Erimem - All I Want for Christmas by Claire Bartlett & Daniel McGachey & Beth Jones & Iain McLaughlin

Author:Claire Bartlett & Daniel McGachey & Beth Jones & Iain McLaughlin [Bartlett, Claire]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thebes Publishing
Published: 2016-12-12T21:00:00+00:00

***

The whisper of pages as the visitor closed his book was as loud in the silent gallery as the sudden beating of a crow’s wings on a still day. He looked evenly at Erimem. ‘And now we have an answer. The story is told.’

‘A story told by a dead man?’ she retorted. ‘Really?’

‘As I said at the outset, it is a ghost story, of a type.’

‘Even if such a thing was possible, and not fantasy or delusion,’ she began, despite instinct telling her it was neither of these things. For it was only now she observed that those whitish traces amidst the bristling black of his moustache and beard were more akin to a mountain range of small, livid scars, their peaks dotted along the ridge of his upper lip, their troughs in the shadow of its the lower twin, the flesh punctured and long-since closed up again where a crimson-threaded needle had passed through and sealed shut both lips. She faltered only slightly before pressing on. ‘Even if this was all true, why tell me?’

‘Because in the dark, amongst the whispers and screams, and remorseless mocking laughter, was heard a name. In truth, many names were whispered or howled. But some were said more frequently than others, and with more vehemence. Not all of them human. Not all of them mortal. But of those who were, one name in particular rang out again and again, like an echo across centuries.’

She did not want to ask.

She did not need to. ‘…things who have straddled more centuries than the span of man’s lifetime allows.’ Those words forced themselves to the front of her mind with rush of sudden clarity. ‘Would I tell of them and of the trails they leave?’

‘Dig deep inwards and this world is filled with darkness, soar far outwards and it is surrounded by a yet vaster darkness; a limitless darkness that is far from empty. But it is ordered, to an extent, even if the nature of that order is inconceivable in human terms. And when you breach that order, upsetting its laws by tearing through the barriers that separate each fraction of each second from its nearest neighbour, let alone rending pathways between widely flung millennia, you open up fissures into far, far deeper, far more incalculable darknesses, from whose limitless depths might yet crawl things beyond all order.

‘And if I can sense and follow the trails that lead to you here, that lead directly to you now, that cling to you like spider silk, then be very sure I am not alone in that ability. Dark things may yet be coming for you, Erimemushinteperem, for you have been noticed.’

She might easily have stopped him leaving. Yet Erimem said nothing as he stood, adjusting his scarf, unconcerned by her seeing the fresh red thread, neat and tight amidst the faded and fading stitches that criss-crossed and overlapped one another, like years layered upon years, as they circled his bloodless throat. That vision of the forest rushed

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