around their hooks.
Deborah joined him and glanced out at the barbecue still going on in the same plane as Nan, with even more laughter and squeals than before.
At the other end of the room, outside the smashed window, the wind howled. They could hear tiles being ripped from the roof as from the underside of a Space Shuttle at re-entry.
The house stopped turning.
“Nan,” called Gavin.
“It’s alright. It’s okay.” Deborah spoke more out of amazement than anything else.
He shook his head. “No. No, it’s not. You don’t understand.”
“What?”
The doorbell rang.
It echoed throughout the upturned house.
She stared at him. Someone at the – ?
He started to turn.
She clutched his arm. “No, don’t answer it.”
“I’m sorry.” He leaned towards her, kissed her. “I’m really, really sorry.”
“No, no, come back. Gavin.”
He strode towards the lounge door.
She ran after him. “No, don’t. Gavin, please.”
He stepped out into the hallway. “I have to.”
She hitched up her dress to straddle the lintel.
He got to the front door. She ran towards him. He opened the door, stepped out.
“No,” she shouted.
He no sooner screamed than it receded.
She got to the front door, leaned out over the lintel and peered down.
Gavin twirled end over end, getting further and further away. Yet it was as if a piece of elastic joined him to her and stretched longer and longer. As he merged with the bottomless sky, it tore at the integument of her chest and ripped a cry out of her.
She pulled her head back in, turned and snot exploded from her nose in a sob as she collapsed to the ceiling – which immediately fell away from her.
“Ugh.” The impact with the floor no match for the rupture inside her, she raised herself off the carpet, ran outside and, standing on a wobbly paving slab, stared up.
Something furry rubbed her ankle and when she looked down, next door’s new cat, Izzy, figure-of-eighted around and between her legs with head back, eyes closed.
###
by Mark Kirkbride
[bctt tweet=”OCTOBER TERROR 2018 Short Story Award – Entry #56 ‘Praying to the Devil’ by Mark Kirkbride – Enjoy all this terrific, disturbing material you have in your hands, lots of horror stories at your disposal for your dark delight and vote!” username=”theboldmom”]
On October 23rd we’ll close submissions and open a poll for the readers to choose their favourite one! You’ll have a week to make your choice and on October 31st we’ll announce the winner!!!
