Flock of Shadows Read online

  I look out through my studio window, and see steam rise on the wasteland. How lucky I am to have that wasteland there. It was the work of minutes and a few bin liners. If you’ve visited the Reeperbahn you will know the characters that line its streets. An artist carrying manikin parts in black plastic bin liners and dumping them on the wasteland at dead of night is, if not an everyday occurrence, something most of us have probably seen at some point. So if anyone had seen me, and no one did, there would have been little suspicion.

  We’re conditioned to think murder is difficult to cover up. It’s to stop us doing it, I suppose, and that’s not a bad thing, I also suppose. Well. It isn’t difficult, if you’re a well-regarded local eccentric and your model has disappeared many times before in her life, frequently turning up on a different continent, and whose family hold no interest for her, and for whom the feeling is mutual.

  ‘Look at this.’ Jan examined a statue of the Venus of Ephesus. She held up two or three of her breasts in one hand, some of the others dangled, and the rest pointed in various directions. ‘Remarkable, isn’t it? Like an ancient Mona Lisa.’ Jan placed her on the desk. ‘Wherever you stand, her breasts follow you round the room.’

  ‘They look rather like eggs.’

  ‘True. In fact there’s a theory that – ’

  ‘You’ve got some weird stuff in here.’ Stefan picked up a midget with three dicks.

  ‘They were weird people, the ancient Ephesians. It’s been here a whole month and no one wants it. Very reasonably priced.’

  Stefan nodded.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’d like to buy it?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Discount for friends?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  They walked to the bar on the corner. ‘Look,’ said Jan. ‘There’s another one. I find this lady disturbingly attractive, I have to say.’

  Across the road two men in orange jackets pasted a large advert against a crumbling wall. It showed a full-length image of a woman walking down a street, cleverly designed so it looked like a gap in the wall and she was emerging through it. She held a blue and green orb of perfume as if it were the world.

  ‘Oh…’ Stefan murmured.

  ‘Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed her before,’ said Jan. ‘She’s everywhere. Everywhere, she is. Gorgeous, isn’t she?’

  ‘Ah.’

  They walked down the street. ‘I think,’ said Stefan as Jan pointed to a magazine hoarding, the woman from the museum again plastered across it – ‘that I need to confess something to you.’

  A café by the canal. Tower block windows reflected on the water, spiked by the triangles of churches. And Stefan, seeing guillotine diagonals in them, confessed his crime.

  Jan thought carefully before speaking. ‘This is why you gave up painting?’ He sat bolt upright in his seat; analytical, clinical. What do we do next, Stefan could see his eyes asking.

  ‘Of course.’ Stefan breathed on his coffee. It’s true, that thing they say about the condemned man – that you notice details more thoroughly. The building opposite had a non-symmetric, cuboid wall of glass. It reflected the reflections, subverting them; questioning reality. What was he doing? Confessing? Why was he doing that? Because he could not not.

  ‘What else do you remember about the evening?’ Jan asked. ‘What did you do with the body?’

  Stefan spread his hands above the coffee and examined the twitch in his fingers. ‘In the wasteland. It’s handy.’

  Jan smiled. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I see it every day from the window… you don’t have to bury things deep, for them to be gone by morning.’

  ‘No one saw you?’

  ‘I wouldn’t be here, if they had.’

  Jan nodded towards the waiter and left some coins on the table. ‘Come with me,’ he said, pulling the mournful Stefan up by his coat collar.

  In the cold air their faces changed from blue, to red, to yellow. Ripples from the canal danced across them, changing their expressions like a newborn baby appears to smile, or appears to frown.

  ‘Stefan, I was there,’ Jan said. ‘Don’t you remember?’

  He appeared to grimace, appeared to look surprised.

  ‘There was a lot of noise, and I came running up from the shop. Clara was there. She said she was leaving you. You lost the plot.’

  ‘I know, I know. You don’t have to remind me.’

  ‘You put the knife through the painting, Stefan. You ripped her face apart.’

  ‘There was blood everywhere…’

  ‘It was paint, Stefan. I helped you clean up.’

  Jan took Stefan to the lake and bought him a takeaway brandy. ‘It’s far too early,’ Stefan objected.

  ‘You’re very well behaved for a truant murderer,’ Jan observed as his friend sipped it reluctantly.

  ‘She drove me crazy…’

  ‘I know.’

  Well if it’s true… where did Clara go?’ Stefan eventually asked.

  ‘The States, I think. You could probably find her on Facebook.’

  Stefan shuddered. ‘But I buried her on the wasteland…’

  Jan shrugged. ‘I don’t know where you get that idea from. I put you to bed. You were raving. I think you slept for about two days. Clara was pretty sour about it, I seem to recall. She said she had paint on her coat. Said that we were both complete nutters, and left. Didn’t even close the door. I cleared up some of the paint, but…’

  ‘I hallucinated it all? I can see myself doing it, I wake up in the night thinking about it – ’

  Jan shrugged. ‘Too much turps, perhaps. At a time of trauma. Your brain has constructed something you could deal with; you couldn’t cope with her leaving you, so your mind killed her for you.’

  They looked across the lake. The fountain did its sudden shooting up thing, like it had remembered it was supposed to be a fountain and had better get on with it.

  ‘And it was a bloody good painting,’ Jan said. ‘Don’t you remember?’

  ‘I remember… I don’t know,’ Stefan said. ‘I remember everything disappearing from the flat. I thought you moved it all.’

  ‘I did. The slashed painting. That went on the dump, it’s true.’

  ‘What do I do now?’

  Jan turned and laid a hand on his friend’s shoulder. ‘You’re to go back to painting. You’re a great painter. Or, you will be. You shouldn’t have stopped.’

  I went back to the museum. It seemed safe now. There was no ghost. It was true, I had been seeing her everywhere – she was on the posters. And the smile she gave me, it wasn’t because she recognised me; it was because she thought I recognised her. Her image is all over the city; people must come up to her all the time.

  I looked at the paintings that spanned the space above the double staircase. Now I know I’m not being haunted, I miss her. But if you see her again, you can talk to her, now you’re not a murderer. Marvellous! It seems strange, as I move on to the dark framed portraits, to find oneself not a murderer after all. An ex-murderer; no; not even that.

  The paintings present ideas; I develop plans in my head for what I’ll do when I get home. A 17th century merchant; fur-lined crags of neck, glistening silver necklace, piles of mouth-watering gold coins on the table and a greyish, unnoticed skull behind. A double portrait, husband and wife, dour, static – look at us, we are important – but the artist evidently too bored even to give their grim expressions any life.

  The third is of a family. Gainsborough, or an imitator, the wife in a striking pink dress, dulled to salmon; it could do with a clean. The master in a tricorn hat and hunting breeches, English oaks and elms across their estate in the background, the greens darkened to blue. A springer dog and a small boy, rosy cheeks and pursed mouth, violet eyes cheerful and twinkling. And in the corner of the picture a teenage girl: gawky, nervou
s and shy but radiant. About seventeen, looking towards the future, wondering what it would hold and quietly excited by the opportunities life might bring. The potential in life; it’s dizzying.

  It was clearly her. She might have been seven or eight years younger than the woman I saw in the museum, who I saw immortalised in the posters across the city, but there was no doubt about her identity. ‘It’s her,’ I said out loud, and felt myself blush.

  The inviting half-smile, looking out to the observer as if in recognition. Who was she? Did she live a long and full life? Did she love? Marry, have children? How old was she when she died? Set me free, she seemed to implore with large hazel eyes, from the claustrophobic, yellowish mist that has fallen upon me over the long, stifling centuries.

  ‘I will,’ I murmur. ‘I hope you became an old and happy lady.’ I step backwards, and have to steady myself against the banister. Time to go, Stefan.

  Jan poured the champagne. My first exhibition in five years was of portraits; modern faces, in clothes through history. I painted Jan as a Greek philosopher, holding one of his beloved Venus of Ephesus statues. (Tits everywhere. The Morgenpost called it ‘sublime’.)

  Across the room, a full-length canvas based on one of the figures in Josef Esterhazy and his Family dominated the archway, positioned so it looked like the figure was about to step into the room.

  Which, after everyone had left and I had drunk too much champagne, she did. She took large lungfuls of air, then kicked the windfall pears that were painted at her feet into brown mush.

  ‘Of course,’ she explained as we sat on the scarlet sofa, ‘Jan was just suggesting that you hadn’t murdered her, because he wanted you to start painting again.’

  ‘Really?’

  She nodded.

  ‘So… I did murder her? What?’

  ‘Do you know Caravaggio?’

  ‘Not personally, no. Do you?’

  ‘Do you think he should have been locked up for murder… or should he have spent the next thirty, forty years painting?’

  ‘Well…’

  ‘Imagine the works we would have, if he lived to be an old man.’

  ‘Not the point, is it?’

  She looked at me questioningly.

  ‘Is it?’

  She put a finger over my lips. I’ll worry about it later, I decided. Being a murderer, I felt cautious about kissing her; but she, being unreal, didn’t mind.

  The Silver Wire

  Bethany W. Pope

  Bae Lin sits on the swing, moving slightly with the motion of her foot. I am playing near the sandbox keeping an eye out for the poisonous frogs that spring like lice from the sand. I am not allowed in the sandbox. I am not allowed on the slide. I am not allowed on the Merry-go-Round or the teeter totter. I am not allowed near the mango trees because they give me blisters. I am allowed in the playground but only if I sit still by her feet. I am allowed to play with my ponies, but quietly, and only if I do not draw attention to myself while she is talking to the other nannies.

  Bae Lin came with the house, like the whitecar. Daddy says that we have to keep her, we’re obligated. I hate Bae Lin. She makes me eat fish and her room smells like sweet nuts and spicy stuff, and she tells me that if I’m not good the Aswang will get me and eat me. She says that you never know who will turn out to be an Aswang, but that their eyes are red from not sleeping because at night they turn into black dogs and eat children and corpses.

  She likes showing me off to the other nannies. They line us up when our parents are gone and compare us, to see who has the best. The nanny whose kid has the lightest skin wins, which means that Justin always loses, cause he’s black. His belly button goes out though, which is really cool. Mine just goes in like everyone else’s.

  I like this pony. It’s the pink one with the butterfly on the side. Its eyes are blue and sparkly like Mommy’s ring, the one Bae Lin takes out of the box when my Mommy is out at work. She’s wearing it right now, but it doesn’t really fit on her finger so she wears it on her thumb. She likes to show it off to the other nannies.

  ‘Let me tell you a story.’ Bae Lin looks bored. That means I’m in trouble. She likes to tell me stories when she is bored and not the good stories, the scary ones about the White Lady and Hukluban, the crone. I know that Huklaban is only one of three, the Death lady, but I had to find out about the good one, Idieale from Tony. Bae Lin only likes me when I’m scared.

  ‘It began in my barrio years ago, when I was a little older than you are now.’ Her smile is happy and hard at the same time. ‘One day a beautiful woman moved into the empty house near the rice paddies. She was older, middle aged. Her hair was long and shiny, straight and so black it was almost blue. Her skin was pale and flawless. She had lines around her mouth from smiling, and lines around her eyes from laughter, but these only made her beauty greater. Soon, every man, old and young, single and married was looking at her in that special way.

  ‘It was in the harvest time when people were praying to Mary and the hermaphrodite Lakapati to bring the rice in swift and full. The woman, who said her name was Haliya, got along with everyone; old and young, man and woman. I used to see her in the market, selling vegetables and gossiping. She used to give me candy sometimes, or fresh split cane if she had it. She was so charming that she won over even the women whose husbands had looked her way with lust. No one wished her any gaba; no ill will at all.

  ‘Haliya became especially good friends with a young woman named Jasmine. Jasmine had recently been married to a fisherman and she was already showing her pregnancy. The gossip in the barrio was that her pregnancy was the reason for the marriage. Everyone knew that Lito beat her. She and Haliya would talk and gossip for hours, you could hear them from the street.

  In the seventh month of Jasmine’s pregnancy a strange thing began to happen. Her belly began to shrink. Each morning it would be a little smaller, and a little smaller, and one day, a few days after the baby inside stopped moving, it was gone. At about that time Haliya stopped being so friendly to her, it was nothing much at first, from long talks to short ones, to smiles and nods in the market, to finally a blank look when Jasmine approached her in the street. About a week after they stopped talking Jasmine fell down in the middle of the street with horrible cramps. She crouched in the dust and pushed like a chicken laying an egg. Nothing came out but a handful of dust and some small brittle bones. And that was the end of her pregnancy. She has never had another one. Her woman places are dry.

  ‘All through this Haliya grew even more beautiful, even more friendly and more well liked within the village. She became close with another young woman named Librada. Librada was a widow with two children already. She was not as beautiful as Jasmine, she had worked too hard to be beautiful, but she was intelligent and hard; friendly but not blind. At first she liked Haliya, but as their friendship grew she became aware of the older woman’s inability to give a straight answer about anything, not even where she came from or what had happened to her family. She always turned the conversation to present things and never spoke about the past.

  ‘In the eighth month of her pregnancy Librada began to have trouble sleeping. The baby’s head was pushing against her bladder and giving her trouble. She kept having to go outside and use the toilet. One night, well after midnight when the moon was moving low against the sky, she saw a strange thing flying. It looked like a large bat trailing a malformed, lumpy tale. As it flew closer she could see that it was the head and shoulders of a woman with bat wings protruding from the neck. Its mouth was lined with razor teeth and its lungs, and stomach, heart and liver were trailing behind it like a tail. Its face was familiar, but she could not place it. It was still too far away for her to see.

  ‘Librada crouched among the bushes and waited for it to pass. Instead it landed on the roof of her hut and began to crawl towards her chimney hole. Librada ran inside as quickly and silently as she could. Her c
hildren were still asleep on their mats on the floor, but she could hear it dragging itself along the thatch above her head. It moved like a lizard, made the same rustles and thumps.

  ‘Thinking quickly, Librada grabbed the salt from the jar near the fire and poured it in a circle around her children and stepped into that circle herself. A face appeared in the circle of the smoke hole, backlit and blurred by the setting moon. Its tongue unwound like a thin white hose and began coming towards her, drawn by her scent. When the creature came to the salt circle it recoiled like a cobra. It tried again and again from different angles, but always the white salt stopped it. Towards dawn it tried a final time, but flew off before the rays of light could catch it out.

  ‘In the morning, when her children were in the village school Librada set off to find Balan.

  ‘Balan was a witch. She was old and ugly and she smelled of cat piss and spoilt fish. She was well known for being the wisest woman in the village. Librada had no fear as she made her way to the old one’s door.

  ‘Balan greeted the widow as a friend and served her adobo and strong cool tea. Librada told her about the things that had happened in the night. The old woman smiled sadly and nodded her head. Yes, she said, what you saw was the Manananggal, the baby killer, fetus sucker. By day it appears to be a beautiful woman, at night a monster. When darkness comes it must split in two, leaving its legs behind to hunt. What you must do first is identify it in its human form.

  ‘Once a Manananggal marks its prey no one else will do. It will keep coming and keep coming until its tongue is inside you and your baby dust. When you know the woman, you can destroy it. Tonight when it comes after you, you must chop off its tongue. You must not worry; it will not fight you yet. It cannot risk damaging its vital organs. Tomorrow look for the woman with the bleeding mouth. If someone is missing, has packed up and fled then it is gone for good and your problems are over. If not, you must wait until tomorrow night, go into its house and destroy its legs so that when dawn comes the sunlight will turn it into dust. Go now, go home and prepare. Sharpen your knife, tonight you draw blood!